Your answer to illegal immigration.

[Aquila]

Originally Posted by jfrog

They aren't a population. They aren't even legal. If they were legal you might have an argument but they are not.

Hmmm....

So if a population doesn't meet the government's definition of "legal" they aren't a population. Because they aren't legal any force necessary is acceptable I assume.

It ain't like I'm wanting to make all jews illegal and get them deported?

Interesting.... let's say that Israel suffers a massive invasion within the next five years and Jews are sent fleeing around the world and thousands come to the United States illegally? Would you round them up and send them back into the hands of the Arabs?

I'm just saying that those here illegally shouldn't be and something more needs done about it.

We all agree that something needs to be done about it. But I'm not for a police state to get it done. I say what's done is done, they're here. The amount of laws and enforcement it would take to get them would be unAmerican. Grant them citizenship, fine them, give them a first degree Misdemeanor, put them on six months probation and be done with it. Once legal labor and tax laws will apply to them in full. You've eliminated a significant number of illegal workers and broadened the tax base. You've expanded the cause of freedom and the political party that does this will have quite a nice little voting block standing behind them. You will have not divided families or sent people back home to deal with God knows what. It's a bitter pill but I see it as the best alternative when compared to your fear inducing police state.

There does need to be ways more can come over and work legally.

We agree.

But i can't understand why your acting like anybody and everybody that comes into this country illegally has the right to be here.

I don't. But I'm a realist. We're not going to be able to go after millions of illegals that are scattered across the US who are working under the table and laying low without a significant amount of regulation, registration, and police action. I see granting them citizenship, fining them, giving them a first degree misdemeanor, and six months probation as realistic and doable. While we do that we work on reforms to streamline the immigration process. Yes, I know some are waiting patiently and abiding by the law. But you know what... they aren't citizens, nor are they entrenched in our communities and economies. We have to resolve the illegal problem and they'll just have to understand.

I mean if that's the case let's invite everyone to come live here without going through any immigration or naturalization process.

That's not what I'm saying.

We'd be flooded with too many people before long and you know it. But that is what you are saying you want done.

Not at all. I agree most with the Libertarian Party on this one... here's what their website says...

3.4 Free Trade and Migration

We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders. However, we support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a threat to security, health or property.


Immigration
Immigration Law Should Reflect Our Dynamic Labor Market
By Daniel T. Griswold

Among its many virtues, America is a nation where laws are generally reasonable, respected and impartially enforced. A glaring exception is immigration.

Today an estimated 12 million people live in the U.S. without authorization, 1.6 million in Texas alone, and that number grows every year. Many Americans understandably want the rule of law restored to a system where law-breaking has become the norm.

The fundamental choice before us is whether we redouble our efforts to enforce existing immigration law, whatever the cost, or whether we change the law to match the reality of a dynamic society and labor market.

Low-skilled immigrants cross the Mexican border illegally or overstay their visas for a simple reason: There are jobs waiting here for them to fill, especially in Texas and other, faster growing states. Each year our economy creates hundreds of thousands of net new jobs — in such sectors as retail, cleaning, food preparation, construction and tourism — that require only short-term, on-the-job training.

At the same time, the supply of Americans who have traditionally filled many of those jobs — those without a high school diploma — continues to shrink. Their numbers have declined by 4.6 million in the past decade, as the typical American worker becomes older and better educated.

Yet our system offers no legal channel for anywhere near a sufficient number of peaceful, hardworking immigrants to legally enter the United States even temporarily to fill this growing gap. The predictable result is illegal immigration.

In response, we can spend billions more to beef up border patrols. We can erect hundreds of miles of ugly fence slicing through private property along the Rio Grande. We can raid more discount stores and chicken-processing plants from coast to coast. We can require all Americans to carry a national ID card and seek approval from a government computer before starting a new job.

Or we can change our immigration law to more closely conform to how millions of normal people actually live.

Crossing an international border to support your family and pursue dreams of a better life is not an inherently criminal act like rape or robbery. If it were, then most of us descend from criminals. As the people of Texas know well, the large majority of illegal immigrants are not bad people. They are people who value family, faith and hard work trying to live within a bad system.

When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem. To argue that illegal immigration is bad merely because it is illegal avoids the threshold question of whether we should prohibit this kind of immigration in the first place.

We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow.

For those workers already in the United States illegally, we can avoid "amnesty" and still offer a pathway out of the underground economy. Newly legalized workers can be assessed fines and back taxes and serve probation befitting the misdemeanor they've committed. They can be required to take their place at the back of the line should they eventually apply for permanent residency.

The fatal flaw of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was not that it offered legal status to workers already here but that it made no provision for future workers to enter legally.

Immigration is not the only area of American life where a misguided law has collided with reality. In the 1920s and '30s, Prohibition turned millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers and spawned an underworld of moon-shining, boot-legging and related criminal activity. (Sound familiar?) We eventually made the right choice to tax and regulate alcohol rather than prohibit it.

In the 19th century, America's frontier was settled largely by illegal squatters. In his influential book on property rights, The Mystery of Capital, economist Hernando de Soto describes how these so-called extralegals began to farm, mine and otherwise improve land to which they did not have strict legal title. After failed attempts by the authorities to destroy their cabins and evict them, federal and state officials finally recognized reality, changed the laws, declared amnesty and issued legal documents conferring title to the land the settlers had improved.

As Mr. de Soto wisely concluded: "The law must be compatible with how people actually arrange their lives." That must be a guiding principle when Congress returns to the important task of fixing our immigration laws.
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Daniel Griswold the is director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies. For a copy of the original article, please visit Cato's Web site here.