Immigration

It's time for me to weigh in on the slightly old issue of illegal aliens living and working in this country, most of them from Mexico. I'm for letting most or all of them stay, because they are still human beings, and shipping them back to Mexico only has negative effects all around.

Let me explain: If the economic situation in Mexico was good (it isn't), all of these people wouldn't feel the need to sneak into the U.S. at great personal risk to get a crappy job that few self respecting, American born citizens would take. If you force a lot of these people back to Mexico, you've got millions more people competing for the same amount of poverty level jobs, and the situation worsens. Unless you build a huge fence across the border like the House bill will, you won't keep those people out of America.

With that said, there are some (actually many) things I don't like about illegal immigration. When listening to some expert on t.v. talking about how the economy needs the cheap labor that immigrants provide, it seems like a good idea to just let the system continue in the interest of saving money and the economy. This is not a good thing, because you're keeping the poor poor. Even if they think it's a good paying job, we shouldn't use that to justify paying them a pittance. I'll admit, right now there are sectors of the economy totally dependent on cheap labor. This makes us no better that the companies that use sweatshops in Asia. It will hurt, but we've got to start paying everybody equally. When jobs that would previously be filled by illegals begin to pay a respectable amount, citizens will start to take compete for these jobs, and the whole thing will start to fix itself, because you've got fewer job openings for illegals. Also (I'm hoping), if they're making more money, the integration of these immigrants into American society will be started/sped up, and some barriers (e.g. racism) will be broken down that are holding many Latinos and Hispanics back.

Another thing I don't like is the idea of illegal immigrants who don't pay taxes using tax-payer funded services (roads, schools, you name it). Let me take some of that back, you can't buy much of anything without paying some kind of tax, so they don't pay as much in taxes as citizens. I don't want to keep anybody from driving on a road or going to school, but you should have to contribute just like the rest of America. Of course, I don't know to what extent most illegals make use of public services, so I can't go into depth on that one.

That said, here's a plan that is actually not mine, but a friend who aligns himself with the Republican side of things (although he's pretty liberal for a conservative), which I think is pretty good. I have tweaked it a little bit: All persons who are in the country illegally have a grace period during which they can register somewhere (like the local courthouse) and get themselves on a path to citizenship or legal residency. Once registered, they would have to show a couple times per year that they are working, they would have to keep their noses clean, and they would either not use public services until they were a tax paying citizen (very impractical, inhumane, and racist-I don't like it), or they would pay some taxes and have limited access to these services (better). Within a year or two, Mr./Ms. Illegal Immigrant would become an American.

This, on top of making it easier to come to America legally (or making the public more aware of how easy it is to do it legally if it is already, I don't know), and maybe helping the Mexican economy would pretty much eliminate any immigration problem we have.

Note: On the issue of whether illegals have rights or not, the Declaration of Independence states clearly that all people are given certain inalienable rights by their creator, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rights aren't just for people who are white and born in America.