Illegal Immigration
According to some recent forum discussions and websites on the net, food stamps have been re-instituted for illegal aliens. That’s right, our tax dollars go to feed Illegal aliens from grocery stores. To be clear, no where that I have seen does it say that illegal immigrants can use the program, but I have yet to see a place where they cannot use the program. You don’t even have to provide a fake social security number in order to claim benefits.
This has come up in a few discussions, and I did some follow up research to confirm. One of the topics that I have seen or heard people talking about for years is illegal immigration and the politics related to it. Most people I know are incredibly sick and tired of it… but for some reason some people I run into online support illegal immigration, saying that we need it in order to survive as a nation. I don’t buy that load of horse manure for a moment.
Some say that it’s unethical to invite them, give them jobs, and then suddenly throw them out on their ear. I wasn’t one of the people inviting them in and giving them a job, I’m one of the people that would alert the authorities to any Illegal alien I found out about.
My basic stance on Illegal immigration is that we don’t need it, and we should prevent it. One of the best steps on the path to preventing it is to stop rewarding it. For example, no legal benefits for illegal aliens.
No, I am not saying we should deport them just to let them come back in. No, I’m not saying that we should grant amnesty. My entire focus has been on preventing new illegal immigration, which includes people who are thrown out being able to come right back across the border for less cost than it takes to send them to their country of origin.
Deporting people makes 0 sense in the current situation, where they can just come back. If your boat is sinking, and you can’t bail as fast as the water is coming in, you plug the holes, -then- deal with the water already in the boat.
And while I don’t support granting legal status to illegal immigrants, if we first prevent new ones from coming, -then- grant amnesty, it would make more sense than granting amnesty with the assumption we will prevent a new influx… and then not doing so… and then granting amnesty again and again and again.
Only once the problem of new illegal immigration has been handled to a satisfactory degree should we turn our attention to those that are already here.
To be clear. I am not advocating allowing new illegal immigrants to cross our border, allowing unethical business people to employ them, and then throwing them out.
You say the boat has sailed on that. For those that are already here, you’re right. Illegal and unethical practices have already been used by business owners and managers, creating a problem that must be solved. How do we solve the problem with those already here? Until we can prevent more illegal immigration, I don’t honestly care, because the solution will be a bad and temporary one. One step at a time.
What I do know is that giving any kind of benefit to those already here until we solve the problem with the illegal immigration will only make the problem of the influx of illegal immigrants worse.
As for the problem of cheep labor, the answer is simple. Put a lower minimum wage on green card workers than on us citizens, or don’t have a minimum wage for them at all. The illegals have no minimum wage, so why not offer a legal way in for the same amount of money?
April 7th, 2007 at 3:33 am
It’ll never happen. The only way to make illegal immigration stop is to make legal immigration either much more rewarding — which we can’t do without hurting domestic workers — or make it much more open — which we also can’t afford to do without hurting the domestic workforce. I think this is one of the inevitable consequences of a successful civilization and is, if not the least of evils, then not the greatest.
April 7th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Removing incentives to come to the US is a good place to start, but you cannot remove all the incentives, the US will always be better than the home country for some people.
Providing incentives to stay in that country (helping the country build an economy, healthcare, transportation, education etc) is also a way forward.
I don’t mean just throw money at them, the US must be doing ’something’ right to be so succesful/powerful, help the other countries to do that too.
July 9th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
We already are trying to help Mexico. Mexico is just really screwed up. The thing is, America has the responsibility of taking care of it’s own citizens first, and in many areas, it is already abdicating that responsibility. We aren’t the first in medication, or education, or many other measurements by which first world countries are measured.
And a big part of why illegals are coming over is because greedy business owners want to shaft American Workers, and thus are hiring the illegal immigrants so that they can pay less for labor as a whole, and we aren’t punishing them for it.
July 9th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
[…] Since the illegal immigrants would not be punished for their crime of illegally entering the country, this fits the dictionary definition of amnesty. Further, it allows them to enter the country legally in the future as a reward for entering it illegally in the past, thus actually rewarding the illegal behavior in addition to forgiving it. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will likely remember that my general philosophy when it comes to border runners is that illegal action should not be given legal rewards. […]