What should be done about illegal immigration?

Bill
Included in the funding legislation was the long awaited and sorely needed raisie in the minimum wage. When this goes into effect can we expect to see a wave of restaurant closings. Sorry, couldn't resist.

He won't be back.

Unless it's another hit-and-run for the purposes of piling on.

Have a great Memorial Day.

Thanks Hokie. I was interested in fbaezer's take on it though. In the past he has tended to join with those who think it is racist to object to illegal immigration though he has not made as big a deal out of that as some. But he is a Mexican citizen (in Mexico City I believe) who is very knowledgable on this stuff, and that's why I really am interested in his take on it. But you may be right.

But Happy Memorial Day to you too and everybody.

Now that we have solved or rather kicked the $hit out of that subject. Happy holiday to all.

... and Happy Pentecost for those, who aren't in the USA :wink:

Top Talent Could Lose Fast Track to U.S.
Under Bill, Foreign Luminaries Would No Longer Skip Immigration Line

By Anthony Faiola and Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 26, 2007; Page A01

NEW YORK -- Would America open its doors for the next Albert Einstein? Under the new immigration bill, the answer is maybe, but maybe not.

For years, foreign-born Nobel Prize winners, corporate officers, and top talents in sports, arts and sciences have had a fast track to permanent residency, and eventually citizenship, in the United States. In the name of attracting the world's greatest and brightest, authorities have granted these luminaries priority access to green cards under a little-known provision offered to "aliens of extraordinary abilities."






It has provided a way for a host of notable foreigners -- among them John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Venezuelan-born New York Yankee Bobby Abreu -- to make America their home.

But the bill now being debated in Congress would do away with the special "EB-1" preferred-status category, effectively forcing foreign VIPs to take a number and get in line with everyone else. They would be subject to a complex point system to determine their eligibility -- assessing education levels, English abilities, experience in the United States and other factors -- just as any engineer from India or farmworker from Mexico.



continued

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/custom/2006/03/31/CU2006033101407.html



This if it came to pass is just one more bit of stupidity emanating from our lame brained leaders

I would add in addition foreign students upon graduation from one of our colleges and Universities should be afforded if they so desire green cards and path to citizenship.

AS part of the requirement on the path to citizenship for illegals is the requirement that they become proficient in English. That does not seem to hold true for those already legally in tthe US. IMO those here more than 3 years who can not speak passable english should have their green cards revoked. That would be an incenttive to learn. In addition government documents, including city and state should be printed in english only.


Message to Santa Ana: For a Better Job, Learn English
Chamber Promotes Classes in City of 150,000 Immigrants

By Sonya Geis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 26, 2007; Page A03

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- "Two jobs?" blares a poster at a bus shelter here. The words are in Spanish over a picture of a tired-looking Hispanic woman in a janitor's uniform. "Work and Work but You Still Can't Get Ahead?" reads another ad on a bus shelter down the street. At the bottom, the small print: "Free English classes . . . in 60 locations.

The ads are part of an unusual campaign by the Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce to spur the city's 150,000 immigrants to learn English. Here in the most Latino big city in the country -- where fewer than one in five residents speak English at home -- business leaders decided that simply offering free English classes was not enough. The chamber is spending $4.5 million to cajole residents to take the classes and get English workbooks into their hands.


It's an economic development plan, not a political statement, said Michael Metzler, president of the Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce. After surveying the city's manufacturing, service and transportation businesses, among others, he said, the chamber realized that employers "could not find enough qualified employees, because when they found somebody who had enough qualifications, they didn't speak English."

The three-year campaign includes outdoor ads, door-to-door outreach and radio spots. The chamber is also buying kits that include a simple computer, which people can use to learn English on their own. The kits are distributed to parents of schoolchildren and to businesses.

In the first two months of the campaign, which started in late January, nearly 1,000 people called the phone number on the bus-stop ads and more than 800 visited the program's Web site.

Santa Ana, the county seat of Orange County, has attracted immigrants for decades. Two hours north of the Mexican border, the city of 340,000 is centrally located in the county, has a strong manufacturing sector and is one of the few places in an area of sprawling tract homes to offer affordable apartment rentals.

The percentage of immigrants here has ticked up quietly for decades, and now half the residents are foreign-born. The city is 79 percent Hispanic, mostly Mexican, and 8 percent Asian, most from Vietnam, according to census data.

One of those immigrants is the city's mayor, Miguel Pulido, who came from Mexico when he was 5. When he arrived, Pulido said, he was the only Spanish-speaking kindergartner at his school. Now he leads an all-Hispanic city council.

Most immigrants want to learn English, Pulido said, but "culturally, there is a disincentive" in Southern California. "I can go to the bank in Spanish, the store, the laundry, read a newspaper, listen to the radio, watch TV -- all in Spanish," he said. Even many Asian immigrant merchants speak Spanish. Workers can build houses, trim lawns, cook in restaurants and work on assembly lines for years without speaking a word of English.

"Where the problem occurs is if people want to go beyond what that subculture allows," Pulido said. "Your ticket into a better job is, do you speak English or not, and can you read and write it."

At Coneybeare Inc., a Santa Ana employment agency that places workers in jobs from manufacturing to white-collar management, there are "absolutely" high-skill jobs that go unfilled because prospects lack English skills, said Victoria Betancourt, the company's president. "The only jobs that are available to somebody with limited English is an unskilled labor or assembly job."

Those are the kinds of jobs monolingual Spanish or Vietnamese speakers do at FSSI, a check-processing company in Santa Ana with 150 employees, chief executive Jon Dietz said. A machine operator can earn up to $12 an hour there without speaking English. But a lack of language skill is "going to limit their mobility in terms of the organizational chart, because the management of the company is in English," Dietz said.

The company has been trying unsuccessfully to hire an account executive to work with clients in English, Dietz said. The job pays $50,000 per year.

On a recent morning in an advanced English class at Santa Ana College, Martin Melgarejo sat in the back looking over an exercise involving a job performance evaluation.

Melgarejo, a 27-year-old from a small town in central Mexico, worked as a carpenter in Orange County for 10 years before he started taking English classes. After an injury that required back surgery, Melgarejo had to quit carpentry, but he said he "liked that work" and wants to go back as a foreman. "I'm here to get more education, so maybe in the future I can get a better job," he said.

The Santa Ana program is thought to be unique now, but it probably won't be for long, said Metzler, the chamber president.

"I've had a number of calls from across the country from people interested in doing something like this. Certainly from California, but also from Iowa, Illinois, New Jersey."

Immigration fraud, continued
By Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
May 26, 2007


Whose problem is the immigration bill in Congress supposed to solve? The country's problem with dangerously porous borders? The illegal immigrants' problem? Or politicians' problems?
It has been painfully clear for years that the country's problem with insecure borders and floods of foreigners who remain a foreign -- and growing -- part of the American population has the lowest priority of the three. Virtually every step -- even token steps -- that Congress and the administration have taken toward securing the border has been backed into under pressure from the voters.
The National Guardsmen who were sent to the border but not assigned to guard the border, the 700-mile fence on paper that has become the 2-mile fence in practice, and the existing "tough" penalties for the crime of crossing the border illegally that in practice mean turning the illegal border crossers loose so that they can try, try again -- such actions speak louder than words.
The new immigration bill that supposedly secures the borders first, before starting to legalize the illegal immigrants, in fact does nothing of the sort.
It sets up various programs and procedures -- but does not wait to see if they reduce the illegal immigrant flow before taking the irrevocable step of making U.S. citizenship available to 12 million people who came here illegally. This solves the problem of illegal immigrants who want citizenship. The "tough" steps they have to go through allow politicians to say this is not amnesty.
But, whether these requirements are "tough" or not, and regardless of how they are enforced or not, there is nothing to say the 12 million illegals here have to start the process of becoming citizens. Those who do not choose to become citizens -- which may well be the majority -- face no more prospect of being punished for the crime of entering illegally than they do now. With the focus shifted to getting citizenship, illegal immigrants who just want to stay and make some money without bothering to become part of American society can be forgotten, along with their crime.
This bill gets the issue off the table and out of the political spotlight. That solves the problem of politicians who want to mollify American voters in general without risking the loss of the Hispanic vote.
The Hispanic vote can be expected to become larger and larger as the new de facto amnesty can be expected to increase the number of illegal border crossers, just as the previous -- and honestly labeled -- amnesty bill of 1986 led to a quadrupling of the number of illegals. The larger the Hispanic vote becomes, the less seriously are the restrictive features of the immigration bill likely to be enforced.
The growth of the illegal population is irreversible but the means of controlling the growth of illegals are quite reversible, both de facto through watering down the enforcement of "tough" requirements and de jure through later repeals of requirements deemed too "tough."
One remarkable aspect of the proposed immigration "reform" is its provisions for cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. Employers are to be punished for not detecting and excluding illegal immigrants, when the government itself is derelict in doing so. Employers not only lack expertise in law enforcement, they can be sued for "discrimination" by any of the armies of lawyers who make such lawsuits their lucrative specialty.
But no penalties are likely to be enforced against state and local politicians who openly declare "sanctuary" for illegal immigrants. Officials sworn to uphold the law instead forbid the police to report the illegal status of immigrants to federal officials when these illegals are arrested for other crimes.
This is perfectly consistent for a bill that seeks above all to solve politicians' problems, not the country's.

Thomas Sowell is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite columnists. He has common sense and the ability to summarize a problem in simple words, and has it right almost all the time.

Sowell has been one of my heroes for going on 30 years now. I wish he would outline the provisions as he thinks they should appear in an immigration reform bill.

As a matter of fact, Thomas Sowell did write about the lates fiasco on immigration HERE.

As if I ever needed proof that you don't read what others write before you comment on (and/or insult them), this is pretty good evidence, C.I. Au posted this very article a little over two hours ago. And if it had comprehensively addressed my comment, I wouldn't have made my comment.

Fox, I don't have the habit of reading everything on every thread in which I participate; sucks doesn't it?

Small take, and I think I won't be back in a while.

Discussion on this thread is leading nowhere. Everyone is stuck with their own positions. I don't think even the most convincing of arguments would make road in (just about) everybody's firm opinion and bias.
That's why I dont stick here that long.

I don't think everyone who opposes illegal migration is a racist, or that anyone who is for amnesty is not a racist.
Of course, racists use illegal migration as an ideological weapon.
Besides racists, there are the xenophobes. Those are worse.

Finally, on the McCain-Kennedy initiative... it may break some principle on recent US immigration policy, but in practical terms it's a joke. Classist crap, IMHO.

fbaezer, Hear, hear. Spot on, and all that good stuff.

You apparently didn't even read the one you posted.

I wish you would reconsider about not coming back. I think you could be helpful in providing your perspective about what the US should be doing relative to illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico as we get the largest block of illegals from your side of the border. There has to be middle ground between Obill's demand for legality from all who want it in however many numbers and those who would almost shoot on sight.

It is not helpful to the debate to call people racist, bigots, selfish, stupid, ignorant, idiots, uncaring, etc. etc. etc. which has been the only argument those on the pro-amnesty side have been able to consistently make. And nobody on 'my' side is willing to consider amnesty considering the devastating affect former such efforts have had both here and there.

So we keep trying to keep coming up with proposals and ideas that would accomplish what everybody most needs, but this is difficult because of the verbal abuse heaped on those who are seriously debating the issue.

And I KNOW that Washington is listening as what the bloggers are discussing and proposing is making its way into those bills little by little.

Congress does NOT want to deal with this lest they offend a major voting constituency--they are calculating which side of the fence to get on that will cost them the least votes--great statesmanship huh?--and our President is pretty impotent re influencing much of anything right now.

So seriously, your input could be valuable to the discussion.

If you have a problem with that, quit reading my posts. Easy, isn't it?

Okay. I'm quite happy to comply with that request.

Thank god for small favors.