Immigration issues

Oh you bet the American middle class needs competition from other countries: open the doors freely to educated, English-speaking immigrants from India, Korea, Singapore, and Pakistan and watch a new white welfare class develop.The "outcry if the United States were to do this" would come from employers who don't need language fluency or skilled workers: they need cheap field, unskilled, and semi-skilled labor for short wages.Most of those employers are conservative Republicans--that's why the one measure likely to stem illegal immigration (aggressive penalties on knowing employers of illegal immigrants) never gets anywhere in Congress.Crime drops in cities with high numbers of illegal immigrants; they pay FICA and other taxes without any likelihood of gaining benefits.The "dole" is not something they are ever likely to see.

Why would you expect my post to be similar to yours? Yours was irrelevant in its insinuations and erroneous in its assumptions.Mine was not. Bobby gets to why can't I? If China can muzzle its press and intellectuals, and privatize its community-owned property to enrich its new party-member capitalist class, why can't we? Does that work for you? If Iran can establish a theocracy, why can't we?As I pointed out, the bar to strong enforcement of immigration laws is not a soft-hearted liberal conspiracy but the huge corporate demand for cheap labor. The GOP-dominated Congress had several years to enact stiffer penalties (and strong enforcement programs) on those employers and refused to do so.Conservatives seem clear on the notion that demand must be stifled to stop the flow of drugs, yet wear blinders when it comes to the flow of cheap labor. If you want stronger enforcement, look to the corporate employers, not to liberals who advocate the free migration of labor. The employers of illegal immigrants collect FICA tax, income tax, state tax, etc.: the immigrant workers are extremely unlikely to cash in on those benefits--often the employers simply pocket the withholdings. Most illegal immigrant regularly suffer the indignity of unpaid wages because they fear deportation--how likely are they to demand the benefits for which they paid taxes?By the way, I see nothing substantive in your reply. Got substance?

We need the labor that Mexico, Central, and South America can provide. They need work.They are, frankly, in greater proportions than our existing population, hard-working, honest people. The primary opposition to their presence here is racist and xenophobic, waxing and waning with the electoral cycle.They are our neighbors--why should we look further, to nations more distant and cultures even more distantly related to our own, for the labor (and taxpayers) we need? In many cases, the economies of their home countries are unable to provide them with a decent living because their traditional ways of life have been discarded for extractive and exploitative resource and agribusiness endeavors that feed rootless, globalized corporations.In many cases, they don't come here looking for a better life but rather any life at all. They come here because there is no longer a life worth living where they were--sometimes because our "banana/beef" plantations destroyed their traditional, sustainable ways of life, sometimes because we supported the death-squad militarist son of a bitch who bankrupted their nation and polity.In those cases where our factories have relocated to their lands, the relocation occurred because the labor and environmental protections that serve us (however poorly) are not present there, and the new boss is just like the old boss, the land despoiled, and all parents can offer their children is the same grinding poverty they inherited. By me?Because I am a U.S. citizen. I bear moral, ethical and political responsibility for those policies I advocate, those I tolerate, and the consequences of my opposition to others.Because I grew up in a poor working class family, and I know that someone is being screwed coming and going when I see it.