500,000 march in LA

[EricMM 0]

Well if we militarize the boarder or what have you, and wave a magical wand to get rid of every illegal in this country, how much do we have to increaes the number of people we accept every year so that we have someone to pick apples, build houses, and so on for cheap?

 

And, I3k, do you realize how much more eeeeeverything would cost if you had to pay everyone involved in the business 6.15 or more?

[BruiserKC 0]

Funny thing about all this...Mexico's president Fox says illegal immigration benefits America...but his country is tougher on illegals than we are. Even naturalized citizens can't hold office among other things. That's a hypocritical line of BS if you ask me.

 

For those who want to come to this country, pay their fair share, and do things the right way...I welcome them with open arms. After all, the majority of us in the US had immigrants in our family tree that came here to make a better life for themselves. But if you have to break the law and come in illegally, then I want your ass out the door. And don't give me this line of crap about comparing this to the civil rights movement. There is zero comparison.

 

The system is broken...first they need to make the process more efficient so they can get to the applications faster. Next...a fence all along the southern border (and northern one, too).

 

Next, I would be cracking down on the companies that hire illegals...start fining them, and maybe if needed throw a CEO or two in jail for it. If it starts hurting them in the wallet, the companies will think twice about hiring them.

 

Finally, I would cut off all aid and all means of assistance to illegal immigrants. You do that and I'm sure a lot of them will leave on their own without using taxpayers money. And don't tell me they have rights to these...the Constitution is for American citizens, not people who broke its laws by entering illegally.

 

But of course our President and Congress don't have the fucking balls to act, and it makes me sick. They're more worried about a few more votes when the same porous borders also lead to the infiltration of Islamo-fascists who want to destroy America and turn us into an Islamic state.

[EricMM 0]

I agree that they need to severely streamline the immigration process before they start putting people back across the boarder.

 

If it takes six years to even get the chance to come here, it's broken. Flat out.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

Eric, if cost is an issue, are you saying it's better for employers to pay these people an illegally low wage than to legally employ them and pay them the federally mandated minimum wage?

 

If we're so concerned about cheap labor, maybe we should just legalize slavery again, since basically what we're doing right now is setting up a poor peasant class with no legal rights in this country anyway.

[EricMM 0]

I nominate that if they are willing and happy to work for that wage, because they aren't US citizens, allow them to come and go, work for that.

 

If they're coming here to become US citizens, thats another story entirely.

 

I'm not really for the low wages, I'm in favor of a minimum wage. But if someone is going to MAKE a minimum wage, they'd better be US citizens, I dont' want all that money leaving the country, our jobs are already on their way out as it is.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

The elephant in the room for this issue seems to be whether or not people who want to crack down on illegal immigration want to streamline the legal immigration process or raise the freakin quotas. This seems to never be brought up.

[SuperJerk 0]

To my knowledge, the people on this thread aren't linking this issue to national security at all.

 

Revised.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

I thought this article was pretty good.

 

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=11378

 

Warning: Liberal views

[NoCalMike 0]

Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists (and Labor is Left Behind)

by Thom Hartmann

 

The corporatist Republicans ("amnesty!") are fighting with the racist Republicans ("fence!"), and it provides an opportunity for progressives to step forward with a clear solution to the immigration problem facing America.

 

Both the corporatists and the racists are fond of the mantra, "There are some jobs Americans won't do." It's a lie.

 

Americans will do virtually any job if they're paid a decent wage. This isn't about immigration - it's about economics. Industry and agriculture won't collapse without illegal labor, but the middle class is being crushed by it.

 

The reason why thirty years ago United Farm Workers' Union (UFW) founder Caesar Chávez fought against illegal immigration, and the UFW turned in illegals during his tenure as president, was because Chávez, like progressives since the 1870s, understood the simple reality that labor rises and falls in price as a function of availability.

 

As Wikipedia notes: "In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valley to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of illegal aliens as temporary replacement workers during a strike. Joining him on the march were both the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Senator Walter Mondale. Chávez and the UFW would often report suspected illegal aliens who served as temporary replacement workers as well as who refused to unionize to the INS."

 

Working Americans have always known this simple equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages.

 

Progressives fought - and many lost their lives in the battle - to limit the pool of "labor hours" available to the Robber Barons from the 1870s through the 1930s and thus created the modern middle class. They limited labor-hours by pushing for the 50-hour week and the 10-hour day (and then later the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day). They limited labor-hours by pushing for laws against child labor (which competed with adult labor). They limited labor-hours by working for passage of the 1935 Wagner Act that provided for union shops.

 

And they limited labor-hours by supporting laws that would regulate immigration into the United States to a small enough flow that it wouldn't dilute the unionized labor pool. As Wikipedia notes: "The first laws creating a quota for immigrants were passed in the 1920s, in response to a sense that the country could no longer absorb large numbers of unskilled workers, despite pleas by big business that it wanted the new workers."

 

Do a little math. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 7.6 million unemployed Americans right now. Another 1.5 million Americans are no longer counted because they've become "long term" or "discouraged" unemployed workers. And although various groups have different ways of measuring it, most agree that at least another five to ten million Americans are either working part-time when they want to work full-time, or are "underemployed," doing jobs below their level of training, education, or experience. That's between eight and twenty million un- and under-employed Americans, many unable to find above-poverty-level work.

 

At the same time, there are between seven and fifteen million working illegal immigrants diluting our labor pool.

 

If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to confront and fix their corrupt ways.

 

Between the Reagan years - when there were only around 1 to 2 million illegal aliens in our workforce - and today, we've gone from about 25 percent of our private workforce being unionized to around seven percent. Much of this is the direct result - as Caesar Chávez predicted - of illegal immigrants competing directly with unionized and legal labor. Although it's most obvious in the construction trades over the past 30 years, it's hit all sectors of our economy.

 

Democratic Party strategist Ann Lewis just sent out a mass email on behalf of former Wal-Mart Board of Directors member and now US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In it, Lewis noted that Clinton suggests we should have: "An earned path to citizenship for those already here working hard, paying taxes, respecting the law, and willing to meet a high bar for becoming a citizen." Sounds nice. The same day, on his radio program, Rush Limbaugh told a woman whose husband is an illegal immigrant that she had nothing to worry about with regard to deportation of him or their children because all he'd have to do - under the new law under consideration - is pay a small fine and learn English.

 

The current Directors of Wal-Mart are smiling.

 

Meanwhile, the millions of American citizens who came to this nation as legal immigrants, who waited in line for years, who did the hard work to become citizens, are feeling insulted, humiliated, and conned.

 

Shouldn't we be compassionate? Of course.

 

But there is nothing compassionate about driving down the wages of any nation's middle class. It's the most cynical, self-serving, greedy, and sociopathic behavior you'll see from our "conservatives."

 

There is nothing compassionate about being the national enabler of a dysfunctional oligarchy like Mexico. An illegal workforce in the US sending an estimated $17 billion to Mexico every year - second only in national income to that country's oil revenues - supports an antidemocratic, anti-worker, hyperconservative administration there that gleefully ships out of that nation the "troublesome" Mexican citizens - those lowest on the economic food-chain and thus most likely to present "labor unrest" - to the USA. Mexico (and other "sending nations") need not deal with their own social and economic problems so long as we're willing to solve them for them - at the expense of our middle class. Democracy in Central and South America be damned - there are profits to be made for Wal-Mart!

 

Similarly, there is nothing compassionate about handing higher profits (through a larger and thus cheaper work force) to the CEOs of America's largest corporations and our now-experiencing-record-profits construction and agriculture industries.

 

What about caring for people in need? Isn't that the universal religious/ethical value? Of course.

 

A few years ago, when my family and I were visiting Europe, one of our children fell sick. A doctor came to the home of the people we were staying with, visited our child at 11 pm on a weeknight, left behind a course of antibiotics, and charged nothing. It was paid for by that nation's universal health care system. We should offer the same to any human being in need of medical care - a universal human right - in the United States.

 

But if I'd applied to that nation I was visiting for a monthly unemployment or retirement check, I would have been laughed out of the local government office. And if I'd been caught working there, I would have been deported within a week. Caring for people in crisis/need is very different from giving a job or a monthly welfare check to non-citizens. No nation - even those in Central and South America - will do that. And neither should the United States.

 

But if illegal immigrants won't pick our produce or bus our tables won't our prices go up? (The most recent mass-emailed conservative variation of this argument, targeting paranoid middle-class Americans says: "Do you want to pay an extra $10,000 for your next house?") The answer is simple: Yes.

 

But wages would also go up, and even faster than housing or food prices. And CEO salaries, and corporate profits, might moderate back to the levels they were during the "golden age of the American middle class" between the 1940s and Reagan's declaration of war on the middle class in the 1980s.

 

We saw exactly this scenario played out in the US fifty years ago, when unions helped regulate entry into the workforce, 35 percent of American workers had a union job, and 70 percent of Americans could raise a family on a single, 40-hour-week paycheck. All working Americans would gladly pay a bit more for their food if their paychecks were both significantly higher and more secure. (This would even allow for an increase in the minimum wage - as it did from the 1930s to the 1980s.)

 

But what about repressive régimes? Aren't we denying entrance to this generation's equivalent of the Jews fleeing Germany? This is the most tragic of all the arguments put forward by conservatives in the hopes compassionate progressives will bite. Our immigration policies already allow for refugees - and should be expanded. It's an issue that needs more national discussion and action. But giving a free pass to former Coca-Cola executive Vincente Fox to send workers to the US - and thus avoid having to deal with his own corrupt oligarchy - and to equate this to the Holocaust is an insult to the memory of those who died in Hitler's death camps - and to those suffering in places like Darfur under truly repressive regimes. There is no equivalence.

 

It's frankly astonishing to hear "progressives" reciting corporatist/racist/conservative talking points, recycled through "conservative Democratic" politicians trying to pander to the relatively small percentage of recently-legal (mostly through recent amnesties or birth) immigrants who are trying to get their relatives into this country by means of Bush's proposed guest worker program or the many variations thereof being proposed.

 

It's equally astonishing to hear the few unions going along with this (in the sad/desperate hope of picking up new members) turn their backs on Caesar Chávez and the traditions and history of America's Progressive and Union movements by embracing illegal immigration.

 

Every nation has an obligation to limit immigration to a number that will not dilute its workforce, but will maintain a stable middle class - if it wants to have a stable democracy. This has nothing to do with race, national origin, or language (visit Switzerland with it's ethnic- and language-dived areas!), and everything to do with economics.

 

Without a middle class, any democracy is doomed. And without labor having - through control of labor availability - power in relative balance to capital/management, no middle class can emerge. America's early labor leaders did not die to increase the labor pool for the Robber Barons or the Walton family - they died fighting to give control of it to the workers of their era and in the hopes that we would continue to hold it - and infect other nations with the same idea of democracy and a stable middle class.

 

The simple way to do this today is to require that all non-refugee immigrants go through the same process to become American citizens or legal workers in this country (no amnesties, no "guest workers," no "legalizations") regardless of how they got here; to confront employers who hire illegals with draconian financial and criminal penalties; and to affirm that while health care (and the right to provide humanitarian care to all humans) is an absolute right for all people within our boundaries regardless of status, a paycheck, education, or subsidy is not.

 

The Republican (and Democratic) corporatists who want a cheap labor force, and the Republican (and Democratic) racists who want to build a fence and punish humanitarian aid workers, are equally corrupt and anti-progressive. As long as employers are willing and able (without severe penalties) to hire illegal workers, people will risk life and limb to grab at the America Dream. When we stop hiring and paying them, most will leave of their own volition over a few years, and the remaining few who are committed to the US will obtain citizenship through normal channels.

 

This is, after all, the middle-class "American Dream." And how much better this hemisphere would be if Central and South Americans were motivated to stay in their own nations (because no employer in the US would dare hire them) and fight there for a Mexican Dream and a Salvadoran Dream and a Guatemalan Dream (and so on).

 

This is the historic Progressive vision for all of the Americas...

 

 

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0329-21.htm

[Stephen Joseph 0]

Still, you can't pay a good wage for menial, manual labor. That's economics.

 

Repeat after me:

 

I am a trader.

 

I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit. Force is the great evil that has no place in a rational world. One may never force another human to act against his/her judgment. If you deny a man's right to Reason, you must also deny your right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and force are more practical.

[EricMM 0]

The market doesn't provide everything fairly, or should I say it doesn't provide everything we need, man.

[Jingus 0]

For those who want to come to this country, pay their fair share, and do things the right way...I welcome them with open arms. After all, every single one of us in the US had immigrants in our family tree that came here to make a better life for themselves.

 

EFA. A few thousand years ago, there were no humans in the Americas.

 

The corporatist Republicans ("amnesty!") are fighting with the racist Republicans ("fence!"), and it provides an opportunity for progressives to step forward with a clear solution to the immigration problem facing America.

 

That's where I stopped reading. Anyone who resorts to insults and namecalling in the very first sentence probably doesn't have anything worthwhile to say.

 

 

So, can we all agree on the following points:

 

1. The legal immigration process, which takes about a decade to process an application, desperately needs to be streamlined.

 

2. It's wrong for companies to pay an illegally low wage to immigrants, and they should be punished for it.

 

3. Mexico is hypocritical on the whole issue because they treat illegal aliens way, way worse than we do.

 

Right?

[Dobbs 3K 0]

I can pretty much agree with that. I've also wondered if it would be OK for me and a group of people to cross over the Mexican border into Mexico without any documentation. Would the Mexican government be reciprocal or hypocritical in how they handled a situation like that?

[EricMM 0]

Who cares what Mexico does?

[Stephen Joseph 0]

Correct about who cares about mexico

 

but agree on 1 and 2

[Guest The Satanic Angel]

EFA. A few thousand years ago, there were no humans in the Americas.

 

It appears the white man has succeeded in erradicating the Native American Indians. Even from history. Bravo.

[MrRant 0]

EFA. A few thousand years ago, there were no humans in the Americas.

 

It appears the white man has succeeded in erradicating the Native American Indians. Even from history. Bravo.

 

Considering my relatives came over early enough to have done some of that...

 

 

Thanks.

[Hektik 0]

I can pretty much agree with that. I've also wondered if it would be OK for me and a group of people to cross over the Mexican border into Mexico without any documentation. Would the Mexican government be reciprocal or hypocritical in how they handled a situation like that?

Americans are allowed to travel about 20 miles into Mexico without any visa. Young Americans cross everday to get drunk and pay to get laid. They then destroy public property and disrespect the laws and law enforcement.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

Im tired of the signs saying "We're not criminals" ..last time I checked..they are Illegal Immigrants which meants..shock..they are breaking the law, although I guess they wouldn't know that now would they?

[Jingus 0]

EFA. A few thousand years ago, there were no humans in the Americas.

 

It appears the white man has succeeded in erradicating the Native American Indians. Even from history. Bravo.

 

It's the truth, Angel. (And if the native americans had never existed, then I wouldn't be typing this, since great-grandma was one of them.)

 

The native americans had barely just got there when the European colonists had arrived, relatively speaking. People walked over the ice from Siberia into Alaska and down into the sweet breadbasket we know as America. The American continent (including South America) was the last spot on the planet to be settled. It was simply on the other side of the earth from where all humanity came from, and that's one hell of a long walk.

[EricMM 0]

12,000 years ago?

 

So brief!

[AndrewTS 0]

"Why is the US damn near the only country on the planet that doesn't really mandate learning other languages in primary school? Most Europeans can get by in a few different tongues."

 

They're likely to actually use it. We aren't.

 

I was required to have two semesters of a foreign language in high school, and I took another in college (French than Spanish). Most other high schools I know of require it as well.

 

However, it's sole usefulness was familarizing me with more latin roots, which helped me with some trivia games. That's it. I only knew of two fluent Spanish-speaking students in my school, and they happened to speak perfect english anyway.

 

Of course, PA is a different animal than Texas/California/etc. However, most of the country speaks some form of English, and anything they pick up of a foreign language is typically forgotten from lack of use in a hurry.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

Exactly...I took three semesters of Latin and two years of German in high school (I went to a private prep school where we had to learn them). I did use German when I actually, went to Germany last year, but other than that, I've completely forgotten both from lack of use. Frankly, the German I did use I probably could've learned from a travel book in about a week.

 

Other countries are so protective of their cultures. Why can't we be protective of ours and just make English the official language of the US and be done with it?

[Guest Sylvan Grenier]

Other countries are so protective of their cultures. Why can't we be protective of ours and just make English the official language of the US and be done with it?

It's not really the same. Our culture is a melange of various European, African, native, and Asian influences over the last 250some years. The history of the English people goes back thousands of years. Yeah, we pretty much all speak English, but the time to make it the solitary language has come and gone, and it'll never get done now.

[jesse_ewiak 0]

You guys are aware that their have been multiple studies saying nearly one hundred percent of third generation Latino immigrants speak English as a first language?

[Jingus 0]

12,000 years ago?

 

So brief!

 

You have a point, or just being contentious for no reason? My original post was just pointing out that, despite how some people act, everyone who currently lives in America is descended from immigrants.

 

Well... except for black people... their ancestors weren't exactly moving to a new land full of promise and opprotunity.

 

You guys are aware that their have been multiple studies saying nearly one hundred percent of third generation Latino immigrants speak English as a first language?

 

I would certainly hope so. The key words there are "third generation". If someone lived in this country for their entire life but somehow their kids never learned English, I would wonder just what the fuck the problem was.

 

I was mandated to take two years of foreign language in high school. Same thing in college.

[NoCalMike 0]

Sometimes people forget this nation isn't even 300 years old yet. Who is to say what being an "american" is, has even been clearly defined in a way that can stand the test of time yet. Our nation has been evolving from the very start, and has no signs of stopping.

 

I don't particularly agree or approve of all the illegal immigration, but goddamn if some of the pundits on tv don't sound like a bunch rich white men in fear of losing their majority power status one day.

[Guest Felonies!]

Can't blame 'em, really. Being a rich white man has its perks.

[Dr. Zaius 0]

Still, you can't pay a good wage for menial, manual labor. That's economics.

Sounds more like Social Darwinism, in all honesty.

[EricMM 0]

If you can't pay people enough money to live off of to lay brick or whatever, no one will do it, because everyone who does it will starve.