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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (129911)	8/5/2005 8:27:20 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793817

Sure it's radical, but unless you live in a border state, you have no idea how acute the problem is. I don't live in a border state, per se, although plenty of immigrants enter the US via the big airports on the Eastern seaboard, and otherwise find their way here because the employment situation is favorable for them. But I do know a couple of things: First, they're not eligible for public assistance: 1996 Welfare Reform Law * Barred legal immigrants entering the U.S. after 1996 from most federal means- tested programs (food stamps, CHIP, Medicaid, etc) for 5 years * Raised the income and legal standards for U.S. residents who sponsor immigrants * Barred illegal immigrants eligibility from most federal, state and local public assistance prcdc.org Second, it would cost at least $41 billion a year to remove them from the country, $206 billion to $230 billion over five years, depending on how many of the immigrants leave voluntarily. washingtonpost.com I have no idea what losing that many able-bodied workers would do to your loca economy, but I can guess what it would do to mine, by mentally "vanishing" the Hispanic faces I see at the local businesses I patronize, and trying to imagine who would take their place. All I can come up with is ghetto kids from DC hitch-hiking because the bus system caters to commuters and doesn't really run late when the people who clean floors finish up and go home. I don't see your average white DC metro resident cleaning floors and toilets at the local Chinese restaurant like the Hispanics do, and all the office buildings. They do all the grunt labor for building these expensive houses and putting in the landscaping, too. An entry level job for a white or black person around here is driving a school bus or working as a cashier at Walmart, which illegal Hispanics can't do. We don't have an unemployment problem in Virginia. I guess I just can't imagine looking at these faces and wishing them gone. Sure, the men like to stand around in parking lots and drink and shoot the breeze after work, but they work harder than anybody else -- except the Chinese and the Koreans, who are probably illegals, too.