| | | Elroy, I'm not totally rejecting your ideas but consider this:
1. What's to prevent the illegal to ditch his papers and disappear into the woodwork where he can get new false paperwork.
2. We're one of very few countries that allow birthright citizenship. (I think it should be repealed.) An anchor baby in a few short years will become an adult an can get his parents (and other relatives) permanently into the country under the various family-unification acts. They (the parents) are then eligible for most of the different kinds of welfare. Your idea would work much better if we didn't have birthright citizenship.
3. You are correct that the financial costs to society are close to a wash re benefits with that first generation of illegals. Likewise crime coming out of the first generation is low. Everything comes apart, though, with the succeeding generations (statistic wise), i.e. the descendants who are legal. This a mature country we live in and job production is anemic. The immigrants that flooded in 150 years ago were coming in the middle of the industrial revolution and into a country with wide open spaces that needed to be built out.
It's a different landscape now and statistics are showing it to be pretty dismal for legal Hispanics. They're finding it difficult to get ahead. They are using welfare at almost the same high rate of blacks. Black and Hispanic families WITH children use some kind of welfare at a rate of around 80%. Even if working, both these groups are a net cost to society in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Just looking at the math of it, don't you think it's pure folly to import desperately poor and ignorant people at the same time we are exporting jobs offshore? It's not xenophobia, It's math.
As for the agricultural industry, it seems that most of the need for cheap labor is in the more labor intensive crops grown in CA and to a lesser extent other southern states eastward. Much, maybe even most, of agriculture is mechanized now. Maybe have a program where young, single immigrants can get work visas but not families? The young workers can only stay for a few years?
All solutions come undone because of birthright citizenship. |
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