All indications are that Carl Rove and the House Republicans plan to make illegal immigrantion a big issue in this year’s Congressional campaigns. Illegal immigrants will be described as the biggest problem facing America and they will be accused of destroying everything we hold dear. A number of solutions will be offered for the problem such as the now familiar strengthening border security, making sure illegal immigrants cannot get welfare or other forms of government assistance and making English the official language. Other suggested solutions will include legal sanctions against landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and national identity cards.
Increasing border security has not been effective in the past and will not be any more effective in the future. Restricting where illegal immigrants can live will just move the problem from one place to another. Laws requiring English will not stop anyone from coming. Very few illegal immigrants know anything about our welfare and government assistance programs so changing them would have no effect on illegal immigration. The only thing that would stop the illegal immigrants from coming would be if they could no longer find employment in this country. They are coming because they are looking for work and they have heard that there are jobs here.
Putting Americans who hire illegal immigrants in jail is the one thing that would reduce the numbers of illegal immigrants coming into our country. Because corporations and farmers who hire illegal immigrants have a lot of clout in the Republican Party it will never be mentioned by the Republicans as a possible solution to the problem. As you listen to the politicians talking about this issue remember that anyone who claims to be interested in reducing the number of illegal immigrants coming to America who does not propose employer sanctions is just engaging in demagoguery.
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5 comments:
Immigration should be a political hot potato. The problem I find is that this current crisis has brought out the bigotry in both parties that I have seen exhibited and ignored by members of all Parties for many years. All Americans, Republican, Democrat, Third Party, African, European, Asian, Hispanic and all the rest of our society need to do some serious soul searching and look in the proverbial mirror. If they are truthful with their desire for equality among the races, they may not like what they see once they look past their bright and shiny shields of facade. There is a lot of hate and bigotry still consuming and rotting the souls of our great nation from all sides.
Amen, brother.
The debate so far seems to focus almost entirely on non-existent dangers (terrorists crossing the supposedly porous Mexican border, English becoming a minority language, illegal immigrants receiving Medicaid) and solutions which aren't (untrained National Guardsmen sent to the border, 2000 mile long fences) so it is obvious that the purpose of all the agitation is to distract voters from real problems and solutions.
With all the anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic rhetoric from the right progressives will be forced to spend the campaign talking about the value of diversity and the ways in which today's immigrants are like our immigrant ancestors
rather than important issues such as the War in Iraq, global warming, the ballooning national debt and the erosion of our prestige and honor in the world.
Dave, do you really believe that illegals coming into this country don't know that federal law requires that states must provide public education and emergency medical care for them?
As someone who has some familiarity with the local Mexican community I can say they have a network that is deep and wide and can give illegals anything they want anytime they want.
paladin,
Yes, I am claiming that the illegal immigrants decide to come to this country knowing very little about our welfare system and that therefore making changes to our welfare system to make even more difficult than it is now for illegal immigrants to get welfare will have little or no impact on the numbers of people deciding to come.
They come here looking for work.
I do not know why you think your observations about their supposed interest in our educational system or the networks of support they join once they are here are a refutation of what I said.
Paladin, thank you giving us an example of the kind of arguments about this issue we are likely to see from the Republicans during this year's Congressional campaign.
Dave, thank you for giving us an example of partisan hackery.
Buh-bye
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