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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (17181)	4/26/2006 1:36:04 PM
From: mph	Respond to of 541429

It is an odd debate about what people supposedly will or will not do. It's replete with assumptions, which are largely unsupported as you indicate. This rhetoric provides cover and code words which enable politicians to avoid angering the increasing numbers of Hispanics who can vote in American elections. IOW, they really don't want to address illegal immigration in any meaningful way because it might lose them votes (or so they think). On the whole, I find this rhetoric and the accompanying assumptions to be insulting----to both the illegal immigrant population and to Americans. Makes us sound like a society of prissies who are too good to clean up after ourselves and the illegals as something less than human. In my opinion, even these menial jobs provide honest work. Americans can't expect to start at the top and if they need to take a menial job until they're prepared to move on, so be it. Nothing wrong with that. There are certainly opportunities for betterment in this country. To the extent illegals are doing these jobs for less than what Americans would expect to be paid (assuming there's some legitimacy to this claim), then they're probably being taken advantage of by employers who are skirting the law. Then there's the reality of usage of public services by illegals who are being underpaid and who are likely not paying taxes on cash wages. (My guess is that the construction industry is a hotbed of such practices.) Access to public services (like indigent health care) coupled with tax avoidance, effectively raises the real "wages" of those here illegally. It's just a question of whether the employers or the general public bear the difference. Just a few random thoughts............