The Coalition of the Swilling

Your penultimate paragraph is the key. There is no wall, there are no sanctions, there can never be enough soldiers or police to keep people out.

We can't keep drugs out of prisons, how are we going to keep people out of the country?

Making it harder to come into the country will have only one effect: It will increase slavery. More and more people will be obliged to trust criminal gangs to cross the border. Once here, no matter the route they take, they will submit to horrible treatment to not be deported and those controlling them will resort to horrible measures to keep them from being caught.

If you thought Prohibition and the war on drugs were bad for creating organized crime, just imagine the result of a war on illegal immigration.

We cannot stop it. The only remedy is to reduce the demand, and that will only come from a carrot, not a stick. We must have a neighbor to the south, Mexico, where the people can live in freedom and prosperity.

That is the only thing that can fix the "problem."

Oh, and get rid of socialist programs that encourage people to come here. Give me back my money and freedom that these illegal people are sucking out of my wallet.

Harsh anti-immigrant actions such as walls and press gangs will only result in widespread slavery and magnified crime.

I agree with Bingley and with Mike. I think we can do both: Make it harder for them to get in and make it less attractive to come here in the first place.

If we can stem the tide, we can make it easier for immigrants to legally immigrate. If we increase our quota from Mexico, I think we can help cut into the illegal immigration. We obviously need these workers, but we want them here legally.

On this side of the fence, we do need to cut the social programs that make it easy on illegals, but if you think that's going to cut crime -- you're crazy. That will have the same impact on crime rates that you talk about with the fence/wall. The illegals here will riot if you cut their life on the dole.

"The illegals here will riot if you cut their life on the dole."

Maybe its different now, but I konw some former illegals who got lucky in the last amnesty. None of them had an SS number, so no access to healthcare or anyhting else except the public education system. We (society) won on that one, becuase one is a chemist, one works at an investment bank, and one is an IT developer (Cornell grad). Without that amnesty, they's all be bussing tables in a Chinese restaurant somewhere.

They owned a business (Chinese restaurant) and paid taxes on that through the legal immigrant who was their paper front man.

But I think things may be different now. One of them commented to me after the last round of demonstrations: "you won't se any Chinese illegals at a demonstration: they are too thankful to be here and too hard working to take time off". Somehow we have got to be able to separate one class of illegals from the other and keep the ones who are worth keeping. And change the constitution so that your parents must be here legally in order for you to get US citizenship out of a birth on US soil.

You mean that they took high paying jobs from Americans and you say that "we won?"

I don't think there are any winners in this game until Mexico is free from such widespread and base corruption and oppression.

And China, too, though the Chinese illegal immigration problem is less of a problem because of geography.

I think it may be time to just start an Annex Mexico movement.

Boy do these guys have us pegged. "We'll break the law, and if you do anything about it, WE'LL SUE." They know what strings to pull.

PS - wonky trackback attempted, but not received. Sorry.

“You mean that they took high paying jobs from Americans and you say that "we won?"”

You a socialist Mike? You think wealth is a zero-sum game? Their older, lazy-ass brother is a furniture salesman, you’d prefer they all work retail? Whatever new wealth they create from their technical pursuits is a great dividend on what we spent on their educations. If you are talking about UAW, $80,000 per year forklift-operators, then yeah, there are only so many of those jobs to go around. Thank God.

Technical jobs are another story. Out of 15 people in my lab while I was there, three, count them 3, Ph.D. graduates who were Americans. None, not one, of the 5 post-docs were. When I was finishing my Chemistry degree, I had a long conversation with a Hungarian immigrant about why so few Americans go into science and technology. Janos said that America had always imported the bulk of her technical talent, it was nothing to worry about. I disagree. But the point is that the foreigners, including those 3 former illegals, are not taking “high paying jobs” from Americans, they are filling a void because too damn many Americans are too damn lazy to study science and math at the level required to be world class.

We are becoming a nation of parasites, with the foreign-born tech geeks really creating a lot of our wealth. The way the laws are written, in order to sponsor a green card, the company has to show why an American could not fill the job. So instead of giving out citizenships to smart people, we rotate foreign workers through on 3 year visas. Not making these people citizens has direct impact on the worth of those technical jobs. When I started grad school, post-doctoral positions in Chemistry paid on average around $30,000 / year. After a huge influx of Russian and Chinese Ph.D.s who could not be citizens, and so were happy to live on Mac and Cheese and send money back home, the salaries dropped by over $10,000 / year. If they had been given a green card and a stake in their future in the US, you can bet they’d have held out for more.

When I went to business school, it was full of Americans trying to get ahead who had really nothing to offer (they studied business or communications as undergrads). They were amazed that we had so many foreigners in the class (~40%). I was amazed at how many Americans there were – I’d been living in a different world for 5 years. Even now, I work in product development, and it’s unusual to have less than 5 nationalities in the room for a technical meeting. But every time I’m in a marketing meeting with a parasitic worthless consultant selling a useless garbage management fad, the consultant is American-born. And he or she’s paid better than the technical guys creating the real wealth in the back room.

So don’t give me that stealing jobs line. Not for technical jobs. Would you rather we outsource to India and lose both the expertise and the tax revenue from the salaries?

Sounds like they are productive, hard working citizens to me. I'm glad to have 'em.

No, I'm not in the least bit socialist, nor protectionist.

But I do resent the horrible economy in our neighboring country to the south that causes so many good manufacturing jobs (including good old manufacturing engineering) to go south. I've lost a job because my company shut down and moved to Mexico, and I've seen how hard it is to find good jobs as a manufacturing engineer for quite a few years since the dot.com bust in 2000.

I welcome individuals who can come here and compete, and I agree that any American that can't compete against people who don't speak English natively have little to complain about.

But it's not a "win" when people are compelled to leave their homes to take jobs in foreign countries (i.e., the US) without viable jobs being available in their native countries. It increases competition for something I find quite dear. And I resent the temporary and arbitrary reduction in my standard of living because the people of Mexico and other countries have failed in holding their own governments responsible for corruption and oppression. People are responsible for the governments they allow to rule them, but instead we're suffering for their moral failure.

The answer is to require, somehow, these nations to encourage freedom, equality, and prosperity. Walls don't and can't work.

Along John's line of thought, there's an enabler in the "Americans won't put in the effort to excel" relationship - the schools. They are a major player in teaching kids not to demand too much of themselves (don't they have self-esteem already?), not least of which includes not demanding much of them as students.

I understand your frustration, Mike, but isn't our country's history all about immigrants forming the foundations of different levels of labor? That is, wherever our shortcomins are, we import the difference -- Like John said. I cannot think of a period of American history where this isn't true.

While it is obvious that other countries' economies effect ours, it is not our job to ensure they flourish. If they can't float the boat, even with us trying to help them bail it out on occasion, then we have to find other sources for the goods, services, etc. they provided us. This includes labor and techinical manpower.

I also disagree with your point about never keeping them (illegals) out. I do think, though, that we don't have the national willpower to do what we'd have to do. I'm sure a 50-foot wide canal along our southern border would work quite well. Never happen though.

Also, your point about losing industrial jobs in the States to our southern neighbor has a lot more to do with NAFTA than anything else.

Sorry for the dble post, Bing ... posting was screwing this morning.

no problem, cullen. mt has been flaky of late.

Mike - I did not want to sound as if I totally disagreed with you, it’s just that I’ve heard that “taking high-paying jobs” line before in the technical disciplines, and having been a TA trying to get Americans to study science correctly, and having been on the receiving end of that devaluation of the post-doc salary in science (that’s one of the reasons I went to business school), I do not buy it. As was the case for me in Japan, most of those guest technical workers over here do not pay much in taxes on their salaries – the first $80,000 is tax-free if their home country has the kind of arrangement with the US that Japan does. If they could get green cards, all that would be taxable.

But I think that you are missing the fact that even if the home economies were fixed in the sense of being free from corruption and encouraging competition, the infrastructure in most of those countries can not supply opportunities for all their bright people, and our economy and infrastructure has the surplus to not only take them in, but allow them the chance to be as productive as their potential allows – which enriches both us and the home country. If the three women I was talking about had stayed in Taiwan, (which is not all that corrupt, and has a decent, but not great, infrastructure), their lack of family connections would have meant that perhaps one, perhaps none of the could have gone to graduate school, and the entire human race would have missed out on using their full potential.

I need to be fair, here, though. There is another cousin in that family who came here after the amnesty, and as far as I know, is still an illegal. She had a kid here, so the kid is a US citizen. We’ve educated that kid, what do we do with her if the mother is caught? Deport them and waste all the money we’ve spent on someone who is a citizen? That teen would forever be caught between 2 worlds, not really American, not really Chinese. What a waste. But it was our own lax enforcement that brought about the situation, and we can do something about it. That’s why I think every delivery room needs to check for citizenship documentation before issuing a birth certificate, and the Constitution needs to be amended to make the kids of illegals non-citizens.

Another issue THS has hit on is social welfare costs. Since the 1986 amnesty, the sale of fake documents and SS numbers has exploded. The SS administration has a slush fund made from W-2 payments on numbers that don’t exist. All we have to do is send the INS to the employers who are major sources of those numbers, but we do not have the political willpower to do that. A few years back I almost got dinged for taxes I did not owe because the e-file system with the IRS had my wife’s name down as hyphenated (when it is not), and so rejected her SS number. If the system is that good at picking up discrepancies when they want money, why is not every SS number for a W-2 form and every SS number for school enrollment similarly checked? One of the great attractions for American life would disappear right there, and it would immediately reduce social welfare costs from people who do not possess legitimate documentation or pay taxes. Like P.J. O’Rourke said about the drug war – we are just not serious about this.

One point no one has hit on is Americanization. I was interviewed by a German guy a while back – he was in his 50s, and he came here in his late 20s. He said that he did not believe in the socialist crap in Germany, and he was 100% American in his outlook, even before he emigrated. My wife disagreed. She came here when she was 11, and she does not consider herself fully American – she still has attitudes and assumptions from her home cultures (Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese). She said no first generation immigrant ever becomes fully American. Maybe she is right, despite the melting pot rhetoric – she’s living the life, I’m 3rd generation immigrant on one side, and about 15th or 16th on the other. And I do see her point. I blame a lot of the socialist blue sate nonsense on 20th century immigration, where many of the immigrants brought silly socialist ideals to our cities from Europe, and not sharing in the pioneer experience or spirit of the 19th century, never fully bought into the Federalist and Republican (in the sense of competing interests being represented in different government bodies) ethos of America. We face the danger of people being made citizens who bring a lot of baggage from their home countries, and have no feeling for the true underpinnings of America if we open the floodgates, and that is why I oppose this amnesty.

We face the danger of people being made citizens who bring a lot of baggage from their home countries, and have no feeling for the true underpinnings of America if we open the floodgates, and that is why I oppose this amnesty.

Bingo.

I don't think we face the danger, I think we're living the reality. And we have school, entertainment, social and government systems that perpetuate this attitude. That it's okay to live here but still hate us.