While there is no doubt that many illegals work long hours at dirty and dangerous jobs, it is low wages, not the type of job, that American workers reject. For many American businesses, employing illegal aliens at wages so low citizens could not afford to take the job is great for profits and shareholders, explaining why businesses, from meat-packing to landscaping to construction, hire illegal immigrants. Companies are rarely punished for this.
For nearly 20 years, it has been a crime to hire illegal aliens. Congress passed the Immigration and Reform Control Act of 1986, which provided that employers could be fined up to $10,000 for every illegal worker they hired, and repeat offenders could be sent to jail. When President Reagan signed the act, he called the sanction the "keystone" of the law by removing the incentive for illegal immigration, the elimination of job opportunities that draws illegals to the United States. Making it a crime to hire an illegal worker was seen as a dramatic step.
Unfortunately, no one was responsible for enforcing the law. Between 1999-2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), which subsequently was merged into the Department of Homeland Security. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing illegal immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000.
Comments
i like the precedents and numbers! i want more numbers! what is the country doing now? what are the legislators doing now? what is anyone doing now?
I hope this is the beginning of a long series of articles. This is a very interesting topic, and I am excited to continue to learn more. Keep them coming!
It's hard to know where to start on commenting on this story, so let's go here.
I can't say the ILLEGAL ALIENS are completely to blame for the shape of our economy, but they are a BIG part of the problem. The ILLEGAL ALIENS send BILLIONS upon BILLIONS out of this Country every year, money we will NEVER see again. Does this help our economy?
How about the BILLIONS the American taxpayers fork out for the ANCHOR BABIES, the schooling of them, the medical care and the list goes on. How about the MILLIONS upon MILLIONS paid to jail the ILLEGAL ALIENS for the crimes, then the cost to deport them. Does this help our economy?
I believe it is time for all 50 States to pass a State law, like Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina and a few others. It is time for these ILLEGAL ALIENS to go back to their home Country and get out of this Country. The problems they are causing will not go away until the ILLEGAL ALIENS are out of here. I think that is plain to see.
NO ILLEGAL ALIEN HAS A RIGHT TO BE IN THIS COUNTRY FOR ANY REASON! This illegal immigration has gone on long enough. It's time for it to end!
Colorado, get a State Illegal Immigration passed! Other States will be soon following.
I'd like to take a crack at answering the question posed by the title of the article, "Is the Immigration and Reform Control Act of 1986 Enforceable?"
Answer: It depends. Is ANY LAW enforceable if the American Citizenry doesn't care? We know many Americans don't and they will be the people responsible for the ruin of this nation. It's that simple.
Anyone who has heard "illegal aliens only do jobs Americans won't do" would be well advised to watch "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery channel. So far it has covered over 200 such jobs being done in America. Most of the people Mike Rowe, the star of the program, takes instruction from on jobs such as maggot farmer and bloodworm digger turn out to be Americans. If given chance Americans will turn their hands to any honest work at a fair wage. It's up to us to insist that our slacker government do it's job in enforcing existing immigration law prohibiting employment of illegals.
The 1986 IRCA is a textbook case of "passing the buck" to later generations. Of course it was enforeable. It's just that the enforcers were too greedy, too lazy, too stupid, or too afraid to do so. The baby boomer generation, by and large, are pretty lame.
Ending the job magnet was the key to ending illegal immigration in 1986 and it is the key today. If (and that is a big if) the federal government extends and makes mandatory the highly effective E-Verify program, illegal aliens will self-deport and foreigners thinking of sneaking across the border will forget the whole idea. It is clear the greatest danger to those opposed to ending illegal immigration through enforcement is the E-Verify program.
Illegal immigrants paying more taxes than you think
Eight million illegals pay Social Security, Medicare and income taxes. Denying public services to people who pay their taxes is an affront to America’s bedrock belief in fairness. But many “pull-up-the-drawbridge” politicians want to do just that when it comes to illegal immigrants.
The fact that illegal immigrants pay taxes at all will come as news to many Americans. A stunning twothirds of illegal immigrants pay Medicare, Social Security and personal income taxes.
Yet, nativists like Congressman Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., have popularized the notion that illegal aliens are a colossal drain on the nation’s hospitals, schools and welfare programs — consuming services that they don’t pay for.
In reality, the 1996 welfare reform bill disqualified illegal immigrants from nearly all meanstested government programs including food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid and Medicare-funded hospitalization.
The only services that illegals can still get are emergency medical care and K-12 education. Nevertheless, Tancredo and his ilk pushed a bill through the House criminalizing all aid to illegal aliens — even private acts of charity by priests, nurses and social workers.
Potentially, any soup kitchen that offers so much as a free lunch to an illegal could face up to five years in prison and seizure of assets. The Senate bill that recently collapsed would have tempered these draconian measures against private aid.
But no one — Democrat or Republican — seems to oppose the idea of withholding public services. Earlier this year, Congress passed a law that requires everyone who gets Medicaid — the government-funded health care program for the poor — to offer proof of U.S. citizenship so we can avoid “theft of these benefits by illegal aliens,” as Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., puts it. But, immigrants aren’t flocking to the United States to mooch off the government.
According to a study by the Urban Institute, the 1996 welfare reform effort dramatically reduced the use of welfare by undocumented immigrant households, exactly as intended. And another vital thing happened in 1996: the Internal Revenue Service began issuing identification numbers to enable illegal immigrants who don’t have Social Security numbers to file taxes.
One might have imagined that those fearing deportation or confronting the prospect of paying for their safety net through their own meager wages would take a pass on the IRS’ scheme. Not so. Close to 8 million of the 12 million or so illegal aliens in the country today file personal income taxes using these numbers, contributing billions to federal coffers.
No doubt they hope that this will one day help them acquire legal status — a plaintive expression of their desire to play by the rules and come out of the shadows. What’s more, aliens who are not self-employed have Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks.
Since undocumented workers have only fake numbers, they’ll never be able to collect the benefits these taxes are meant to pay for. Last year, the revenues from these fake numbers — that the Social Security administration stashes in the “earnings suspense file” — added up to 10 percent of the Social Security surplus.
The file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year. Beyond federal taxes, all illegals automatically pay state sales taxes that contribute toward the upkeep of public facilities such as roads that they use, and property taxes through their rent that contribute toward the schooling of their children.
The non-partisan National Research Council found that when the taxes paid by the children of low-skilled immigrant families — most of whom are illegal — are factored in, they contribute on average $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume. Yes, many illegal migrants impose a strain on border communities on whose doorstep they first arrive, broke and unemployed.
To solve this problem equitably, these communities ought to receive the surplus taxes that federal government collects from immigrants. But the real reason border communities are strained is the lack of a guest worker program.
Such a program would match willing workers with willing employers in advance so that they wouldn’t be stuck for long periods where they disembark while searching for jobs. The cost of undocumented aliens is an issue that immigrant bashers have created to whip up indignation against people they don’t want here in the first place.
With the Senate having just returned from yet another vacation and promising to revisit the stalled immigration bill, politicians ought to set the record straight: Illegals are not milking the government. If anything, it is the other way around.
Daniel Griswold: Immigration law should reflect our dynamic labor market
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, April 27, 2008
Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.
Among its many virtues, America is a nation where laws are generally reasonable, respected and impartially enforced. A glaring exception is immigration.
Today an estimated 12 million people live in the U.S. without authorization, 1.6 million in Texas alone, and that number grows every year. Many Americans understandably want the rule of law restored to a system where law-breaking has become the norm.
The fundamental choice before us is whether we redouble our efforts to enforce existing immigration law, whatever the cost, or whether we change the law to match the reality of a dynamic society and labor market.
Low-skilled immigrants cross the Mexican border illegally or overstay their visas for a simple reason: There are jobs waiting here for them to fill, especially in Texas and other, faster growing states. Each year our economy creates hundreds of thousands of net new jobs – in such sectors as retail, cleaning, food preparation, construction and tourism – that require only short-term, on-the-job training.
At the same time, the supply of Americans who have traditionally filled many of those jobs – those without a high school diploma – continues to shrink. Their numbers have declined by 4.6 million in the past decade, as the typical American worker becomes older and better educated.
Yet our system offers no legal channel for anywhere near a sufficient number of peaceful, hardworking immigrants to legally enter the United States even temporarily to fill this growing gap. The predictable result is illegal immigration
In response, we can spend billions more to beef up border patrols. We can erect hundreds of miles of ugly fence slicing through private property along the Rio Grande. We can raid more discount stores and chicken-processing plants from coast to coast. We can require all Americans to carry a national ID card and seek approval from a government computer before starting a new job.
Or we can change our immigration law to more closely conform to how millions of normal people actually live.
Crossing an international border to support your family and pursue dreams of a better life is not an inherently criminal act like rape or robbery. If it were, then most of us descend from criminals. As the people of Texas know well, the large majority of illegal immigrants are not bad people. They are people who value family, faith and hard work trying to live within a bad system.
When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem. To argue that illegal immigration is bad merely because it is illegal avoids the threshold question of whether we should prohibit this kind of immigration in the first place.
We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow.
For those workers already in the United States illegally, we can avoid "amnesty" and still offer a pathway out of the underground economy. Newly legalized workers can be assessed fines and back taxes and serve probation befitting the misdemeanor they've committed. They can be required to take their place at the back of the line should they eventually apply for permanent residency.
The fatal flaw of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was not that it offered legal status to workers already here but that it made no provision for future workers to enter legally.
Immigration is not the only area of American life where a misguided law has collided with reality. In the 1920s and '30s, Prohibition turned millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers and spawned an underworld of moon-shining, boot-legging and related criminal activity. (Sound familiar?) We eventually made the right choice to tax and regulate alcohol rather than prohibit it.
In the 19th century, America's frontier was settled largely by illegal squatters. In his influential book on property rights, The Mystery of Capital, economist Hernando de Soto describes how these so-called extralegals began to farm, mine and otherwise improve land to which they did not have strict legal title. After failed attempts by the authorities to destroy their cabins and evict them, federal and state officials finally recognized reality, changed the laws, declared amnesty and issued legal documents conferring title to the land the settlers had improved.
As Mr. de Soto wisely concluded: "The law must be compatible with how people actually arrange their lives." That must be a guiding principle when Congress returns to the important task of fixing our immigration laws.
Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.
The Undocumented are less than 5 % of the Labor in USA, How come 5% is PROBLEM? Stop blaming your own woes and incompetency on the poor that pick our food, If You want to work in a farm or wash dishes than You need to get EDUCATED, Because a US Citizen can get educated and find the JOBS that are required in todays workplace.
ASK YOURSELF WHY ARE "YOU " UNSUCCESSFUL. NOT THE POOR MIGRANT.
Native Americam, where do you get this stuff? Since when is it 'unreasonable' to have, and enforce, immigration laws? Given your misguided sentiment, we should simply do away with all immigration laws and let everyone come here.
By the way, the estimated number of illegal aliens (not migrants), is in excess of 20 million (and probably closer to 30 million).
You actually others have already) posed the question as to whether we should choose between redoubling our enforcement efforts or change the laws affecting immigration. Why can we not do both? It is obvious that the farm and service industries prefer lower wage illegal alien labor as it's money in their pockets. So, the people who are actually 'enslaving' these illegal workers is actually the problem - not the people who want the law enforced.
You must realize that if the illegal alien workers were 'legalized, then they would be covered by all U.S. labor laws and the employers would be required to provided the minimum wage and benefits as prescribed by U.S. law.
Obviously, the employers of illegal workers don't want that, so who do you think the 'enemy' is here?
You are choosing the wrong target when you rail against people who want enforcement of the law - unless of course your goal is t osimply have open border chaos, which it certainly sounds like you do.
Your argument that crossing the border illegally is not a crime such as rape or murder...you are right, it's not. But that still doesn't make it any less a crime - like speeding or theft.
The 1986 amnesty was not designed or intended to provide legal pathways for future illegals - why would it? It is not the design of immigration laws to provide 'loopholes' fopr illegal aliens. Immigration laws exist to provide orderly and LEGAL mechanisms to follow.
Everyone knows that illegal aliens cross the border to come and find work here, but since when is it the legal obligation of the U.S. to provide work for citizens of other countries. The leaders of these countries need to 'step up to the plate' and solve the problem of unemployment and social services for their own people - not the U.S.
The 19th century frontier was not settled by 'illegal squatters' as you call them. There was no formally recognized nation-state. Even most Native American tribes have stated that they did not believe that the land belonged to them, they were just 'tenant-users' of it. Also, the 'squatters' you refer to were of English, French, Spanish, and other nationalities, so any argument that the U.S. stole these lands is primarily a specious one.
You are dead-wrong on the taxes versus social welfare costs. Every non-biased, respected study on the costs of illegal aliens versus tax payments shows a deficit.
Oh, I also wonder how an illegal worker who is making, in most cases, less than the minimum wage could possibly afford the scheme that you propose about paying a fine and back taxes - how (and who) would determine the amount of back taxes owed by each illegal alien. If we use the current tax codes, given the exemptions allowed based on income - most would most likely qualify for a REFUND! By placing them at the 'back of the line' for legal status would mean that they would most likely wait 20 -30 years to become legal. Apparently you are not aware of the lengthy waits by LEGAL immigrants - depending on where and what category of immigrant they are.
You propose making the illegal worker wait at the end of that line - but still be allowed to remina in the U.S.?
What about letting the legal immigrant ahead of them in line come now and take the job away for the illegal worker? Then what? Also, as soon as you legalize the illegal alien, they will go look for work that pays better - why not, after all they now have the power of the U.S. labor laws behind them.
The only justifiable answer to have the illegal aliens go back where they came from and wait for the U.S. to catch up to modern times with regard to immigration laws and the fair labor market.
Otherwise, people like you are just blowing hot air up your own skirts.
Get real and stop swallowing all the BS from PARTISAN organizations and writers who simple-mindedly have one goal in mind - open borders.
JOHN, you want more numbers? Try these on for size.
Let's start with the 1986 amnesty, which was supposed to only benefit 1.5 million illegal aliens. When it was all said and done, almost 5.5 million people received amnesty.
Okay, using 1986 as a start date, the U.S. Census Bureau has estimated that between 3 & 4 million(M) people either illegally entered or remained beyond their legal period of stay each year since then. So, 22 years later + 3M people = 66M illegal aliens.
Yes, 66 MILLION !
Okay, the U.S. Border Patrol states that they intercept, arrest, and remove
almost 1 million people per year. ICE only removes a few thousand or so each year. So, that would mean that the Border Patrol has removed almost 22M people since 1986.
66M minus 22M = 44M illegal aliens.
Proponents (supporters) of illegal aliens contend that about 1 million of these people 'self deport' each year.
1M x 22years = 22M people.
Okay, so the bottom line is that somewhere between 20-25 million illegal aliens remian in the U.S. as we speak.
My position is, given that the government has a tendency to under-report figures and that special interest groups usually over exaggerate their numbers, that the actual number of illegal aliens is more likely to be 30-plus million.
That's 10% of our population! Big numbers, huh?! Cause for concern? I think so...how about you?
Good question and the answer is yes. The problem is getting the correct number of enforcers and putting the appropriate tools in their hands. An example is the 287g program where local law enforcement has been given training and authority to work with federal enforcement. There are other common sense steps such as e-verify that would be very helpful.
There are powerful lobbies working against any enforcement tool or legislation but a lot of U.S. citizen have taken notice and are fighting against these groups in order to preserve the rule of law.
The Presidents and Congress' since 1986 have let the American people down totally, listening instead to lobbyists from special interests and taking campaign money from those same interests. They want to reward corrupt, greedy employers with a large pool of low wage slave labor and to hell with American workers in need of work. Encourage your elected officials to pass the SAVE Act. This Act will require all employers to use E-Verify, a free, accurate and easy to use system that verifies American workers and legal immigrants for jobs. When E-Verify is put in place the 20 to 30 million illegal aliens wrongfully taking American jobs from legal workers will self deport.
"For laws to be respected, they have to be respectable." -- Frederic Bastiat
"For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced." -- Albert Einstein
"... there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'" -- Martin Luther King
The "rule of law" and "nation of laws" are sweet national myths, but in all our history, no law has ever been respected that the people did not find just, moral or sensible. There are numerous examples of bonafied native-born American citizens blatantly disregarding bad laws (e.g. Prohibition, harboring escaped slaves, etc.). The tired old "illegal is illegal" argument is a circular argument. Bad laws get eliminated or reformed. Write your representatives and ask for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a) elimination of a beaurocracy that requires decades for a worker to become legal; b) market-driven quotas that put Americans first; c) improved border security and enforcement on all five borders (not just a portion of the southern one) and that targets criminal and/or terrorist entrants.
I believe that if such reform were to take place, the entire "amnesty" debate would essentially be moot. No self-respecting "illegal" immigrant would deny him/herself legality if working legally were made attainable. As it is now, they have little choice but to work unauthorized virtually indefinitely. Levy back-taxes where applicable, and if it makes nativists feel better, levy fines and penalties for breaking our rules. I wholeheartedly support the deportation of undeserving "illegal" immigrants who have been misbehaving or not working while here.
First let me say; Don, give it a rest. There are a number of economic and social justifications for controlling immigration. 'nuf said.
The 1986 Act became unenforcable once the INS discovered that proving an employer "knowingly and willfully" hired illegal aliens was harder than was anticipated. The amount of money required to enforce and prosecute it far exceeded that which was recoverable through the meeger fines that were imposed. Jail? Ha!
E-verify is the ticket here. Employers won't be able to say they didn't know that the documents they saw were fake. The government can monitor to see if the employers are using the system. The anti's say that it isn't reliable (about 95%), but I say; is it more reliable than leaving it up to employers to decide if they are seeing valid or fake documents? Use E-varify or get slapped. That's a no brainer.
Until we get rid of the Globalist that permeate our governmental bodies, of course the Immigration and Reform Control Act of 1986 will be unenforceable. It has nothing to do with INS or ICE having problems proving "knowingly and willfully" against employers. With the E-Verify program and a competent and compliant Social Security Administration, enforcing laws against hiring illegals and with locals governments committed to removing illegals from our cities and states, ICE can enforce the 1986 Act.
Lets get it done.
Halibut, I never once said we shouldn't control immigration. Classic strawman argument. Nice try...
And btw, as a small business owner, using E-verify is putting a bandaid on a wound that has cut a major artery. It addresses the symptom, and not the root cause, which is a fundamentally flawed and out-moded immigration system.
I'm against all bandaid solutions, especially those that will make the problem worse. Since I already pay taxes (corporate and personal) to fund Homeland Security and ICE who are supposed to be controlling who comes in through our borders, forcing me to use E-verify is a form of double / triple taxation. Employers should not be doing ICE's job. I want them to use the money I already pay them more effectively.
Furthermore, E-verify has too high an error rate, which will jeapordize the jobs of millions of legal workers at a time when our economy is already at the edge of the abyss. Even with a small error rate, over a million legal workers could easily be jeapordized. Anybody promoting ineffective bandaid solutions like E-verify has to be driven by other motives besides wanting to do what is truly good for our nation socially and economically.
Another argument against E-verify is that it uses the a system not designed for citizenship verification. It's a gerry-rig, and there have even been constitutional arguments against it. The SSN and the card we're each issued was never intended to be a form of national identity card. Social Security is a completely different kettle of fish. If it's a national identity system you're after, E-verify is one crappy way of doing it. We can do better, no?
Another argument against E-verify is that it uses the a system not designed for citizenship verification. It's a gerry-rig, and there have even been constitutional arguments against it. The SSN and the card we're each issued was never intended to be a form of national identity card. Social Security is a completely different kettle of fish. If it's a national identity system you're after, E-verify is one crappy way of doing it. We can do better, no?
I recommend an evaluation of the latest Colorado specific cost analysis at fairus.org
Most of the difficulties facing enforcement issues center on identification. The 'Secure and Verifiable ID' law passed in 2003, proposed to solve some of those problems. But it has been ignored, until recently. Gov Ritter has ordered all CO Depts to present compliance reports by the end of the month and report to the Legislative Audit Comm by early Jan. The LAC has reviewed the recent performance audit, motioned to continue the examination of compliance, and solve conflicts with 1023, a later, Special Session law involving benefits.
The Rule Making process is already changing procedures at Human Services. Local political sub-divisions may require a Writ of Mandamus to become aware of their lack of SVID usage. And of the abrogation of gov't immunity for knowingly violating.
Colorado State Law provides for a Division of Labor, Dept of Labor audit of employers, both by random selection or complaint. This provides for a first time, $5,000 per person, per day fine. And the letters are ready to go out.
In addition, the State Auditor's Office and Gov Ritter's Immigration Working Group will be forthcoming with separate recommendations involving enforcement of State Law.
Also, the 'No-Match' SSN letters injunction will be reviewed in the first quarter of '09, possibly impacting millions of employee's and denying 'Safe Harbor' for ten's of thousands of employers.
With the Exec Order Bush signed mandating e-verify usage on Fed contracts over $100,000, the State Law requiring Sub-contractors affirm lawful presence, and Smart Business Practices
allowing citizens to determine e-verify registration of local companies, the pressure is on.
And building!! Strong currents are flowing, quite discussions being held, and with economic forces pressing the job situation, look to the school enrollment numbers this spring for qualification of departures.
ps...
I attempted to supply reference links, but the site rejected those. I would be glad to provide those; contact me through the cairco.org site.
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Nations enact Immigration Control laws for three main reasons;
1. Protect jobs
2. Prevent disease repeats, already eradicated
3. Keep criminals out
Whether we like it, or not, the USA now hosts more than 40 million foreign nationals unlawfully present, PLUS their 13 million kids and grand-kids. Although YOUR governments are trying to convince YOU otherwise, that deception scam is not working.
More than 700,000 illegals now reside in Colorado, PLUS their 250,000 kids. 27% of the kids enrolled in CO K-12 schools are children of illegal aliens. Guess how much that costs ?
While 90% of the illegal aliens are nice, ten percent are not. The USA jails and prisons now host more than half a million illegal aliens - of which some 7,500 are incarcerated in Colorado. The additional cost for more cops, more prosecutors, more judges, more courts, and more jail cells is gigantic.
And what about bias and favoritism ? Is it fair and reasonable, when 1,300,000,000 are lined-up to come here from third-world nations, we cater to 40 million who have come here illegally ?
In this economic recession, we are facing serious problems. Is it helpful when some 30 million who are fully employed, making an average wage of $43K/yr, are unlawfully present ?
According to a recent study published in a population publication (The Social Contract), the NET cost to U.S. taxpayers for medical- and social-services for illegal aliens and their family members is some four hundred billion dollars per year. Did YOU vote to spend money that way ?
Think about it; the USA is NOT a church. Neither is the state of Colorado.
Is it reasonable and proper for us to give away thirty million jobs AND $400 BIL/yr ? Is it not more sensible to enforce the immigration laws and instead send more foreign AID to third world nations, helping foreign national folks there - NOT HERE ?
Is there a logical, reasonable way to turn the tide ?
When each of the 50 United States decides to investigate, prosecute and incarcerate 99 crooked, greedy employers for their law-breaking activities, their peers will 'get legal,' the jobs will dry up and the migrant laborers will voluntarily repatriate and go back home.
So simple.
When that happens, crime rates in the USA will drop by 30%, hospitals and schools will not be crowded, our highways will be less crowded, our greenhouse gases will be reduced, and our economy will recover faster.
So, what are YOUR local leaders waiting for ? Blaming the feds is just plain stupid.
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I couldn't agree more with Biker Chick. All the people who argue that illegal aliens, from wherever, should be here because of this, that, or the other reason, are grossly missing the point. The point, in case some dumbheads haven't realized it yet, is this, Americans are in a struggle against the traitorous elitists on Wall Street, in the Chamber of Commerce, in the Dept. of Labor, in the Democratic and Republican Administration, and even chruches--to have their will carried out. We are in a struggle to take back the nation from those traitors who have brought this nation to its knees. THOSE WHO THINK THIS THING IS SOLELY ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE DELUDED. This is a struggle to have the will of the American people mean something, and not the will of this nations elites. DON'T SOME OF YOU UNDERSTAND!! WE ARE LOSING THIS DEMOCRACY, BECAUSE OUR LAWS ARE BREAKING DOWN AND MASSIVE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION FROM ,MEXICO FOR INSTANCE, IS JUST A SYMPTOM OF IT ALL. LOOK AT ALL OF THE RACIST ETHNIC INTEREST GROUOPS LIKE LA RAZA, MALDEF, AND LULAC, WHO SIMPLY THINK THEY CAN BULLDOZE OVER THE LAWS THE AMERICAN CITIZENRY HAVE CREATED FOR--AND HERE'S THE POINT, "OUR BENEFIT", FOR OUR BENEFIT, NOT THE BENEFIT OF SOME CHURCH, CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, OR WALL STREET. WAKE UP AND GET SOME UNDERSTANDING OF THE DANGER WE ARE IN. OUR LAWS ARE BREAKING DOWN LEFT AND RIGHT.
We should inforce our immigration laws. You have to look bigger picture not just oh I feel sorry for illegals. (Little note here we all do but if they live in a bad country change IT don't come here and try and change ours. If you do come here do it the right way) My father came from Italy when he was in his late 20's busted his butt doing landscaping. Working as much as 100 hour weeks. When he had learned english well enough to communicate he said "no more Italian in the house. If I want to be successful in the US I need to speak english" he didn't expect signs to be written in Italian or paper work to be writen in Italian or when he called the government, while working on his citizenship, to speak to an Italian speaker. He now owns a resturaunt and has had it since 1973 paying taxes being a good citizen but I digress. My point is if we follow and enforce our laws legal immigration is a boon to our economics. Where ilegal immigration is a cancer that eats away at the fabric of our country. As Kari mentions above if the rules on the books are enforced the punishments are there.
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