Illegal Immigration Controversy
Recently, there has been a large amount of media coverage about an immigration bill that was before the house and senate. Many in the main stream media (such as television) have praised the bill, while many in the blogosphere, and in talk radio have blasted the bill. The bill had both Bipartisan support and opposition.
With all of the problems surrounding immigration, and the views on it, it’s no wonder that there is so much talk about it recently.
The basic premise of the bill, which was recently defeated, was to allow illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship. They would be put at the back of the line, just like any other immigrant, even having to go back to their own country to apply for citizenship. However, unlike other immigrants, they would be allowed into the country automatically after applying.
Many have decried this as being amnesty. Others have objected to this description.
The definition of amnesty is as follows.
–verb (used with object)
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.
There are other regional bills in place in the scandal as well. In Arizona there is a bill that will be coming into effect that actually punishes companies that hire illegal immigrants. The company will have it’s license to practice business suspended for the first offense, and revoked on the second offense. I’m very much looking to how well this and other similar bills work, especially if they are enforced.
Unfortunately, other states have gone in the direct opposite direction. In California, 16 cities are requiring Home Depot to provide shelters for trespassing day laborers, including illegals. The only opinion I saw supporting this decision was on Fox news, and goes something like this.
When you go to home depot, you pick up building supplies. You need help actually getting the projects put together because home depot doesn’t sell finished projects. So of course they enter a partnership with day laborers, including undocumented workers. Cities issue building and business permits. It only makes sense for a local community to be able to put conditions on the granting of building and business permits. Especially when those conditions are just making the company take care of people that it relies on to do business.”
Home Depot is in the business of supplying a mix of people, from construction companies, to your average every day consumer. Where do you go to get Spackle or paint to fix up minor problems in your home? A hard ware store. What is home depot? A hard ware store.
Now yes, a city can choose to grant a business license or not. However it is not reasonable to require a company to give aid and comfort to criminals.
The man went on to say that it’s important to take care of those that do work in our homes, and that we have to make sure they’re comfortable while waiting to work for us. He then went on to ask, and then answer the following question. “Do we want to have two classes of residents, legals and illegals? Obviously, the answer is no!”
Well yes, the answer is obviously no, but I don’t think he and I have the same reasons. He wants illegals to be treated the same as citizens of the United States. I don’t want there to be any illegal immigrants in the country.
Horribly enough, there are some people who want there to be two classes of residents in America, and want the border runners (aka illegal immigrants) to actually have greater legal advantage than United States citizens.
In California, illegal immigrants who illegally reside in the state are not only allowed to attend Universities, but can do so at the in-state tuition rate, a rate which allows students to reduce the cost of their education substantially by getting the tax payers to pay part of the tab. Meanwhile, people who are Legal residents of the United States, but hail from other states have to pay more than people who hail from outside of the United States and are here in violation of the law.
The legislature of Connecticut wants to follow suit. Thankfully their Governor has seen fit to veto the law. However, rather than pointing out that the law would be encouraging more border runners to violate the law, he says that since the law requires those who are here illegally to file an application with the federal government to legalize their status, it would cause many of them to be deported.
July 10th, 2007 at 12:58 am
The Perfect Solution is a logical fallacy wherin a potential solution is dismissed because it does not eliminate the problem.
Illegal immigration is going to happen. It’s a source of cheap labor and, like it or not, that’s fairly important to the economy as it stands. If you’re going to dismiss any policy that could turn them into tax paying citizens because “there shouldn’t be illegal immigrants in the first place” then you will never find a solution you’ll like.
There are illegals. Accept it. The only way to get rid of them is to give them a reason to come forward. So unless you have some master plan to find and deport illegals and prevent them from coming back AND do so without causing an economic depression AND without costing more taxes than illegals would be paying anyway, I’d love to hear it.
July 10th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
First of all, if cheep labor is necessary, we can get it through legal immigration, illegal immigration isn’t necessary. Illegal immigration provides labor which companies can use to illegally pay less than the minimum legal wage for the work. This reduces the wages of legal workers, and takes jobs away from Americans who are willing to work for minimum wage.
Much of this money then leaves our economy in order to be sent to families of Mexican workers. So the entire reason we’re supposed to tolerate criminals as good for us is out the window… because it’s not good for the US economy at all.
The reasons businesses wail and whine about how illegal immigrants are vital to the success of our nation is because illegal immigration allows them to get richer faster by unethically breaking the law, at the expense of the American middle and lower classes.
Secondly, I’m not rejecting a “potential solution” because it’s not perfect. I’m rejecting it because I think it will do little to no good, and will do much harm.
The problem is that there are people here who broke the law by entering the country illegally, and more are coming. They undermine the rule of law, consume resources, and make it harder for law abiding people, including immigrants who made their way through the system legally, such as my sister in law, to gain citizenship, because quotas on legal immigration are restricted.
Any proposal to give law breakers legal benefits for breaking the law only encourages more people to break the same law.
Now, “turning them into citizens” does not solve the problem, because they have already shown themselves to be people with less respect for the law than other people we could allow to come here and become citizens. They entered the country illegally, and no matter what we do (save causing them not to be here any more) still leaves them here!
However until we work on our borders, any solution aimed at those already here, be it amnesty, or deportation, is like trying to bail water out of a boat that is leaking it in faster than you can bail it out. You plug the hole, then bail.
Is illegal immigration still going to happen no mater what we do? Well duh, of course it is. I just want to get the incoming leek down to a slow trickle so that we can manage what is coming in more effectively.
Any plan that meets the following criteria will have my approval.
Step 1. Implement measures to cut illegal immigration in half (at least).
Step 2. Evaluate to see if step 1 worked. If not, skip step 3.
Step 3. Deal with the people already here.
According to a news article I saw on fox news earlier today, step 1 is already underway, but hasn’t reached a reasonable cut off yet. New technology has been implemented which allows us to better apprehend illegals crossing our southern border. Some units of the national guard have also been allocated to help back up us border agents.
Since these measures have been implemented, the number of illegals that have been apprehended has gone down 24%. While some say this could simply be due to less of them being caught, I think that this is belied by the fact that we have more manpower and more sophisticated technology in place, as well as the fact that drug runners and illegals are becoming more violent in their attempts to invade the country, and have been described as being more desperate.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
To argue that because a “Perfect Solution” is unworkable we must therefore accept the status quo is equally lacking. While at first I was hesitantly approving of the immigration reform bill, the ensuing act of political theater that followed squelched whatever warm fuzzies I might have had in the first place.
In the first place, there was the unseemly haste with which the Senate tried to push the bill through - a matter of weeks rather than the usual months-long timeline most bills experience.
There was the matter of Senator Reid and his compatriots re-introducing the bill after its first round of defeat. Then followed the most dramatic legislative prestidigitation I have ever cared to witness, whereby Senator Reid invoked an arcane Senate rule capping amendments to legislation at 24, then filled all twenty-four slots with amendments crafted by his allies and others who promised to vote for the bill. What’s more, amendments were written and attached with more regard to the legislative capability (that is, the ability to get the bill passed at all) than with the feasibility or practicality of those amendments.
As if that wasn’t enough, Reid limited opponents of the bill to 15 minutes maximum, while supporters were permitted over 30 minutes and even allowed to exceed those limits while opponents were forced to cede the floor rapidly after their fifteen minute mark. This is assuming the Senators actually read either the bill or the amendments, and given the timeframe, amendments were hitting the floor for vote before Senators even had time to read through them.
On top of all this was the sheer acrimony of the debate from both sides of the aisle. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina threw more than one histrionic fit on the Senate floor, while other pro-bill senators spoke about the pressing need to “do something” and do it now, seemingly without regard to consequences. Further, supporters of the bill did not stop at chastising the slow speed of the debate but also maligning the motives of anyone who raised objections to the bill. Accusations of bigotry and racism were just the beginning, and I am particularly enamored of those high-minded Senators who, from their lofty perches high in the stratosphere, characterized the majority of the American public as only slightly to the left of the Nazis.
When Teddy Kennedy, “The Orca of Chappaquiddick,” and George W. Bush both agree on the same piece of legislation, you’d best put one hand on your wallet and the other on the buzzer because something horrifying is about to happen. When Senators dismiss criticism as “intimidation” and mutter darkly about “dealing with” the “problem” of talk radio “running the country,” when more than 70% of the American public thinks you might want to slow down and look a little closer at the bill you’re working with, when you use every trick in the book to quash dissent and stifle the opposition (And I’m pointing the finger at bodies on both sides of the aisle), then you make a mockery of representative government and give a great big honking bird to the people you are supposed to be serving.
So let me just say, thanks a lot Senators Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy, Lindsey Grahmnesty, Trent “Goat Fence” Lott, and the big kahuna, the immeasurably incompetent Harry Reid. Your open disgust and disdain for even the motions of democracy is duly noted.
July 15th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
That’s classic genetic fallacy. The merit of the argument — in this case the legislation — has nothing to do with the merit of the people making the argument — in this case the astoundingly stupid people that represent the average American. Note sarcasm.
To illustrate this fallacy, imagine Hitler saying “I like puppies.” Now, does this make puppies evil? Of course not! Puppies are good. Especially with ketchup.
July 15th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
It was not that it was stupid people pushing the bill, it was the means by which they did so - hastily, with minimal review, oversight, or debate. Such haste strikes me as desperation, and makes me wonder if the particular bill in question would really live up to the expectations engendered by its supporters.
I’ll cherry-pick one point - the Z-Visa bit. Supposedly the DHS can handle a rush of 8 million or 10 million applications with minimal trouble, while the State Department is struggling mightily to process a surge of 6 million passport applications due to a change in laws. Ingenuous? Perhaps. It displays either a comforting or disturbing level of faith in the ability of the current bureaucracy to cope with sudden changes.
Again, an aside. Your argument, as far as I can tell, can be boiled down to this: Since we can’t solve the problem, we might as well just accept it. Or, to simplify further: Give up. Just call them something else so the problem goes away. However, that doesn’t actually dismiss the issue. We still face a growing strain on social services in portions of the country where illegal immigration is most prevalent. We also face an influx of undesireables - and I don’t mean Mexicans.
No, I’m not going to conjure up spectres of terrorist infiltrators slipping in with Jose and Gorge. I’m concerned about the other criminals slipping in. Gang members. Predators. Those who come here to exploit the system at the expense of others, those who come here to take advantage of our freedom and, yes, hospitality. To wit, I say the one change to the current situation that few people could honestly argue against is this - “Deport the Predators First.”
If an illegal immigrant has committed a felony crime (aside from entering the country illegally, of course), or a series of misdemeanors (like DUIs, for instance), once their sentence is up they get deported and their name goes on a watch list so, ideally, re-entry isn’t quite as easy. I’m not going to show off my naivete and say it would then be impossible.
Problems require workable solutions. Not perfect solutions, and not relabeling. Both are avoiding the question in their own way. The most recent bill was an inadequate solution, but so what? Hopefully the right people learned something from it, and the experience wasn’t wasted. Issues like this require time and deliberation, not hastily-crafted pabulums to snag a few votes in what looks to be a bruising election cycle.
July 15th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
If that’s what you think my argument is…then clearly this is an exercise in futility.
First argument:
Josh’s original post dismissed any ideas that did not end with punishing and removing illegal immigrants. Ideal, but utterly unworkable. The choice to dismiss potential solutions in favor of an ideal is logically flawed.
Second argument:
Your original post dismissed the bill due to “the ensuing act of political theater”. That theater has nothing at all to do with the bill’s impact and therefor is irrelevant.
This argument:
I would have enjoyed making an argument on the merits of proposed immigration policy, but I have no interest at all in the debate that has supplanted it.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
I do believe that I have already clarified my position on immigration Ryvaken. My position is that we must secure our borders and stem the ingress of additional illegals before we do anything with the ones already here.
Whatever we want to do, be it amnesty, deportation, or (as the natzis would do) murdering them and throwing their dead bodies in mass graves, we must first secure our borders. To note, since we would never mass murder people of a given ethnicity, that puts us very far off from the Nazi’s. Thus, I am decrying the proposal of the bill as being something that is premature to other measures that must happen first.
DerImpresario has said that to “Just call them something else so the problem goes away”, which I assume to be his view on granting them amnesty, will not solve anything. That’s addressed at one aim of the bill as well.
He has brought up problem with the legislation it’s self, and brought up something from the legislation he would support. I don’t see how we have abandoned debate of the material in the bill it’s self.
On top of that, if you don’t have a chance to read a bill in it’s entirety before voting on it, you should generally vote against it. Our legal system is built on the premise that laws will be read and debated by those working on them. I have no problem with re-introducing a bill, with the hopes that it will pass the second time. What I do have a problem with is not allowing a person to study a proposal they are expected to vote on until they have the chance to vote on it.
And if I am studying the implication of a bill, and am expected to vote based on the public debate, if I see that one side is getting cut off as they are trying to make their points, and being given less time, I will likely be of the opinion that I am not getting all of the information or opinions about negative implications to the bill. Again, a perfectly valid reason to vote against it.
But, back to the bill’s actual mertits. We will always have illegals coming across our border. However, in my opinion, one goal of legislature regarding illegal immigrants, should be to decrease that number in a reasonable fashion, such as the legislation enacted in Arizona.
If we grant legally mandated benefits of any kind to illegal immigrants, this encourages more to come across the border. This includes giving them a chance to stay in (or re-enter) the country while applying for citizenship. Because of this, I am against the granting of amnesty, but especially while we are still in the process of securing our borders.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
To be clear, I am not saying that just because certain people worked on a bill, does not qualify it automatically to be voted against in my mind. You need to carefully read it and debate it on it’s measures.
Unfortunately, when you cannot do that, you have no choice but to vote it down.
However, if there is a specific point of the bill you believe is a good one, I would love to hear, and debate that particular part.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
Since you’ve conveniently broken it into points, let’s dance on those points.
Point one:
To dismiss possible solutions because they fall short of perfection is, indeed, unwise. To accept whatever solution is put forward without forethought is also unwise. To do nothing is to make the problem worse, but to actively worsen the problem is a more hazardous course. The legislation has been considered, and found critically wanting. “First do no harm.”
Point two:
No, it is not irrelevant, because that sideshow throws some very stark illumination on what is wrong with the process in D.C. concerning the issue. We can debate the merits of the bill itself until we’re blue in the face, but the facts on the ground are these: The bill is dead, and its supporters tried every dirty trick in the book to get it through. No bill worth the ink it’s printed with has ever passed without a tough fight. This bill should not be any exception.
Point three:
At this point, it’s less than worth my time to plow through the ungainly monstrosity of the bill, and from my readings of the “Reader’s Digest” version where they translated it from Legalese into somewhat-readible English, the provisions would have done nothing that isn’t already on the books for combating the issue. A better answer from both Congress and the White House would be more vigorous enforcement of existing laws and perhaps a review of priorities. Particularly where resource expenditure is concerned.