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"Your entire schpeel depends on a sudden removal of all Illegals. WONT HAPPEN!! "

No, my entier "schpeel" does not depend on it happening suddenly, nor do I think that it happing suddenly is possible.

It will happen over time, and an increase in legal immigration should be phased in over time to provide workers as needed.

"There will be ample time for the economy to adjust from this long slow process."

If by adjusting, you mean shrinking, I would agree that it won't happen overnight. Businesses being raided and closed down will happen a few at a time, for a while there will still be a considerable pool of illegal workers around and those disreputable companies will be replaced by others.

How quickly we can reduce the illegal immigration population depends on two factors. How effectively can we reduce illegal immigration, and how quickly can we process deportations. Right now immigration hearings appear to be the amin bottleneck.

We already have the means to detect a large percentage of the illegal immigrants working in the US through the IRS. However, it's not being used because our courts are full and we simply can't process more deportations and we don't have the facilities to incarcerate more illegal aliens. Therefore they concentrate on those they believe to be dangerous criminals, not those that are working for a living.

However if we can reduce the bottleneck in the courts, and even encourage SOME (I have no delusions that this will be a huge percentage) to leave without fighting deportation through the possibility of being eligable for a guest worker program, we can make significant progress in reducing the illegal immigration population.

However, you can't just ignore the facts and say it will all work out.

If we end up with significantly less workers, we end up being able to produce significantly less and what we do produce will cost more due to the law of supply and demanad in regards to worker wages.

To prevent that from having too large of an effect, we need to have a program that can increase legal immigration accordingly.

The nice thing about a guest worker progrm is that it requires that there be a job for the immigrant before they can enter the country. It would also require that the employer try and hire a US citizen or legal resident first.

There are similar regulations with the H1B visa program. In my experience where I work, it didn't seem like our company had much trouble justifying hiring qualified foreigners under that program because the labor market was pretty tight. However as soon as we hit some bugetary troubles and had to let some people go, the people working on H1B visas were layed off because to keep them insead of an American citizen they would have to justify that the American citizen was not capable of doing the same job.

The guest worker program should not be capable of flooding the country with people who aren't contributing to society. It should also put some competition in the low end of the labor market and make it so that employers have a choice of hiring legal workers and contracting with employers that hire legal workers.

So, once again, I have to ask what is the harm in allowing immigration as long as the immigrants are required to pay taxes and support themselves while they are here, as well as obey our laws, or find themsleves being deported.

My one big concern would be that we allow in people legally and that they become disqualified in some way, yet we allow it to be made too difficult to deport them. That's is something we must make sure does not happen. If possible we should make it so that legal immigration is halted under the guest worker program if we are unable to process deportations. That would at least require Congress to address the issue if deportations become a bottleneck. It would also piss off the ACLU which is almost always a worthy goal in itself.