Law students offer free immigration help to apply for diversity Visa lottery

Kearney Hub ^ | 11-12-2008 | University of Nebraska

[SmallGovRepub]

I fully expect to see some sort of amnesty program in the next couple of years. Something like the “Dream Act” will be passed to allow aliens who grew up here and went to our schools who intend to go to college or the military to get their green cards, and we'll probably see some other amnesty type program for others who have been here for many years and stayed out of trouble, especially those with citizen children and/or citizen or legal permanent resident spouses. They'll probably just have to pay a fine along with all the other fees they have to pay for their immigration paperwork, so they'll probably be able to get everything squared away for less than three grand not counting attorney's fees if they use attorneys.

This won't really be about what citizens want. It will be about what businesses want. Politicians on both sides of the isle support some sort of amnesty or guest worker type program because businesses that donate to their campaigns are asking for programs like these so they can keep their cheap labor. They'll sell it on family unity humanitarian grounds and say it will be good for businesses and it will pass within a year, maybe two at the most. That's my bet.

[longtermmemmory]

that is what I said, you still have to qualify with the minimum standards as any other green card applicant.

[SmallGovRepub]

“We should allow in only the skilled and English speakers. “

With respect to allowing in only the skilled, maybe that's not as good an idea as it might seem. We are a fairly well educated country. Most people graduate from high school at least. Many attend some college or get some technical degree, and a lot get college degrees and advanced degrees. Educated people generally won't work lowly manual labor jobs. And those that don't even finish high school in this country are too often going to be real screw ups that won't work hard and won't last long in any jobs. These Mexicans and Central Americans that come in are relatively uneducated and unsuited for anything other than manual labor. The difference is that they aren't uneducated because they are screw ups, usually it's because of financial reasons. They're a lot more likely than uneducated Americans to work hard for low pay and be happy just to have jobs.

We have to have as a society a good number of people to work the lowliest jobs. Somebody has to do that work. If we don't have cheap labor that do good work, we just lose those jobs entirely to other countries where labor costs are low. That's just a fact of life and a problem we have to face in affluent educated societies where labor costs tend to be high as a matter of course.

I bet we end up with even more immigrants in this country in the future, and that we'll in fact want them here. The oldest Baby Boomers are 62 now and in the next couple of decades we're going to have many millions of people retire and start collecting Social Security benefits. Birth rates have been relatively low in this country for quite some time and we just aren't going to have enough in the work force to be paying in enough to the Social Security program to pay out all the benefits we are obligated to pay all these retiring Baby Boomers and even some of those born in the years after the Boom. We'll have to boost the amount of money coming into the Social Security program and one way we'll do that I bet is to allow laborers to come in from other countries to work, both skilled and unskilled.

[Dante3]

In some areas, diversity is a bad thing. From my sociology notes, “In large-scale societies, we are accustomed to diversity of beliefs, we even applaud ourselves for our tolerance, not recognizing that a society not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all, but a political association of individuals held together by the presence of law and force.”