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First of all, let me say that I don't trust statistics on illegal immigration. By the very nature of the thing, illegal immigrants are hard to track down, so you can't possibly be polling a significant percentage of the illegal immigrant population. Secondly, those who are questioned are unlikely to just go ahead and say, "Yeah, I'm a bad guy! I'm a member of organized crime, smuggling in and selling drugs and killing people who get in the way!" I mean, come on. Really now.

Secondly, I'm not saying that illegal immigration causes an obvious increase in violent crimes. What I am trying to say is that making illegal immigration easier undermines the defenses of the country. It allows people who have ill intentions to slip in along with the vastly larger number of people who are here to find a better job, unnoticed. And I am also saying that people who do come here who are up to no good are able to become virtually invisible once they are in the country, because they can erase their past and become completely new people.

Even if these bad apples make up only 0.5% of the illegal immigrant population, that's too many people who are being helped by these work-around laws. People who are off the grid, as it were, and much more difficult to find and get rid of. According to the Pew Hispanic Center (http://pewhispanic.org), there are 17.5 million non-native born Hispanics in country. Now, going by what I consider to be a very conservative estimate and saying that 2/3rds of those people immigrated legally, that still leaves some 5.8 million illegal immigrants. Assuming only one out of every 200 of those illegal immigrants are members of the Cartel, or a gang, or are just generally no good, that gives us 29,000 bad apples in country, that could have been weeded out if we weren't so easy on illegal immigration.

Alright, now my actual argument.

Aside from how open it leaves our country to danger, making illegal immigration easy is stupid in every other way as well. First of all, there's the old jobs argument. It's true. Illegal immigrants are willing to do jobs for less than minimum wage, decreasing the number of jobs there are for Americans. Cutting my previous "statistic" in half to consider children and other non-workers, that's almost 3 million jobs.

Now, many people say that illegal immigrants take the jobs Americans don't want. Ignoring the fact that this argument is extremely arrogant and sounds to me like it considers non-Americans to be sub-human, there is also the fact that if illegals didn't take the jobs, Americans would be forced to. This would go far to solve the unemployment problem.

But not only is illegal immigration bad for your average American, it's bad for the immigrants too! See, if they immigrate legally, the laws protect them from getting paid the sub-human rates! Really, the only people who are benefiting from illegal immigration being so easy are the people who are up to no good, and the big businesses who use illegal immigrant workers in order to cut costs!

I don't see how anyone can -possibly- support that, unless they are part of big-business and have absolutely no morals.

-To sidestep any arguments about the hypocracy of saying that I don't trust statistics on illegal immigration and then using statistics, let me say that, as I mentioned, those statistics I used were "facts" about Hispanics living in country, which I do trust to an extent, though there is probably a significant number of illegals who aren't included in it because they lied on census reports. And I used what I considered to be very conservative guesstimates in creating my own pseudo-statistics, but I am of the opinion that even if those numbers were cut in half, it's still too many.

Aren't illegal immigrants deported, though? And I hate when people just call them immigrants, like they're the same as any other immigrant.

Background? Well I'm mostly Irish/German/Chekylslavakian, but I've got black and Native American ancestors. But I really don't see what that has to do with anything.

Interesting-looking bugger, aren't ya? wink I'm Polish and Creole, myself, the former a 3rd-generation immigrant. Gotta love the military for its spawning of random pairings...

The Irish are a prime example, and iirc they're brought up in the study I cited. As in, an immigrating ethnic group ostracized out of xenophobia and accused of contributing to a rise in crime. The Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, Mexicans and other Latinos, the Polish and other Eastern Europeans to a lesser extent...

But that's not quite the point you were making--being undocumented is illegal, a crime, albeit a largely victimless one. But for the most part, people commit crimes for a logical, desperate reason, not because they're sociopaths. They steal or sell drugs because they're desperate for money, they have abortions because they fear being shunned for pregnancies out of wedlock, etc.

Immigrating to the U.S. is not easy nor cheap. If you're dirt poor, scraping by to feed your family, but can make a lot of money through a decent job if your employer skirts the law, you'll do it.

The overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants would prefer to be citizens. But they're living "paycheck-to-paycheck," not being able to save any money because all of it goes to food and shelter.

I'm actually not as familiar with U.S. immigration law as I am with Canadian, since that's where I plan to immigrate.

Care to know what I'll need to immigrate to Canada?

At least a year of experience working in a high-demand field
A job in that field--yup, need to be hired first, or at least $10,000 in liquid assets (more if you have dependents)
Either relatives who live in Canada or a high level of education
High proficiency in either English or French (more points if you speak both)

So at least in Canada, someone who's worked on a farm their whole life, never went to high school and doesn't speak the language well is s**t out of luck.

This is why people stay undocumented. They're just trying their best to pull their family out of the hole.

Thing is, if no one hired them, they wouldn't have that option.

Immigrants I have respect for. Those who hire undocumented immigrants so they can pay them less than minimum wage and treat them like crap should be deported--to Antarctica.

I see the employment of illegal immigrants as similar to prostitution. (Don't look at me that way, wait for it.)

The employees are not to blame. Generally, they don't like the work they're doing. They do it because they're desperate for money AND there's money to be made. They do not create demand with their supply, they create a supply in response to demand:

If nobody wanted to have sex with a prostitute, there would be no prostitutes.

If nobody hired illegal immigrants, there would be far, far fewer illegal immigrants.

I place the blame squarely on the companies and individuals who look the other way, don't ask for status or work permits, and threaten to call the INS if people complain about the pittance they earn, the harassment they experience or the benefits they'll never be given.

I blame the American companies that move their factories right over the border so they can pay Mexicans far less than they're allowed to pay Americans.

I blame the Mexican government for not enforcing a living wage, and the U.S. government for allowing American companies to dump their American employees in the name of profit. And similarly, the governments of China, Indonesia (rot in hell, Suharto), and many other countries for not enforcing a living wage, either, and allowing the exploitation of their citizens.

And you're right, lymey, they're not just taking jobs Americans won't do. But they're not the ones intentionally hurting Americans so they can buy a new Lexus every year. They're just trying to survive. I have nothing against enforcing our borders (except a personal beef with the border patrol, but that's on the Canadian side...). But more enforcement is the "easy" way out; it doesn't solve the problem of crooked, greedy employers breaking the law in the name of profit.

And worst of all, the people who do yell and scream the loudest about protecting the Mexican border are people like these sacks of s**t. They're not trying to protect Americans, they just hate people with brown skin.

(btw, I highly recommend the SPLC for "knowing your enemy." They report on anti-abortion violence, too, but they're very impartial.)

We have it so good we cannot even comprehend water not coming on demand. I've lived on the streets man, even that''s better than living in some of the places these people come from.

Isolation would not be a bad thing, if we could get some renewable energy. Which we could- We have thousands of miles of desert used for bomb testing. Fill it with solar pannels and we won't need outside energy. Cars? Hydrogen or electric powered.

It wouldn't hurt anything if we isolated ourselves- We would not have any more allies, yet we would also have fewer enemies. It seems like it would likely lead to a more peaceful world, at least on our part. And our part is the only role we need to concern ourselves with.

I disagree on isolationism too. One pretty big example I can think of is WWII; tons of people disagreed with America getting involved. People wanted America to be isolationists. "It's not our war, don't send our boys to die. Don't harbor refugees, we'll make ourselves a target. Don't get involved." Even after Pearl Harbor there were protests. I think we can all agree that while America didn't single-handedly win the war, we played a big part in it, and history would have been very different if we'd stuck to not getting involved.

I think it involves a balance. We can't go rushing into every little conflict to sort things out, but I don't think it benefits us to say "No allies," because then when we do have enemies, we have no help. That would have been a disaster in a lot of places in history, even in our lifetimes if you were alive during the cold war (I know you'd be young, but still).

I completely and totally disagree. That's a very selfish mindset; And what, you care but you're not going to do anything about it? That doesn't sound much like you care at all.

That's really easy to say when it's not your money. And when you don't even believe in money. I actually figured you were going to say something like that, so replace money with resources. It would take many man hours, first to make the metals, then to make the circuits, then to put the panels together, then to place the panels, then to connect the wiring to the power grid, then to constantly be cleaning off the panels and replacing broken panels... It's a mess. Regardless of whether you value money or not, resources would be going into it, massive amounts of resources, much much more than go into our current power plants.

But seriously, just clean off the panels? xd Do you think we should have stations of people who just go out and sweep every day, to make sure we're still getting electricity? This is assuming that the sand doesn't form into drifts, or dunes, as I said. It may not be the Sahara, but the sand still shifts around in a pretty big way.
Except that, under the water and then under some sand, there is clay. Clay we can build on; Clay is stable. Sand is not. Deserts, if there is clay down there, it's reallly far down there.

That didn't happen over the course of a day, or a year, or a single project. We started with a few centers of electricity and telephone service, and it slowly grew outward.

rolleyes Because that's totally how it is in the desert. Also, I'm pretty sure that in the real desert-deserts, jackrabbits and wolves can't survive anyways. :/