Yes - a lot would return to Mexico. All the liberal draws to begin the dependency push of illegals into the LIBERAL voting block keeps bearing fruit. It MUST stop!
Re E-Verify. It puts a terrible burden on small businesses. It is highly unreliable and has caught people who were legal and missed many who are illegal. It is a bandaid NOT the solution. There have been TOO many “fixes” and laws that are not enforced or don’t work.
The idea of everify is good. If there are problems in implementation, those can be worked on. There is no reason it should be a burden on employers. Why should it be any less effective than the NICS system for gun purchases? And using it could be an absolute defense for business owners if all their employees pass.
You know I am more or less a Perry supporter, but the truth is a lot of Pubs, including IMHO Perry, really resist any real enforcement of laws agaisnt employing illegals because a lot of their support comes from businesses that rely on illegals. That’s no longer a viable position, and it’s likely going to cost Perry the election.
Your note about catching people who are legal caught my attention.
I have a Hispanic-sounding name. It's actually Italian and my father's ancestors have lived in the United States since immigrating to Michigan in 1870, but when I lived in the Southwest I was sometimes mistaken, based on my last name, for being an Americanized person of Hispanic ancestry. I actually got called a “disgrace to my race” on occasion by people who thought my Spanish speaking skills aren't very good. They were quite correct that my Spanish accent is really bad, but quite wrong about my ethnicity.
My name has caused me no problems and actually helped me when living in New Mexico. However, my mother, whose ancestors have lived here even longer than my father's ancestors and doesn't look in any way “foreign” except for being short and having black hair, got identified as a possible illegal immigrant during the early days of employer checks.
Fortunately she was working for a Michigan law firm at the time, the state where she, her father and mother, and her grandparents were all born and which she never left again after attending Reagan's 1981 inaugural. The partners of the law firm thought it was very funny that some federal bureaucrat gave them an opportunity for a discrimination lawsuit. The mixup got fixed **REALLY** fast with some nastygrams by the lawyers to the federal bureaucrat who thought a person might be an illegal immigrant whose only ancestors who “immigrated” were people who moved from Indiana to Michigan after the Civil War. There were absolutely no indicators of possible non-citizenship except her last name.
If we think citizenship verification is easy for businesses, we underestimate the problems. It's well and good to say businesses shouldn't hire illegals, and I agree, but effectively enforcing that is considerably more difficult.
My mother thought the whole incident was funny at first — until she realized what could have happened if her boss hadn't been a lawyer and if the claim of non-citizenship wasn't obviously bogus to everybody around.
I think all FReepers believe American companies should be hiring Americans and not illegals. But what if the person being identified as an illegal really is a citizen? What do we do then?
Unlike me, my wife is an immigrant, as are four other members of my family in my household. We've spent thousands of dollars to handle things legally, to the letter. My wife is now a citizen, and my niece hopes soon to be in the US Army. We've done things right, and we get angrier than most at illegals who want to live in America without following the rules.
But let's make sure that when we penalize people for breaking the rules, we don't penalize people who have done nothing wrong except be the victims of a bureaucrat's screw-up.