Immigration
How about we enforce some of the laws that already exist, before we enact any more?
It is illegal to hire undocumented workers, but they are all over and being abused by businesses. You start by actually enforcing the laws against the businesses. Stop arresting workers and start arresting employers.
Then, actually fund the securing of the border. Hire the Border Patrol agents you need and let them patrol the border. Hire the Coast Guard and give them equipment to patrol our waters. Fund and implement port security.
The great fallacy of the “guest worker” programs and the H1B visas, is that Americans don’t want these jobs. Americans don’t want to work for the money that business wants to pay for these jobs, and as long as business is assured of labor at poverty level wages, the wages won’t rise to a living level. “Guest worker programs” are nothing more than a variation of outsourcing.
10 comments
Arrest employers? How very….un-Republican. Raising the minimum wage would do wonders for this country, but that’s very un-Republican, too.
I’ve lived in a couple of places where the minimum wage was what you earned for the first 3 to 6 months while you were on probation for a job with a healthy raise when you went permanent.
If we didn’t have desperate people willing to work for $5.15/hour it would have been history a long time ago.
If they can’t get work, they won’t stay. You don’t have to arrest or harass them, they’ll leave on their own.
but…but…bryan…that makes too much sense! geez! get with the program. besides, i’m inclined to think that if we actually solved problems logically, then we’d run out of things to complain about and build political platforms on and then what would we do? i’m not trying to be completely cynical, i mean, it could just be that we do this subconciously (sp? i always get that wrong) 🙂
oooh! the chinese are going to tax wooden, disposable chopsticks b/c they’re wasteful and consume lots of wood…now there’s news!
A basic problem with legislatures is that all they can do is pass laws, so that’s what they do. It’s the old “to someone with a hammer, everything is a nail” syndrome. If they would insist that the executive start enforcing the laws we have, instead of passing new laws, we might find out which laws work and get rid of those that don’t.
It didn’t occur to me that chopsticks were a problem until the local BBC reporter explained how they were deforesting huge parts of China specifically to make them. I guess I should be using my good ones, or find some plastic ones that can be washed effectively. The disposable wooden ones were certainly convenient, and they were more effective at holding on to food than the lacquered ones.
Bryan, the worst of the proposed new law is the part that would make it a crime to provide food or healthcare to illegal immigrants. I’ve worked in hospitals, a school of public health and several healthcare research institutions off and on for years, and I’ve yet to meet the virus or bacterium that could distinguish an American citizen or a legal resident from an undocumented worker. If passed (and of course enforced, always a question) this law would be actively dangerous to public health in America.
(OT, today, WordPress just replaced their editor on wordpress.com with an alleged WYSIWYG editor, and the results have sent me screaming. Hint: poets like to control line breaks in their documents; automatic word wrap is a bad, bad thing for most poems. They have threatened, um, I mean, promised to migrate the new editor to the installable version of WordPress. Beware of upgrades!)
When you roll up to an accident in a “gumball” you don’t ask about immigration status, you get people medical attention.
If someone is in trouble in the water you don’t ask for a “green card”, you pull them out.
If someone is wandering in the desert, you don’t ask if they’re a prophet [I couldn’t resist], you give them water.
I have a question for the author, how can you legally determine someone’s citizenship status if you don’t work for the government? That information is protected and you can’t get access. In a world filled with Photoshop and color printers, documents don’t mean a thing. Do they have any idea how many people have absolutely no documents left after last year’s hurricane season?
In a world with a flu pandemic on the horizon, I want sick people in a healthcare facility.
Bryan, I don’t think the author and cosponsors really care. It’s all demagoguery, pitched at the basest fears of the Americans most scared of foreigners, in hopes of turning their vote in the next election.
The irony is that many of the health-related problems along the border with Mexico are driven by Americans, not Mexicans… Americans consuming illegal drugs, American companies employing workers at maquiladoras who live in communities with substandard or nonexistent health infrastructure, etc. Those Americans who are hostile to Mexicans in general have no real basis for their hostility (other than racism), and those Americans who are hostile to Mexicans who are in the U.S. illegally need to think long and hard about why they are here, and then go look in the mirror for the primary cause. Building high walls or fancy electronic fences along the border will not solve the problem. Creating a sort of second-class citizenship or guest-worker program will not solve the problem. When Americans (and especially their corporations) enter into fair business relationships with Mexicans, then we’ll find out what jobs Americans really won’t take (I suspect there are damned few such jobs, if salaries are fairly determined on both sides of the border) and we’ll find out how much it really costs (in money) to solve the problem, rather than how much it really costs (in human terms) to continue to abuse our neighbors.
(OT again, I’ve corresponded with WordPress; they’re amazingly responsive for an outfit that gives away services, storage and bandwidth. My main problem was not knowing the Shift-Enter keystroke, which inserts a break tag rather than a paragraph tag. The other problems may be browser-specific. Details later.)
Re OT: browser specific sound like they’ve been pandering to IE to produce non-standard results.
Again OT: Bryan, no, according to the guy at WordPress, the company that makes the editor (it’s called TinyMCE) struggles day and night to cope with the changes all browser vendors make to their interpretation of the DOM. Microsoft is guilty, but so is Mozilla. In this case, a change made to Firefox between 1.5.0.0 and 1.5.0.1 caused TinyMCE to break when the user deletes a new-line or a paragraph with the cursor at the end of a line. It’s not their fault, but it is their problem. You know how that feels, I’m sure!
One client of mine liked really fancy client-side interfaces… too fancy, but I couldn’t talk them out of it… so I got pretty good at JavaScript and I had a passable understanding of the DOM in some detail. The DOM was specified by humans, and humans are capable of unintended but vast ambiguity. Browser designers, even those with wholly good intentions, resolve those ambiguities in an amazing number of different ways, so that complex code (I think you’ll admit that TinyMCE is a tour de force), even if it is utterly standards-compliant, doesn’t run quite the same in different browser implementations.
I am fully sympathetic to the programmers at TinyMCE; it’s a difficult task. And from my discussion with WordPress staff, I’m convinced TinyMCE is not attempting to pander to Microsoft. They’re just trying to produce a product that works correctly on most of the browsers out there. Been there, done that.
OT: actually, I know exactly what that particular problem looks like and I haven’t found a good fix, only a kludge/hack that usually, sort of works, but may cause other problems that haven’t shown themselves yet.