Some good comments found with the blog article Republicans and Democrats pushing amnesty legislation... I feel for the US citizens. Their country is going to become destroyed with over immigration like England will be very soon. Election results in the near future will be very interesting though. It'll be test time for the American people and hopefully goodbye to all the incumbents.
That is one stupid law . All it will serve is more and more abuse . The US is spending billions in border security and yet provide means for anyone to infiltrate their country .
America has changed a bit since the 1800s when the west had yet to be won. When we drafted newly coined citizens into cannon fodder for a civil war, or used them as near slave labor building tunnels and railroad tracks. The 1900s brought labor reform, and we no longer fight wars by throwing waves of people at machine weaponry. By necessity, our immigration policies changed at the same time, closing our borders to what was once completely open and unfettered immigration. The words above may still be true, but they are not as true as they once were. I have a hard time seeing how they will ever be true in that way again without repealing most of the laws protecting laborers, or instituting an immigrant draft. If it is decided military conscription should be the pathway to US citizenship and free education, so be it. Lets not just not be discriminatory about it and offer such a program predominately to one group of people. There are literally hundreds of millions of people in Africa that I am positive would love to kill for the US Army for a shot at citizenship, and they will likely ask for much less than our current crop of illegals.
What do you mean "so be it"? You don't have a problem with anyone obtaining US citizenship if they promise to serve in the military or want to learn at the universities?
This would provide an excellent opportunity for entire groups to join the US military . An entire terror cell could join an army group and strike when opportunity arrives .
When one considers that no liberal in this country really wants to repeal the worker protections put in place over the last 100 years, or go back to fighting wars by throwing bodies at machine gun emplacements, one could assume I was being facetious. Then again, if we were to draft a million new conscripts out of Africa and other impoverished parts of the planet to go deal with our problems in Afghanistan, I can guarantee you the insurgency over there would end. Use of "expendable" forces to do things like clear minefields is not exactly unprecedented in history. IED attacks would lose their meaning, and all of the current Taliban tactics to make the land "ungovernable" would fail. Hell, we could probably send more troops than the country has citizens for a nice 20 year military "commitment". Seriously though, I'm not in favor of repealing our labor force protection laws, our battlefield tactics, or our immigration laws. The idea that illegals would be allowed into our military in the first place is offensive.
They could do that as homegrown terrorists, too, like at Fort Hood. The French already have this setup with the Légion étrangère and they have never had any problems with foreigners splitting off and terrorizing France after joining. In fact, the one time that the Legion did go rogue was when France decided to give Algeria independence and the Legion didn't want to surrender it to the Islamists. Not exactly a move that most terrorists would appreciate.
They qualify after a few years--sooner, I think, than recruits would with the DREAM Act, though I could be wrong.
Hmm I doubt that the US will build the equivalent of the Legion . But when a nation hires and pays non citizens to defend it it usually spells the beginning of the end . Athens 2000 years ago went kaboom , Constantinople 800 years ago was fucked . I'm pretty sure you would not like the US to have the same fate .
The difference here is that the US doesn't have to hire foreigners to defend itself. It's doing it optionally, to ensure that people who want to live in the US are well-integrated. The US forces could survive solely on Americans and permanent residents right now, but that's not the purpose of the DREAM Act. The other option in the DREAM Act is that someone can complete at least two years of Bachelor's degree work. So, the idea is to assimilate illegals into behaving like Americans through either military service or higher education, and after five and a half years, they qualify for full permanent residence. After that, their residence counts towards the citizenship requirement like any other legal immigrant. And no, I do not wish to see the end of my favourite country, the USA. That's why they should stop fighting the free market which desires more immigrants of a certain class coming into the United States, and should just open the floodgates to all non-criminals who can sustain themselves without mooching off of the welfare state. American businesses would be more productive and globally competitive, and the government would have more free resources to deal with actual dangerous immigrants like criminals and terrorists.
What are you smoking ? The US is pushing the 79-80% mark in natural resource exploitation . You're society and economy is 75% sustainable and you want more population ? Good ahead open up the flood gates and have a meltdown of society . Unless you're going to preserve the current population ratios you're going to have the same problems we have : Nazi groups blooming around bbquing immigrants . The last things you need when your economy is in deep shit is to allow more people to come into your country . You should focus on cutting down imports and increasing exports , industrial resources efficiency , modernizing the infrastructure and so on .
You are nearly as comic as Colbert testifying before congress this morning. If you are a true believer in "Free market" principals, you will agree we need to be bringing in the millions of dirt poor non-criminal Nigerians who will work for dollars a day. After all, it will make us more globally competitive, despite the fact it would put our 80% Latino illegal immigrant population out of work in favor of people who will work for a plate of food. Grab a clue. The US armed forces recruiters who are allowing illegals into our military ranks are BREAKING FEDERAL LAW and need to be prosecuted as such. If our government properly enforced the laws on the books, we could draft the DREAM Act and it would apply to not a single person. By the way, have you ever stopped to consider that ending illegal immigration would allow us to accept more people legally on an annual basis?
The items I boldened depend largely on cheap labor. Labor, for example, from low-cost migrants. If the US is to be competitive in its exports, the cost of its manufactured and farmed goods need cutting, and cutting labor costs is a good way to do that. Regarding natural resource availability, etc, all of that is resolved in a free market. Simply put, people can't consume anything other than what they're able to pay for. It's when the government starts directing what will be done with resources instead of those who generate the resources that problems occur. Malthusians have been worrying about natural resource availability for years, always saying that the end is near, and it still hasn't happened except in countries where there is no free market.
I don't say one way or the other whether "we" need to bring them in. It's up to a businessman to determine whether he can make a buck off of it. I don't think that protectionists should stand in his way and force him to pay people he would otherwise not hire. I'm not sure how to respond to this. Am I supposed to object to the idea of the more productive worker being given the job? If that's the case, I had better not outsource anymore with the DigitalPoint Business section, or on oDesk. I don't think that a valid reason for standing in the way of two freely contracting parties is that a third party doesn't get money anymore. The recruiters do not currently allow illegals in, unless they're using forged documents, as they require proof of citizenship or legal residence. The proposal is to allow illegals in. It's all fine and good to say that the government ought to enforce the laws on the books, but they have failed in doing that, and you could bankrupt the federal government and probably still not find all of the illegals and deport them all. It's simply not cost-effective to try to deport every illegal in the USA instead of giving them an option to become legal residents. Ending the welfare state would allow for an unlimited number of immigrants on an annual basis. Self-sustaining immigrants are not a problem, period. They increase the diversity of the marketplace, making the US a more competitive country. Resisting immigration for protectionist reasons is a flawed plan for the same reason that high tariffs have failed countries implementing them. It keeps out a more competitive service that the market desires to prop up less competitive individuals.
What you propose is simply impossible in America. Foreign labor works for a dollar a day in some parts of the world, while our illegal immigrant labor is paid at 8$ an hour. There is no math that makes something produced at 8$ an hour cheaper than something produced at pennies an hour. Period. To be "competitive" in the world market per your argument, we would need to do away with most of our labor laws and the minimum wage, on top of "opening the floodgates" to immigrant labor and destroying the wages of the 70% of Americans who do not have a college degree. Is that what you are proposing?
Keep in mind that the general cost of labor has a very close relationship to the cost of living. While the nominal wages of Americans may be reduced, their real purchasing power won't be equally reduced because now, as you said, there are people who will work for pennies per hour. Well, if people will work for pennies per hour, goods and services dependent largely on the price of marginal labor will cost less, right? Everybody benefits from the price deflation (not that everybody's well-being is a moral reason for restricting an individual from engaging in free enterprise). The only places that locals are going to be beaten out by migrant labor are the places where the locals simply don't want to do a good enough job for a low enough price. Why should anybody have the right to interfere with an employer through government protectionism so that they can do a worse job for a higher price? There doesn't seem to be an economic benefit of this, particularly in terms of global competitiveness, and I certainly don't think it's moral to force one individual to subsidize another individual's lifestyle.
The implementation of better tech can greatly reduce costs . A CnC machine can do in hours the work that it took others days . Three men can operate 100 CnCs at the same time for a indefinite period of time . One trained worker is far more productive then 5 people that can't even read . Sorry to disappoint you but the world market is not a free market . OPEC controls the price per barrel in the world . China controls 97% of rare earths exports . In Europe Russia fucks around whit natural gas prices . I could provide you whit a huge list on the matter . The thing is that on the industrial raw matter level the wold market was never free . The Digital revolution couldn't even exist without Neodymium and other such elements . I'm not worrying because I know exactly the current available planetary resources and potential resources . But China has some good aces at the moment . You have the highest unemployment since the Great Depression and you want more immigrants ? What do you think the other will do ? Last time the Caucasians assembled in gangs it resulted in the Mafia and the KKK . That type of organizations appear when a certain class has social or economic unrest . Nutjobs like the Oklahoma bomber don't appear out of the blue . Whit the current level of information you can have dozens of guys like this . How will that help ? I'm not interested of US inter-party politics but I hear more and more often of the Tea Party or something like that . I don't think such organizations appear out of the blue . Nor do I think that the appearance of a all white political group in the US is something that occurs every day . The only way you can bring more immigrants at the moment is by viciously suppressing the current US citizens .