What should be done about illegal immigration?

Our education system is in bad shape, alright. You would have learned in high school what the executive branch is supposed to do, vs the legislative branch. Three branches of government, imposter, go back and learn what they are supposed to do.

Naw, it's a waste of my time - especially since our government doesn't follow the bidding of who they are supposed to represent, the people, and that includes the executive and congress.

You're so smart, how about providing a quick summary? High school? Hell, I barely graduated.

The legislative branch makes laws, imposter, and the executive branch is supposed to enforce them. It isn't the job of Congress to enforce laws. Of course it helps if they make sensible laws and laws that can reasonably be enforced.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ...... the executive branch enforces laws...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ......they're only good at breaking laws, domestic and international.

Okay, tell me more silly stuff.

I'm glad I can make you laugh, imposter. Add a few more ha ha's.

Actually, you may be onto something. If Congress had to enforce their own laws, maybe they would quit making more and more stupid ones.

Yet it is the Legislative Branch that supplies funding for Federal enforcement programs, to which they provide little funding relative to immigration.

The economy will feel it soon too.

Hey, what happened to Foxyfire? Her last post was in May 26th.

The farmers all across America, and our restaurants in our area are going to be short of laborers.

You have repeatedly claimed that unemployment is alot higher than the figures show? You have claimed they are wrong because your math shows more people are needing jobs out of college and so forth than job growth figures show? Now you are claiming we have a shortage in the labor pool. Which is it?

okie, You are too dumb to understand.

I can predict how you explain away your contradiction, imposter. In fact, I think you have tried the arguments on me already in the past, but I would like you to explain it to everyone else. Just how is there a labor shortage if unemployment is alot worse than the numbers show?

I happen to think that perhaps the minimum wage law would be rendered more meaningless than it already is if employers could not hire illegals to do all of their dirty work, and had to pay more competitive wages to get the help they need.

1. The US must produce about 180,000 new jobs every month (based on "expert" economists) to really be "fully" employed. Look at the stats on new jobs, and also include the jobs lost - including the auto industry.

2. The unemployment rate the government produces only reflects those who have been out of work for only the past 4 or 6 weeks. They drop all those looking for work, but are still unemployed.

3. The shortage in the labor pool on farms and restaurants will be exacerbated by destroying the labor pool they have now - mostly Mexican workers. Many others, including whites and Asians - no matter what economic level they live in do not work on farms or in restaurants.

4. It's not about the minimum wage, stupid. With no skills based on education, Mexicans are relegated to the work they know and have access to.

5. Mexicans are typically very hard workers, and employers do not hesitate to hire them. Many places around the US make special accommodations for the Mexican workers, because without them, many of their farms and businesses would go under.

Illegal immigration is the conservative's secret weapon. It lowers labor costs, increasing profits and the compensation of CEO's. Unfortunately, too many people, especially the mindless nonwealthy conservative voter, fair to see this.


Conservatives are all atwitter about illegal immigrants. Some want to give them amnesty. Others want to reinstitute the old Bracero program. Others want to build a wall around America, like the communists did around East Berlin. Some advocate all of the above.

But none will tell Americans the truth about why we have eleven million illegal aliens in this nation now (when it was fewer than 2 million when Reagan came into office), why they're staying, or why they keep coming. In a word, it's "jobs." In conservative lexicon, it's "cheap labor to increase corporate profits." ...

One of the tools conservatives have used very successfully over the past 25 years to drive down wages, bust unions, and increase CEO salaries has been to encourage illegal immigrant labor in the US. Their technique is transparently simple.

Conservatives well understand supply and demand. If there's more of something, its price goes down. If it becomes scarce, its price goes up.

They also understand that this applies just as readily to labor as it does to houses, cars, soybeans, or oil. While the history of much of the progressive movement in the United States has been to control the supply of labor (mostly through pushing for maximum-hour, right-to-strike, and child-labor laws) to thus be able to bargain decent wages for working people, the history of conservative America has, from its earliest days grounded in slavery and indentured workers from Europe, been to increase the supply of labor and drive down its cost. ...

Today, this fundamental economic rule of labor supply and demand is most conspicuous in the conservative reluctance to stop illegal immigration into the United States. All those extra (illegal) workers, after all, drive up the supply - and thus drive down the cost - of labor. Even in areas where there are not high populations of illegal immigrants, their presence elsewhere in the American workforce drives down overall the cost of labor nationwide. And when the cost of labor goes down, there's more money left over for CEOs and stockholder dividends. ...

But conservative strategists have noticed that the workers - and the voters - of the United States are getting nervous about nearly 10 percent of our workforce being both illegal and cheap. This has led conservative commentators and politicians to resort to classic "wedge issue" rhetoric, exploiting Americans' fears -- while working to keep conditions relatively the same as they are today. ...

None of the various con proposals - from a fence to amnesty - address the fundamental truth of the situation: Conservatives and the businesses they represent want to maintain a large, illegal or marginally legal, and thus powerless workforce in the United States, to keep down the price of labor and help them finally destroy the union movement - and, thus, that politically pesky middle class. ...

Conservatives believe that what John Adams called "the rabble" - you and me - can't really be trusted with governance, and therefore that job should be kept to an elite few. The big difference between the old-line Burke conservatives and modern conservatives is that Burke and the cons of his day felt that an hereditary ruling class was desirable (because it would inculcate rulers with a sense of "noblesse oblige"), whereas modern cons like Adams, McKinley, Kirk, and Bush believe that the ruling class should be more of a meritocracy - rule by the "best."

And - in the finest tradition of John Calvin (who suggested that wealth was a sign of God's blessing) - what better indication of "best" could there be than "richest"? They believe there should be a thin veneer of democracy on these old conservative notions of aristocracy in order to placate the masses, but are quite certain that it would be a disaster should the rabble ever actually have a strong say in running the country.

This is, at its core, why conservatives embrace the idea of eliminating the American middle class and replacing it with a Dickensian "working poor" class, and are working so hard to use illegal immigrant labor as the lever to bring this about. ...

If Congress were to pass a law that said, quite simply, that the CEO of any business that was caught employing illegal immigrants went to jail for a year - no exceptions - then within a month there would be ten million (more or less) people lined up at the Mexican border trying to get out of the United States. The US unemployment rate would drop close to zero, and wages would begin to rise. The American middle class would begin to return to viability, as would the union movement in this nation. ...
-davechandler.info

au, where is your compassion. I have to assume you think that the shooter should have been previously kicked just because he made a little criminal mistake, and that the other shooter should not have been given legal status. Maybe you are a bigot.

And maybe you are an idiot. Check that no maybe about it.

Anybody here looking at the poll on this thread?

So far, with 100 votes cast, the "against" illegals have 2/3, the pro illegals have 1/3 of the total - about the same as nationwide results.

Factually... 2/3 of Americans in all of the polls polls run by reputable organiztions (i.e. polls run by the CIS or the KKK not included) support a compromise that includes giving immigrants here illegally now should be given a path to citizenship.

The key phrase for the next few months: Immigration hardliners are blocking progress

The economic downturn that will soon be caused by the fact that extremists blocked needed immigration reform is going to drive another spike into the coffin of the conservative movement.

Business... from big business, to small businesses to family farms are already screaming that the extremism of the anti-"illegal"-immigrant folk is hurting their businesses.

Americans don't like extremists, and the pro-immigrant side has been the reasonable side who is willing to compromise.

The 2008 election will prove me right on this (as if the 2006 election didn't say enough).