Illegal Immigration: Your Solutions

I'm more a fan of rivets.

That would hurt the cat, right?

If "cat" is street slang for "mexican immigrent", then I suppose so.

This is a bit of a tangent, but one thing has had me wondering for weeks. The Hispanic community has been very vocal about the immigration issue. However, there are many who snuck in from Asia, Africa and Europe as well. Why haven't we seen those undocumented protesting?

For the same reason that you don't hear as much complaining ABOUT them.

You sure you wanna give up Los Alamos and other such places in New Mexico to Mexico?

To be clear-I'm not invoking 9/11 as a trump card. I bring up 9/11 along with the NO levees as examples where money spent sooner could have averted disaster later.

I'm curious as to how you define "real border protection".

-Kiamat Dusk

To be clear, I wasn't invoking 9/11 as some sort of trump card. I used 9/11 and the NO levees as examples where money spent sooner may have averted disaster later.

I'm curious to hear your definition of "real border protection".

-Kiamat Dusk

For a start, I'd like to see the border patrol and INS spending more time keeping dangerous foriegners out of the country rather than chasing after illegal workers.

Illegial doesn't bother you? they can try for citizenship legally yet they don't. Hospital costs. medicare. Child care. Welfare. other public services. ALL drained.

Send them back, shoot them if they try to cross illegally.

Farmers will be able to raise wages because -the market will adjust.- Its called supply and demand.

I believe that there's plenty of high school students who would love a minimum wage job. Not everyone wants to work at McDonalds.

I think the best thing to do is land mine the border. We wouldn't need to pay for so many security guards and building a wall up.. The point here is.. yes America is about immigration.. but we have laws for a reason. If you're family was starving.. and had one piece of bread.. would you allow your chidlren or elderly parents to starve and give the bread to someone else you don't even know? *end of rant*

Exactly! It makes Big Business accountable for paying their employess decent wages. If these people were not here.. They would be forced to pay good wages... This goes along with companies killing blue collar America because they can have an Asian child make 3 cents a week to produce their clothes.. or whatever... Its also the same as our steel mills... Allentown.. Bethlehem etc... all gone due to this kind of greedy business.

If you saw two starving families, one that wanted to work for bread and one that wanted to sit on their ass and have it handed to them, who would you give that bread to?


The juxtaposition of these two sentences in the same paragraph sent my irony meter off the scales.

I'll give you a hint, though: Its not the "greedy companies" that are sending business overseas, its the "greedy consumers". People want things cheaper and are willing to buy the cheaper foriegn imports. Its the same as the Walmart syndrome. People complain about Walmart: they pay poor wages, they are an ugly blight on the landscape, they drive local stores out of business. But when it comes to it, the *consumers* choose to shop at Walmart, and that's why it succeeds.

Its clear that you support some sort of socialist economic model, and in an ideal world I would agree with you. The sad truth is that the Soviet Union couldn't make it work and even China is embracing market reforms. Many European countries has very strict "fair labor" laws... and high unemployment. (oh and in one of these threads people were talking that there isn't an illegal immigrant problem in Europe, which made me giggle)

Immigrant workers, including illegal immigrant workers, are helping to prop up the standard of living for the rest of the US by making goods and services that *consumers* want at lower prices. I'd rather not have illegal immigrants coming into the US for security reasons, but economic arguments like this do not sway me.

Do you want to be paid more than an unskilled worker? Then get to work and better yourself, learn some skills and find a job that pays more. If you think that you're entitiled to a free ride in life just because of the country you were born in, then you picked the wrong country.

I am educated. I teach elementary. If these illegals weren't here.. then maybe the people living off welfare would take those jobs. I do agree that too many Americans.. are lazy and have no work ethic.

Do you shop at Wal-Mart?

actually no.. I find what I need elsewhere.. I live in a small community where we have lots of local merchants. That is who I buy from.

Seconded. It'a a rare day I go in wally world, and its as a last resort. The last thing I bought there was... um...

Uh...

I think a camping lantern, when the power went out at 11 at night this winter.

I -work- at walmart. Given the size of my town, its also the only one stop shop unless you go to the mall...no lunchmeats yet but wer are getting a remodel and grand reopening.

Two words:

trojan horse

I work in the construction industry and many of the jobs that used to pay US$15 an hour, now only pay $8, why? Go out on your local non union job site and see, most of the wall crews are illegals and most except for the ones in charge can't speak hardly any english. Soon they will be saying "We need these workers to build our homes because no one else will do it" Well of course, no one wants to work for free or live 10 families to a home so we can afford to work that cheap and send half the money back to our families in another country...does that make me lazy? Hell no, does that make me greedy? Ummm No. Besides...it's all fine right now for everyone to say breaking the law to get into this country is fine, but what will you say when they start affecting YOUR jobs? (On a side note...that I find very interesting, most of the ones in favor of this are also the ones screaming that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer......have you seen houses getting any cheaper with all the cheap labor?)
All amnisty will do is encourage another (Figuring 8 million were granted amnesty in the 80's....20 years later another 15 million have appeared magicly) say 37 million to pop in, in another 20 years. When will it end? Why is it suddenly ok now, when it wasn't ok for my ancestors who had to go through all the paper work and wait in line like everyone else?
The border must be secured....the minute men have estimated the price of building a wall of sorts along with trenches, and it came out to something like $127 per yard. If everyone who's against this would donate that much, the border would be closed
BTW We have unmanned aircraft that can fly 24 hours watching the border now, if they are automated and have screens for controllers to watch, it would save alot of man power and money.

I like Starax's idea. I'll meet you in Cancun!!



Not bad ideas Kiamat, just thought I'd add my 2 cents. I think a problem that's often not talked about is the strain on social security if we lost all those tax payers. I can't remember the figure, but the amount of money generated by alien workers that goes into Social Security was huge. Furthermore consider that since those illegals are using fake SS numbers to work and pay into SS, they will never be able to draw upon SS to retire. It's basically free money for legal citizens. Also, they can't get benefits like welfare and food stamps without a real SS number(plus, they are often to scared to seek any government agency for assistance for fear of deportation). I wonder if our SS system could handle the drain in funds. =/

After reading all of the posts in this thread all I can say is that life is tough. Buck up and do yer best. Don't blame the Mexicans or anyone else for your lack of success.

So how are you going to pay for all that? You're $8,000,000,000,000 in debt at the moment. You can't really afford to build a huge border defence system, maintain it, patrol it, AND fund the deportation of millions of people, AND ride out the economic damage removing so many workers will cause.

"-Build a permanent wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico"

How many thousands of miles of border? Do Mexicans not have ladders and ropes? Are you going to watch every single mile of the border to stop them?

Let's see now:

1951 miles of border. Now, assuming with the use of television cameras and vehicles, you can post one man per 10 miles of border; he can watch monitors, see an attempt to climb the wall, race out there in a jeep and stop them. But then, border-crossers will come armed, and will have more than one armed man. So you'd need perhaps a 5 man team to have any hope of security.

So 5 men per 10 miles of border. That's 9,755 men (or women, of course) required. At a wage of $20,000 a year, that's a cost of $19,510,000 per year.

That's nineteen million dollars a year.

And then there's the wall to build and maintain, the security cameras, the wiring, the monitors, the guard buildings (lighting, heating, electricity, furnishing), the guns to provide, the vehicles to buy, maintain and fuel, the training to provide, the uniforms, the body armour, the pensions, the sick-leave to cover, the management, the recruitment...

OR...

...you can accept that there are a lot of desperate, poor people in the world, and that you have millions of jobs at home that you really, really don't want to do yourself, and that allowing some of them to take those jobs is the easiest, and cheapest (free, in fact) form of charity there is.

Oh woe, all you poor, poor highly-educated, extremely wealthy, extremely safe, secure and happy people, unable to get a job cleaning toilets.

And then you have to remember the American capitalist system...that the spoils go to the person who fights the hardest for it. It's competition, and it's what your country revolves around. It's what made you rich and powerful.

If you can't compete with some Mexicans (who, lets face it, fought a LOT harder to get those jobs than you EVER will...dodging border guards, crossing deserts and rivers, evading the law, and working shitty jobs with shitty hours for shitty pay with no welfare, no healthcare, no job security and no health and safety enforcement), then you need to start working a little harder.

Because if you've grown up with all those opportunities that an American grows up with, and you can't get anywhere in life because McDonalds and Wallmart is full of illegals...

...well, the taxpayer should start asking for their money back, because all that education was wasted on you.

Musuko.

Actually 1951miles / 10miles * 5staff = 975.5 staff.

But don't worry, because it's a 7/24/365.25 type job you'll need 4-5 times as many staff to cover swing, grave and weekends.

Almost 5000 new non-revenue generating barely taxable jobs to help 'protect' our economy.

Unreleatedly... one of the points I came across recently is this:

Illegal immigrants usually end up working some kind of seasonal agriculture work. They sneak in, they work for a season, then return home to their families in Mexico with a wad of money.

Since stricter border enforcement has gone into effect it has become riskier for them to sneak back and forth... and as a result more are bringing their families with them, and staying here full time instead.

Not exactly the desired result, eh?