Nothing like rewarding those who are proficient at Hide N Seek.
What is the alleged morality (and I direct this specifically at GWB) of adding 15 million lawbreaking illegal aliens to an immigration system which is currently backlogged with millions of legal and law-abiding applications?
And what is the morality of elevating lawbreakers above the legal applicants who go through years of waiting and then a rigorous process of medical checks, background checks, and financial requirements?
The utter failure of the administration to address the complete brokenness of CIS (nee INS) and at the same time to suggest adding 15 million illegal aliens to its workload is duplicitous at best, insane at worst.
Everyone on Capitol Hill knows that the immigration system is completely broken - not to mention at the White House - so to imply that CIS can handle this new workload (a magnitude above its current capacity) is completely dishonest.
If only Bushbots could read.
That's lumping a pretty wide variety of plans together as one. Not exactly a thoughful discourse on the subject.
I agree that simply making illegal immigrants here in this country legal is the wrong thing to do.
However with our low unemployment rates it should be obvious that our economy can support more workers than are legally in the United States.
Just don't allow anyone to apply for the program from within the United States that isn't here legally, and the issue of it being an amnesty program goes away.
This has been proposed, yet it gets ignored by isolationists who will call any plan to allow more legal immigrants to come and work an amnesty plan.
I'm sick of people mischaracterizing things. If they have to lie to me to get me to support their viewpoint, their viewpoint doesn't deserve my support.
Inviting foreigners to come to America as guest workers is equivalent to sending the message: You people are only fit to do menial jobs that Americans think they are too good to do.
Why don't we let them decide for themselves what message it sends and let them decide if it benefits them.
We will let you come into our country for a few years to work low-paid jobs, but you have no hope of rising up the economic and social ladder.
Spoken like a true elitist. The guest worker plans I've seen have a provision that allows people that have proven themselves to be a benefit to our society a path to residency and citizenship.
The various bills differ in whether or when the guest-workers will be expelled back to the poverty they came from, but the bottom line of all is to create a subordinate underclass of unassimilated foreign workers, like serfs or peasants in corrupt foreign countries. That's not the kind of economy that made America a great nation.
Some care does need to be taken to not flood the labor market with unskilled labor. The rational plans that have been proposed do address this.
We have a free market economy. Wages are determined by supply and demand. We need enough workers to allow our economy to grow. If we have too large a supply of workers, unemployment goes up, and wages get unreasonably low.
We are sitting at 5% unemployment right now, even with the huge number of illegal workers here in the US. The unemployment rate historicly doesn't stay much lower than that.
Right now we don't really need a large influx of legal immigrant workers, however if we start being successful at curbing illegal immigration and deporting illegal immigrants, we are going to need to increase legal immigration or we are going to harm our economy. We will put ourselves into a recession as our economy shrinks.
The construction industry is a decent example of this.
There is a lot of contractors in construction that hire illegal immigrants, though many times the employer has a limited ability to find out they are illegal. They provide SS numbers to the empolyer, and the IRS never notifies them that the numbers are invalid or belong to someone else.
Some employers likely conspire with the illegal immigrants to hire them, others likely don't but just do their best not to get sued over some equal opportunity regulation.
If the IRS suddenly starts doing their job and reporting all these illegal immigrants workers and they get deported, builders have a harder time getting subs to do the work. It takes longer to get things built. The tight labor market drives up labor costs. Less houses being built also drives up prices in the housing market.
Inflation goes up. Our money buys less.
Less houses being built means that less building materials are sold.
Inflation goes up. The economy shrinks. Welcome to a recession.
American workers lose their jobs. Those that still have jobs find their wages buying less.
America is a country that welcomes immigrants who want to be Americans, who come here legally, who obey our laws and our Constitution, and speak our language. They start with entry-level jobs, but they have the opportunity to rise into the middle class and realize the American dream.
So is she recomending not having time limits on how long guest workers can stay and work in the US? Or is she recomending that they have more mobility in jobs once they get here? The plans I've read require matching a worker with a job, but I don't know how hard it is for them to switch jobs. It didn't seem that difficult for people here on H1B visas to switch jobs, why would the guest worker plan be different?
Between job mobility and a possible path the citizenship, I would think this concern is being addressed in some of the plans.
France and Germany have already demonstrated the folly of a guest-worker economy. They admitted foreigners to do low-paid jobs, and now both countries have thousands of foreign residents who do not assimilate, who burden the social welfare system, and who become more disgruntled and dangerous every year.
France and Germany has too many socialist protections built in for workers. That is what is keeping people from having job mobility. When conpanies cannot get rid of bad workers and hire better ones it causes such problems.
Amnesty/guest-worker would help to perpetuate Mexico's corrupt economic system, which keeps a few people very rich and most Mexicans in abject poverty.
Yes, the government of Mexico is corrupt and it exploits their people.
You can argue that a guest worker program would give their people a chance to see a different form of government and raise their expectations for their own government and force change.
You can argue that it helps prevent economic colapse and helps keep money flowing into that country that helps the Mexican governemnt.
In the end, the purpose of a guest worker or visa program is to help our country grow economicly. At the same time it benefits the workers who come here.
Amnesty/guest-worker would reward lawbreakers. The guest-workers would be exempted from punishment for breaking our laws in entering our country illegally and then using fraudulent documents, and employers would be exempted from punishment for hiring them.
If the guest worker program provides for amnesty this is true. If it doesn't this in untrue. Lumping all the plans together doesn't help address this issue, it distorts it.
The employers commit a double offense if they pay the illegal workers with cash in order to evade paying payroll taxes and providing benefits to the workers. For our government to tolerate the vast underground economy is unjust to honest businessmen who pay their taxes.
I have seen no provisions that would exempt employers who payed any workers under the table from being prosecuted for violating the law. This one is pure B. S.
We need to enforce those laws better. We need to enforce our immigration laws better. However a guest worker program is legal immigration, not illegal immigration. It requires that the immigrant have a job to remain here. If they aren't getting paid over the table and paying taxes, they aren't part of the program.
Amnesty/guest-worker is unjust to the millions of people who complied with our immigration laws, stood in line, and patiently waited their turn to win legal residence in the United States.
Amnesty would be.
A guest worker program that does not include amnesty would not be. Some people say that leaving our borders open to people who want to sneak into our country illegally is the compassionate and Christian thing to do. On the contrary, it is uncaring and immoral to close our eyes to the crime on our southern border.
I agree.
The rest of the article was about the need to enforce immigration law and close our borders, which I agree with.
I also believe that there is an immediate need to close our borders and step up enforcement while a guest worker program or revised system of work visas could follow. However, I do believe that if we are successful in enforcement, we will harm our country's economy if we don't address the need to people to work.