Posted on 06/11/2014 10:46:34 AM PDT by illiac
Opinion: Immigrants are productive and make us a richer nation
With House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s primary loss to tea party candidate David Brat, federal immigration reform looks dead. But the Tea Party should favor sensible immigration reform with border controls. It would result in additional economic growth, allowing the government to cut spending and lower taxes — key tea-party demands.
Immigrants increase gross domestic product growth. Immigration expands the American workforce and encourages more business startups. In 2013 the labor-force participation of foreign-born workers was higher than native-born workers (66.4% vs. 62.7%). Their unemployment rate was lower (6.9%, compared with 7.5% for native-born Americans). If people want to come and work, that adds to our economy.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
And his brother Teddy put the nails in the coffin:
We do favor immigration.
We favor legal immigration under our own terms.
Nauseating bigotry and hatred of Americans.
If “immigrunts” from Mexico are so productive and helpful to an economy, then why is Mexico a desperate, poverty stricken country?
If the answer is “that’s the way their society is”, then when they are able to vote to control our country, won’t it end up looking just like theirs?
Saying that immigrants want a job more than US born Americans do.
It’s basically a bait and switch.
They show you hundreds of bright clean PHDs but they deliver million of campesinos.
Gee, I didn’t realize that we already had legal immigration available to the most innovative and productive individuals of the world. We should create some kind of legal immigration policy or something....
Our current system is only “broken” because the ruling class is not actually enforcing the current system.
JFK devoted much of his political life to injecting a fatal bullet into the heart of Americanism.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s.
In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960.
In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin.
After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
Simple. First off the author says immigrant, not legal or illegal. These are people, either categorey, with another nation to go home to. How could they not have better participation rates? An out of work American stays in country.
I’m also not entirely sure if the number includes guest workers which in thweory should have 100% participation.
Any way i look at this i would think the spread between immigrant ansd native participation rates should be even larger.
Question: should we more like Chile ...or Bolivia?
Invalid question.
We should be what the founders built.
Period.
And,equally important to the “above the table” federal subsidies, are the below-the-table illegal alien “worker” benefits possible with a cash-economy: NO TAXES, no medical insurance, no unemployment insurance, no SSI payments, and no withholding!
I support Ted Cruz’ immigration reform 110%!
In addition, there are crimes of violence, property crimes like vandalism, or other acts like gang activity, drug offenses, and drunk driving. Even John McCain estimated that there were two million criminal aliens who must be deported immediately. A March 2011 GAO study, Criminal Alien Statistics, found the following:
The number of criminal aliens in federal prisons in fiscal year 2010 was about 55,000 [one fourth of the total population,] and the number of SCAAP criminal alien incarcerations in state prison systems and local jails was about 296,000 in fiscal year 2009 (the most recent data available)…
Based on our random sample, GAO estimates that the criminal aliens had an average of 7 arrests, 65 percent were arrested at least once for an immigration offense, and about 50 percent were arrested at least once for a drug offense…About 40 percent of individuals convicted as a result of DOJ terrorism-related investigations were aliens…GAO estimates that costs to incarcerate criminal aliens in federal prisons and SCAAP reimbursements to states and localities ranged from about $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion annually from fiscal years 2005 through 2009.
The GAO report listed 25,064 arrests for homicide by criminal aliens. There have been estimates that over 50,000 Americans have been killed by criminal aliens since 9/11. Criminal alien crime has affected millions of Americans who have been the real victims of the lawbreakers. Who speaks for them? Citizens have a right to expect their government to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities and protect them from what amounts to a foreign invasion.
The serious national security threats posed by illegal aliens involve terrorism and drugs. Former FBI Director Mueller testified before Congress in 2006 about Hezbollah operations on the Mexican border. In 2009 outgoing CIA head Michael Hayden stated that the threat of a narco-state in Mexico was one of the gravest dangers to American security, on a par with a nuclear-armed Iran. Four of the 9/11 terrorists were illegal aliens who overstayed their visas—the source of 40 percent of the 12 to 20 million illegal alien population.
There has been a confluence of interests between drugs, illegal immigration, and terrorism. The systems for moving terrorists illegally across the border have become increasingly sophisticated, with Mexican drug kingpins now playing a major facilitating role using the same routes and methods to bring in illegal aliens and drugs.
Like Tonto said in the old joke: "What you men 'we', Kemosabi?"
I believe the whole debate is over the import of the word "sensible". Some folks fancy that permitting many (if not all) people currently in the U.S. illegally not only to have their presence regularized in some way, but essentially handed Green Cards after a little bureaucratic hassle and put on their way to becoming citizens, is sensible. Others think that tougher enforcement of existing immigration law, including quick deportation of anyone in the U.S. illegally is sensible.
I suspect what is really sensible is somewhere in between. (Personally I like "Red Card" proposals -- a way of granting permanent legal status to remain in the U.S. to some non-citizens that does not put them on a track to citizenship. We can quibble over who should be entitled to such status, but it blunts all the left's humanitarian arguments and would be a way of stopping chain-immigration through family reunion resulting in lots of new 'Rat voters.)
THE LIBERTARIAN POSITION:
COMPLETE PLATFORM TEXT
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND CIVIL ORDER
IMMIGRATION:
“”THE ISSUE: We welcome all refugees to our country and condemn the efforts of U.S. officials to create a new “Berlin Wall” which would keep them captive. We condemn the U.S. government’s policy of barring those refugees from our country and preventing Americans from assisting their passage to help them escape tyranny or improve their economic prospects.
THE PRINCIPLE: We hold that human rights should not be denied or abridged on the basis of nationality. Undocumented non-citizens should not be denied the fundamental freedom to labor and to move about unmolested. Furthermore, immigration must not be restricted for reasons of race, religion, political creed, age or sexual preference. We oppose government welfare and resettlement payments to non-citizens just as we oppose government welfare payments to all other persons.
SOLUTIONS: We condemn massive roundups of Hispanic Americans and others by the federal government in its hunt for individuals not possessing required government documents. We strongly oppose all measures that punish employers who hire undocumented workers. Such measures repress free enterprise, harass workers, and systematically discourage employers from hiring Hispanics.
TRANSITIONAL ACTION: We call for the elimination of all restrictions on immigration, the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, and a declaration of full amnesty for all people who have entered the country illegally.””
I disagree. I feel he was a patriotic Democrat, the kind that used to exist (but no longer do). I feel he was misguided, and believed in an ideal that doesn't work in practice.
This is exactly the argument a chamber of commerce friend laid on me a few months ago. He’d just retired as CFO of a major American construction company, and he’d been CEO of several large produce and food industry corporations.
His basic argument was that immediate deportation would crash the American economy because the immigrants were ensconced in every work-intensive industry.
His second argument was that immigrants were extremely hard workers away from air conditioning, something he said is not true of Americans anymore.
His 3rd argument was that immigrants disproportionately start up businesses...restaurants, repair shops, etc.
The response of mine that really made him pause was: are all these things not true of LEGAL immigrants as well; why should an illegal steal the place in line of a legal?
He accepted that.
It was a sort of “trick answer” Take away all the handouts and we wouldn’t have the rush.
Completely and totally ignorant of the fact that laws addressing the above are already in place and are being ignored and compromised!!!
What makes Diana Furchtgott-Roth think that new laws will not also be ignored and compromised?
8:}
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