@au1929,
au1929 wrote:
The only way to keep undocumented aliens from remaining in the removal of there source of income by the imposition of crushing fines upon those who employ them.
That was attempted in both the Carter and Reagan administrations, but it proved to simply be unenforceable.
We employers were required to obtain three positive proofs of identification for each new hire--a birth certificate, a passport, a driver's license, a utility bill, etc. It sometimes took a person, especially one who had just moved and had everything packed away, some time to locate such documents. When you lose an employee and must replace him/her immediately, it proved to be unworkable to wait and it too often wasn't followed up. Or, employers reverted to exclusive use of day workers to avoid detection and that eliminated permanent steady jobs that might otherwise have been created. For more permanent jobs that still existed, a booming cottage industry producing phony documents immediately sprang up. It was simply unreasonable to require every employer to have the skill or ability to recognize phony papers from real ones.
It will require a multi-pronged approach I think.
1. Yes, do impose fines and penalities on those employers that knowingly recuit and hire illegals if that can be proved as well as those employers who pay illegals wages below scale for the area.
2. Enact laws exempting schools, social service agencies, and medical services from the requirement to serve illegals for other than obvious emergencies. That would allow humanitarian effort to prevent imminent death or starvation without creating a network of services that illegals could tap for free.
3. Remove the silly restrictions imposed on law enforcement so that they can reasonably check, identify, and arrest persons who are in the country illegally.
4. Enact a universal English-only law instead of requiring accommodation for those who cannot speak English. American citizens should be able to read road signs in English and pass required tests such as for a driver's license in English. Such laws would not forbid accommodation of other languages, but the law would no longer require them.
5. We need better and more streamlined immigration policies that eliminate unnecessary red tape and make it more efficient for people to immigrate legally and be more easily assimilated effectively into the existing American culture. Such persons should desire American citizenship because they want to be Americans and they should be willing to learn and obey our laws and learn English.
4. Finally we need a better system by which employers who cannot hire enough Americans to work to be able to legally recruit and import temporary workers from Mexico or wherever and see that such workers return home immediately upon completion of the job. Employers should not be able to abuse such guest workers but either provide or ensure that adequate shelter, food, transportation etc. is available and must pay the same wage that American workers would require. (This would effectively ensure that Americans would be recruited and be given priority in hiring, but would allow recruitment of guest workers as necessary to get the job done.) Guest workers should not be allowed to bring in nonworking members of their families, etc. with them.
5. Finally, once a practical guest workers program is in place, we need one more short period of amnesty--say 90 to 180 days--for those here illegally now to return to their native country and come back through the legal guest worker process. That would mean that they need a sponsor and be able to prove that they have a bonafide job waiting for them. Such persons would be eligible to apply for and receive a green card and/or citizenship though they would have to get in line and take their turn for consideration with all who have applied for citizenship through legal channels.
6. Those unwilling to accept these terms and choose to remain in the country illegally would be subject to arrest and deportation and such deportation should be to some far distant point where it would be difficult to sneak right back across the border. Those who have seriously broken our laws--jaywalking would not be a disqualifier for instance, but being intentionally in the country illegally would--would not be eligible for either guest workers permits, green cards, or citizenship.
7. Finally there are those cases where you have persons who have grown up here and effectively have no 'home country' other than the USA and other isolated situations of particular hardship. I would favor the government setting up an independent qualified group to evaluate these cases and perhaps allow special congressional dispensation. This would almost certainly be the exception instead of the rule.
Some of the problem has been relieved as work has dried up in a lot of labor intensive small business and the workers went home. But the situation remains unacceptable for numerous reasons. We cannot continue to allow a flood of undocumented persons to strain our schools, labor, and social services and continue to dilute a common language until these break down entirely and we look more like the places they have attempted to escape from which would be compassionate to nobody. We do not have to be cruel or hateful in any way to fix the problem. But it does require common sense and being proactive.
--we should amend the Constitution to add a requirement that at least one parent must be a U.S. citizen in order for a child born in this country to receive automatic citizenship.
