What do u think of Bush proposing major immigration reform?

nimh

Stop shaking your head...various things will come looser.

"any argumentational means"?

"gooditude," what a frighteningly GW Bush-like word.

blatham

he makes a lot of good points in an appealing way.

but he's quite willing to twist around facts and arguments any way necessary to make his political point.

so no, i dont like him much.

nimh

I thought that was what you meant, and the writer in the Times makes a similar protest (as do others) but I would need some examples of 'twisting facts and arguments' and I haven't actually seen a good case made for that position.

Chomsky ends up on Canadian television quite frequently. He's almost never to found on American media, even rarely on PBS (not sure about NPR).

I am not familiar with Chomsky enough to pass judgement.

I usually only save stuff i like, so i dont have anything at hand to quote.

But it was for example during the yugoslav war that I got really annoyed by his stuff.

His primary interest - like that of many peers - seems to forever lie with the enemies he's fighting at home ... and whichever country's problems he turns his attention on, he will redefine them to fit the patterns he's identified (and fought) back home. Thats the impression i got away with there.

Very marxist, really - not his thinking per se, but that he does that. But myself, i cant stand - and i'm only very loosely referring to chomsky in particular, here - people who, when they look at kosovars or nigerians or uzbeks and the fates they face or fight, still only see their own political struggle, and simply project its categories and identifiers onto the scene. It's because they don't really care about the locals - those are just more symbols for their big scheme of things - thats why local contexts are best explained away. They only really care about their own fight & grail.

I don't feel the need to redefine my dislike for extremists evrytime they are brought up. Do a search for Chomsky, read past posts and simply apply them to his current project. He is an excellent linguist, and his knowledge of the language is second to none, but his usage of the language and his extreme beliefs make me dislike him. He is to the Left as Limbaugh is to the right.

[]

January 06, 2004, 8:50 a.m.
Amnesty Trapdoor
What is the president thinking on immigration?

In comedy, when you see a man walking straight towards an open trapdoor, his eyes fixed on the far horizon, you laugh. In politics, when you see the same thing, you wonder why.
[] [] []Just now President Bush is striding three-quarters of the way to "open borders" immigration policy. According to the Washington Post, Mr. Bush will next week announce an immigration package with three new elements:
1. A new visa system for "temporary" workers who would be allowed into the U.S. if there were jobs unfilled by Americans waiting for them (i.e., a new guest-worker program.)
2. Some kind of "legal status" for the estimated eight million "undocumented workers" in the U.S., i.e., an amnesty for illegal aliens.
3. Stricter entry controls "to make the plan more palatable to conservatives."
Even on its own terms, Mr. Bush's plan is full of holes. Experience from Germany to California shows that "guest-worker" programs invariably increase illegal immigration since they create welcoming cultural enclaves of foreign nationals into which the "illegals" promptly vanish without trace. Amnesties also encourage illegal immigration by sending the message that if an "undocumented worker" makes it over the border, he will eventually be granted legal status. The 1986 amnesty prompted just such an upsurge in illegal immigration. And what exactly is the point of stricter border controls if you admit anyone willing to work-temporarily — for starvation wages? Surely not even Republican congressmen are likely to be deceived by such a "palatable" absurdity.


http://www.nationalreview.com/jos/jos200401060850.asp

American Jobs but Not the American Dream

By DAVID ABRAHAM

Published: January 9, 2004
President Bush's immigration reform proposal, unveiled on Wednesday, is a classic guest worker program on the European model. As such, it may be doomed from the start: Europe's guest worker programs created as many problems as they solved, and to this day they remain unpopular.
Guest worker programs were widely used in Europe from the 1950's through the 1970's during a period of extreme labor shortages. Most of the several million Turks and Yugoslavs in Germany, for example, are there today because of Germany's substantial guest-worker program of that period. Lesser but substantial numbers of guest workers are also to be found among the Muslim populations of Central and Northern Europe.
Germany's guest worker program was ended more than two decades ago. Yet Germans still have not resolved the question of what to do with the millions of immigrants living in their midst. Although these immigrant workers get some benefits of citizenship — health care, for example, and unemployment insurance — they are not citizens. They are not allowed full membership in German society, yet neither are they forced to return home. It is virtually impossible to find anyone in Germany today who would favor re-establishment of its guest worker program.
The details of the program announced by President Bush have yet to be worked out. But its outlines are clear. At the invitation of employers, workers will be permitted to stay in the United States for a limited time without having to wait in its long immigration lines. They would also secure many of the benefits and protections of American-born workers.
The chief virtue of the program, as the president made clear, is that the guest workers would be allowed to move relatively freely between their country of citizenship — overwhelmingly Mexico — and the country in which they are "guests." Such movement could reduce the disturbing smuggling and illegal border crossings so common along America's frontiers.
But the drawbacks of guest worker programs far outweigh their advantages. To begin with, experience shows that guest workers are not good guests: they rarely want to leave. In Germany today there are more than two million people of Muslim Turkish origin, many of whose families came as guest workers four decades ago. Guest workers marry locals; they have children; they encourage their kin and friends to join them in the host country, legally or illegally.
After all, guest workers are not just labor, they are people. Where will these people live, and how will they be treated? Can we look forward to new urban ghettos or rural guest-worker "villages"? Fifty years after the civil rights movement, will we now have a new caste of subordinated foreign workers? Once the economic need for guest workers abates (assuming, in fact, that there is such a need) what happens to them?
It is true that America has more experience with assimilation than Europe. But that does not mean finding answers to these questions will be any less difficult.
And in some respects, the dangers of a guest worker program in the United States are graver than they were in Europe. Germany, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and other European host countries had and still have very strong labor unions. Those strong unions were able to make certain that guest workers were not used by employers to depress wages. By contrast, American labor unions are weak to nonexistent in most segments of the labor market.
In addition, President Bush has clearly expressed his intention to put employers in charge: guest workers will be selected by employers and will be able to remain in the United States only so long as they stay with the employer who brought them. This is a sure recipe not only for the exploitation of these "guests" but also for the depression of American wages generally, especially among those who can least afford it — many of them immigrants.
The United States has always been a "welcoming country," as the president said, "open to the talents and dreams of the world." But this plan is an abandonment of America's ideals, not an expression of them. It values immigrants' talents over their dreams. Instead of hope, it offers them simply a job.

David Abraham, a visiting fellow in European history at Princeton, is a professor of immigration law at the University of Miami.

While certainly Bush's proposal is not the "whole enchilada" we wanted, it's a good start for a new understanding about the migration problems that affect both nations.

Some democrats consider that the proposal fell short. "It will be a rotation of human capital, to be used and discarded", said Bob Menendez.

Some republicans think it is a giveaway. "It rewards illegal immigration", declared Tom Tancredo.

I think it's a positive step towards regularization and security.

Let me, finally, point out a couple of things:
Most Mexicans who cross "to the other side" plan on coming back. Their idea is to build some capital and go to the fatherland. Only a minority actually wants to stay in the US for the rest of their lives. Some of them are actually forced to stay, in order to become legal.
Stiffening of immigration laws only helps to divide the families and make the stay of Mexicans in the USA last longer than projected.
So 3/6 years plans are welcome. On this side of the border, at least.

To add to fbaezer's perspective: one of the reasons raising capital and returing to one's country is attractive is that said capital will go a long way in a less wealthy country.

The wages that are pitiful in America are more attractive once exchanged for their own currency and spent in their country.

fbaezer, I'm not sure I can buy that "return to homeland" scenario. Many immigrants from other countries said the same, but decided to stay. I don't have any stats to back up this claim, only anecdotal info from reading about immigration and what happened to many Asian families.

This is an inherent part of fbaezer's scenario. He said the initial desire is to return but to acieve legal status staying is often needed.

Many people who leave to save up and return migth end up staying, fbaezer was commenting that the initial desire is usually a temporary one.

Jumping in late, I'll read the responses shortly.


I think it benefits American employers, who get cheaper labor, harms American employees, who get lower wages, and benefits immigrants from poor countries, who get better pay and much better working conditions than at home. By global standards, American employers tend to be rich, American employees tend to be middle class, and Latin American immigrands tend to be poor. So I think it's on net a good thing.

Needless to say, that's not the reason George Bush is proposing this reform, but that doesn't change the consequences, which are good.

Most migrants who go to the US leave their family behind.

Mexican families in Mexico received a staggering $13 billion in the first eleven months in 2003 from their relatives working in the US.

The number of border seizures has soared over the past few years. So has the financial cost of crossing the border. So has the number of border crossing related deaths (one a day). At the same, the average time of stay has grown.

The reason is simple: since it is harder to get in the US, you think it twice before going back to Mexico. Perhaps you won't make it again to the States.

Well, I guess Thomas summarised my opinion about this as concisely as possible ;-)

I'm on your side of the argument here, but I must add that almost all Turks and Moroccans who came here in the 70s and 80s planned on returning home, for all the reasons you and Craven point out - but only a small minority of them ever did.

One reason this could be so is because we have family reunification laws here, allowing legal immigrants to legally get their wife and children (under 18) over as well.

Without family reunification possibilities, perhaps guest workers will indeed remain guest workers - perhaps - but wouldnt that be too harsh?

Gee Nimn, hasn't your society collapsed under the filthy pagan practices of those heathens? Haven't they all raped your daughters and sisters in their diabolical un-Aryan rites?

The first 'guestworkers from Spain and Greece came in 1960 to Germany (Turkey 1961, Maroc 19663, Potugal 1963, Tunesia 1965, Jugoslawia 1968 ...).
[Altogether there were 2,691,700 guestworkers in 1973 here.]

Half of the Spanish and more than a third of the Portugues returned ... while the Tukish stayed at the same level (and grew later, due to the reasons, nimh mentioned above).

Perhaps the difference was because Spain and Portugal themselves became so much more prosperous?

Its true, I've met so many random people in Greece telling me how they used to work in Holland or Germany - lot of them went back, too.

Or perhaps its to do with honor? Many Turks and Moroccans didnt actually acquire the nice savings they came here for - and returning home with empty hands (relative to expectations) might have been too great a shame?

That plus the family reunification thing and the children then wanting to stay here, after having gone to Dutch schools etc, of course ...

Tho I must retract a little bit - most Turks, Moroccans, etc, didnt go back, but many did - (especially when the government still gave "remigration subsidies") - just, the numbers got somewhat obscured by the continuing influx of ever new people, so that the totals never dropped.