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The very pupose of immigration laws are national security and to weed out the undesireables.
When cicumvented by illegal immigration you have no way to screen out those unwanted. Only Idiot's like Obama spout off nonsense about those that follow the laws, obviously not the ones they broke.
How can you know what kind of person an "undocumented" is as they don't have legal documents and history.
This issue won't go away. Obama keeps it alive and failed Repubs like Gingrich and Perry took big hits in the polls because of it.
Legal immigrants from wherever they may be from are welcome , Illegals are not. And should not be rewarde with a spot that should have gone to an honest LEGAL immigrant.
Yes the REALITY is they are ILLEGAL, comprende ???
Eh, see I like history. I'm fascinated by history's multitude of ironic situations. Take our country for example. European immigrants came here to build new lives, to escape oppressive governments, to practice their own belief systems free of interference, etc. Only problem was, when they arrived, there were already people here. Now, I'm not sure if you know much about the Americas before European contact, but all recent evidence suggests that they were nothing like what our high school history books told us.
They weren't lands of untouched, pristine wilderness. The Natives had been terraforming both continents so much for so long that forests were more like city parks and animal populations were constantly in check. For example, take bison. When most Europeans first saw the Great Plains, they witnessed herds of bison as far as the eye could see. It's estimated that there were, at one point, between 40 and 60 million of them. Settlers eventually nearly made them extinct (at one point there were maybe 1,000), but not the point. The point is that those huge numbers Europeans saw was an unintended consequence of First Contact. European disease killed off so many Natives that the animals they had been keeping in check exploded in population. By the time most people saw the Great Plains, they only saw the result of the human die-off. It was the same story with countless other animals as well, and without the Natives managing forests, they grew unchecked until most colonists simply believed they had always been these dense, untouched lands. The colonists claimed the land for themselves thinking that they would be the first to develop it. They had no idea they were building on top of civilizations they, at least at first, inadvertantly destroyed.
The rest of the Natives, with their numbers decimated by First Contact diseases, inevitably were slaughtered by colonial and then US government forces. There were many tribes and cultures that were so completely wiped out that there is nothing left of them. The US intentionally tried to commit cultural genocide (beyond the actual one going on) by opening up schools that forced Natives to learn English, to dress like white Americans, to convert to Christianity, etc. These policies were repeated in all of Central and South America, including Mexico. These policies proved so effective that, even now, the darker brown you are in Mexico, the lower class you are considered to be. It's very similar, but somewhat less well-known than India's caste system. Basically, US and European policy made being Native not only something to be ashamed of, but something in which to actively deny. Most Mexicans are mestizo, a mix of Spanish and Native genetics, but many people will outright deny that they have any Native blood at all, because it often means that you get fewer opportunities.
A large portion of America's illegal problem ultimately stems back to these long-held beliefs. Most of the people coming to the US are poor, with quite a few being farmers. A LOT of Mexican farmers tend to be of Native blood, as farming is something that goes back here for millenia. It used to be a somewhat sustainable practice, but trade agreements like NAFTA took away their ability to make any kind of living farming, and with ongoing stereotypes and racism (perpetuated by our own doing), these poor people find it significantly harder to find other types of work. Throw in the fact that Mexico's economy basically collapsed in the mid-1990s (around the same time as NAFTA), that's when we saw illegal immigration really start to skyrocket. When you have the most powerful nation on the planet just north of the border, well I would imagine that's quite the beacon for people who's options are few and getting fewer.
So where are we at today? Well, Mexico's economy is improving and growing at a rate faster than the US', and this is allowing more of the nation's poor to stay there. It's even drawn some of the US' Mexican illegals back. So what about those that aren't leaving? Besides so much irony in the above facts, it is disingenuous at best to suggest that we simply deport them. We've been screwing these people over for 500 years, is it really that hard to come up with a logical, reasoned immigration plan? I think not. It's so easy for modern Americans to get on the high horse, but history tells a very sordid story about our relationship with these people, and while we don't owe them anything free, we do have control over the system and can come up with something better.
@jbcmh
History cannot be changed, but the times have changed and things are a bit different now.
I agree that we can come up with something better, my question to you is, if we did and it was still ignored, then what?
When will it end or come to a reasonable and fair conclusion?
It was supposed to come to that after the Reagan amnesty, Mexicans need to work harder in their country for change, just like the Arabs do now and Blacks have done here in the past , instead of running away to something easier.
The very pupose of immigration laws are national security and to weed out the undesireables.
When cicumvented by illegal immigration you have no way to screen out those unwanted. Only Idiot's like Obama spout off nonsense about those that follow the laws, obviously not the ones they broke.
How can you know what kind of person an "undocumented" is as they don't have legal documents and history.
This issue won't go away. Obama keeps it alive and failed Repubs like Gingrich and Perry took big hits in the polls because of it.
Legal immigrants from wherever they may be from are welcome , Illegals are not. And should not be rewarde with a spot that should have gone to an honest LEGAL immigrant.
Do you have any specific issues with my suggestions in #17?
@jbcmh
History cannot be changed, but the times have changed and things are a bit different now.
I agree that we can come up with something better, my question to you is, if we did and it was still ignored, then what?
When will it end or come to a reasonable and fair conclusion?
It was supposed to come to that after the Reagan amnesty, Mexicans need to work harder in their country for change, just like the Arabs do now and Blacks have done here in the past , instead of running away to something easier.
No, history cannot be changed, but we should at least be willing to acknowledge our very prominent role in why illegal immigration, particularly from the Americas, occurs.
And the Reagan amnesty did not fix any of the the base problems, that's why it didn't work. I'm not advocating a free, no-strings amnesty.
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