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All the Mexicans at my school are yelling and protesting. It's funny because they don't know what they are actually protesting.
Why do all the protesters against the new immigration bill, that has passed the house and the senate committee, look the same ? 11 million ILLEGAL immigrants' ( and they ain't Canadian, or Russian, or Chinese or Pakistani.
First and formost, a nation of law, over immigrant. Besides the big wave of immigration into the US, that made it what it is, is 150 years passed and no longer necessary.
Take that
All the Mexicans at my school are yelling and protesting. It's funny because they don't know what they are actually protesting.
omg, I saw on the news the protestors in california...i ing laughed my ass off
This is a true ing paraphrase, probably 98% correct (i in swear)
"I was born here, in america, but I consider myself an immigrant" (he went on to say why he thought the bill would be wrong)
I don't remember exaclty what he said after that cuz I was too busy laughing my ass off. I was born here in america, but I consider myself an immigrant? wtf?
Kinda like saying "my screenname is gtownspur, and i am a worthy human being".
I'm still undecided about the bill, mostly cuz its hypocritical, but I would never protest that .
Living in Brazil and knowing so much about South American immigration freaking tsunami waves to the U.S. (illegally), I can tell you that its about freaking time America clamps down hardcore. Its getting ridiculous. But I have more of an issue with the Chinese, whose government often refuses to take their illegals back. At least Brazil doesn't do that . Anyway, you gotta feel for the poor around the world, but you gotta protect your own house and family first and foremost, and being that America is so flooded with illegal immigrants and probably several terrorist cells taking advantage of immigration loopholes, you gotta crack the ing whip.
Lol, these people are protesting the bill but they probably can't understand the first sentence of it!All the Mexicans at my school are yelling and protesting. It's funny because they don't know what they are actually protesting.
I don't believe that. I also think that if a bunch of white conservative high school students protested, they would be presented as heroes and better than your normal high schoolers. Even O'Rielly and gtownspur would bow down to them and give them verbal handjobs.
They're racist and don't even know it. If 11 million illegal Irish immigrants were illegally in the US I wouldn't be flying an Irish flag on the streets. I don't even know what an Irish flag looks like.
They’re not racist, just wrong, none-the-less it's good to see there is an issue that will mobilize the hispanic community. I agree that there should be more controls on illegal immigration, but I don't think we should be arresting people who help illegals that come across, especially members of churches and organizations that have traditionally helped illegals in the past - it's immoral. I also don't agree with building a border-wall, I thought we were better than that, but I guess not.
North of the Border
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 27 March 2006
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," wrote Emma Lazarus, in a poem that still puts a lump in my throat. I'm proud of America's immigrant history, and grateful that the door was open when my grandparents fled Russia.
In other words, I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration. But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration, and immigration from Mexico in particular. If people like me are going to respond effectively to anti-immigrant demagogues, we have to acknowledge those facts.
First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small. Realistic estimates suggest that immigration since 1980 has raised the total income of native-born Americans by no more than a fraction of 1 percent.
Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration - especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.
That's why it's intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do "jobs that Americans will not do." The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays - and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is compe ion from poorly paid immigrants.
Finally, modern America is a welfare state, even if our social safety net has more holes in it than it should - and low-skill immigrants threaten to unravel that safety net.
Basic decency requires that we provide immigrants, once they're here, with essential health care, education for their children, and more. As the Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote about his own country's experience with immigration, "We wanted a labor force, but human beings came." Unfortunately, low-skill immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the benefits they receive.
Worse yet, immigration penalizes governments that act humanely. Immigrants are a much more serious fiscal problem in California than in Texas, which treats the poor and unlucky harshly, regardless of where they were born.
We shouldn't exaggerate these problems. Mexican immigration, says the Borjas-Katz study, has played only a "modest role" in growing U.S. inequality. And the political threat that low-skill immigration poses to the welfare state is more serious than the fiscal threat: the disastrous Medicare drug bill alone does far more to undermine the finances of our social insurance system than the whole burden of dealing with illegal immigrants.
But modest problems are still real problems, and immigration is becoming a major political issue. What are we going to do about it?
Realistically, we'll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants. Mainly that means better controls on illegal immigration. But the harsh anti-immigration legislation passed by the House, which has led to huge protests - legislation that would, among other things, make it a criminal act to provide an illegal immigrant with medical care - is simply immoral.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's plan for a "guest worker" program is clearly designed by and for corporate interests, who'd love to have a low-wage work force that couldn't vote. Not only is it deeply un-American; it does nothing to reduce the adverse effect of immigration on wages. And because guest workers would face the prospect of deportation after a few years, they would have no incentive to become integrated into our society.
What about a guest-worker program that includes a clearer route to citizenship? I'd still be careful. Whatever the bill's intentions, it could all too easily end up having the same effect as the Bush plan in practice - that is, it could create a permanent underclass of disenfranchised workers.
We need to do something about immigration, and soon. But I'd rather see Congress fail to agree on anything this year than have it rush into ill-considered legislation that betrays our moral and democratic principles.
Another wonderful column by Tom Hartmann...
Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists (and Labor is Left Behind)
by Thom Hartmann
The corporatist Republicans ("amnesty!") are fighting with the racist Republicans ("fence!"), and it provides an opportunity for progressives to step forward with a clear solution to the immigration problem facing America.
Both the corporatists and the racists are fond of the mantra, "There are some jobs Americans won't do." It's a lie.
Americans will do virtually any job if they're paid a decent wage. This isn't about immigration - it's about economics. Industry and agriculture won't collapse without illegal labor, but the middle class is being crushed by it.
The reason why thirty years ago United Farm Workers' Union (UFW) founder Caesar Chávez fought against illegal immigration, and the UFW turned in illegals during his tenure as president, was because Chávez, like progressives since the 1870s, understood the simple reality that labor rises and falls in price as a function of availability.
As Wikipedia notes: "In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coac a Valley to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of illegal aliens as temporary replacement workers during a strike. Joining him on the march were both the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Senator Walter Mondale. Chávez and the UFW would often report suspected illegal aliens who served as temporary replacement workers as well as who refused to unionize to the INS."
Working Americans have always known this simple equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages.
Progressives fought - and many lost their lives in the battle - to limit the pool of "labor hours" available to the Robber Barons from the 1870s through the 1930s and thus created the modern middle class. They limited labor-hours by pushing for the 50-hour week and the 10-hour day (and then later the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day). They limited labor-hours by pushing for laws against child labor (which competed with adult labor). They limited labor-hours by working for passage of the 1935 Wagner Act that provided for union shops.
And they limited labor-hours by supporting laws that would regulate immigration into the United States to a small enough flow that it wouldn't dilute the unionized labor pool. As Wikipedia notes: "The first laws creating a quota for immigrants were passed in the 1920s, in response to a sense that the country could no longer absorb large numbers of unskilled workers, despite pleas by big business that it wanted the new workers."
Do a little math. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 7.6 million unemployed Americans right now. Another 1.5 million Americans are no longer counted because they've become "long term" or "discouraged" unemployed workers. And although various groups have different ways of measuring it, most agree that at least another five to ten million Americans are either working part-time when they want to work full-time, or are "underemployed," doing jobs below their level of training, education, or experience. That's between eight and twenty million un- and under-employed Americans, many unable to find above-poverty-level work.
At the same time, there are between seven and fifteen million working illegal immigrants diluting our labor pool.
If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to confront and fix their corrupt ways.
Between the Reagan years - when there were only around 1 to 2 million illegal aliens in our workforce - and today, we've gone from about 25 percent of our private workforce being unionized to around seven percent. Much of this is the direct result - a Caesar Chávez predicted - of illegal immigrants competing directly with unionized and legal labor. Although it's most obvious in the construction trades over the past 30 years, it's hit all sectors of our economy.
Democratic Party strategist Ann Lewis just sent out a mass email on behalf of former Wal-Mart Board of Directors member and now US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In it, Lewis noted that Clinton suggests we should have: "An earned path to citizenship for those already here working hard, paying taxes, respecting the law, and willing to meet a high bar for becoming a citizen." Sounds nice. The same day, on his radio program, Rush Limbaugh told a woman whose husband is an illegal immigrant that she had nothing to worry about with regard to deportation of him or their children because all he'd have to do - under the new law under consideration - is pay a small fine and learn English.
The current Directors of Wal-Mart are smiling.
Meanwhile, the millions of American citizens who came to this nation as legal immigrants, who waited in line for years, who did the hard work to become citizens, are feeling insulted, humiliated, and conned.
Shouldn't we be compassionate? Of course.
But there is nothing compassionate about driving down the wages of any nation's middle class. It's the most cynical, self-serving, greedy, and sociopathic behavior you'll see from our "conservatives."
There is nothing compassionate about being the national enabler of a dysfunctional oligarchy like Mexico. An illegal workforce in the US sending an estimated $17 billion to Mexico every year - second only in national income to that country's oil revenues - supports an antidemocratic, anti-worker, hyperconservative administration there that gleefully ships out of that nation the "troublesome" Mexican citizens - those lowest on the economic food-chain and thus most likely to present "labor unrest" - to the USA. Mexico (and other "sending nations") need not deal with their own social and economic problems so long as we're willing to solve them for them - at the expense of our middle class. Democracy in Central and South America be damned - there are profits to be made for Wal-Mart!
Similarly, there is nothing compassionate about handing higher profits (through a larger and thus cheaper work force) to the CEOs of America's largest corporations and our now-experiencing-record-profits construction and agriculture industries.
What about caring for people in need? Isn't that the universal religious/ethical value? Of course.
A few years ago, when my family and I were visiting Europe, one of our children fell sick. A doctor came to the home of the people we were staying with, visited our child at 11 pm on a weeknight, left behind a course of antibiotics, and charged nothing. It was paid for by that nation's universal health care system. We should offer the same to any human being in need of medical care - a universal human right - in the United States.
But if I'd applied to that nation I was visiting for a monthly unemployment or retirement check, I would have been laughed out of the local government office. And if I'd been caught working there, I would have been deported within a week. Caring for people in crisis/need is very different from giving a job or a monthly welfare check to non-citizens. No nation - even those in Central and South America - will do that. And neither should the United States.
But if illegal immigrants won't pick our produce or bus our tables won't our prices go up? (The most recent mass-emailed conservative variation of this argument, targeting paranoid middle-class Americans says: "Do you want to pay an extra $10,000 for your next house?") The answer is simple: Yes.
But wages would also go up, and even faster than housing or food prices. And CEO salaries, and corporate profits, might moderate back to the levels they were during the "golden age of the American middle class" between the 1940s and Reagan's declaration of war on the middle class in the 1980s.
We saw exactly this scenario played out in the US fifty years ago, when unions helped regulate entry into the workforce, 35 percent of American workers had a union job, and 70 percent of Americans could raise a family on a single, 40-hour-week paycheck. All working Americans would gladly pay a bit more for their food if their paychecks were both significantly higher and more secure. (This would even allow for an increase in the minimum wage - as it did from the 1930s to the 1980s.)
But what about repressive régimes? Aren't we denying entrance to this generation's equivalent of the Jews fleeing Germany? This is the most tragic of all the arguments put forward by conservatives in the hopes compassionate progressives will bite. Our immigration policies already allow for refugees - and should be expanded. It's an issue that needs more national discussion and action. But giving a free pass to former Coca-Cola executive Vincente Fox to send workers to the US - and thus avoid having to deal with his own corrupt oligarchy - and to equate this to the Holocaust is an insult to the memory of those who died in Hitler's death camps - and to those suffering in places like Darfur under truly repressive regimes. There is no equivalence.
It's frankly astonishing to hear "progressives" reciting corporatist/racist/conservative talking points, recycled through "conservative Democratic" politicians trying to pander to the relatively small percentage of recently-legal (mostly through recent amnesties or birth) immigrants who are trying to get their relatives into this country by means of Bush's proposed guest worker program or the many variations thereof being proposed.
It's equally astonishing to hear the few unions going along with this (in the sad/desperate hope of picking up new members) turn their backs on Caesar Chávez and the traditions and history of America's Progressive and Union movements by embracing illegal immigration.
Every nation has an obligation to limit immigration to a number that will not dilute its workforce, but will maintain a stable middle class - if it wants to have a stable democracy. This has nothing to do with race, national origin, or language (visit Switzerland with it's ethnic- and language-dived areas!), and everything to do with economics.
Without a middle class, any democracy is doomed. And without labor having - through control of labor availability - power in relative balance to capital/management, no middle class can emerge. America's early labor leaders did not die to increase the labor pool for the Robber Barons or the Walton family - they died fighting to give control of it to the workers of their era and in the hopes that we would continue to hold it - and infect other nations with the same idea of democracy and a stable middle class.
The simple way to do this today is to require that all non-refugee immigrants go through the same process to become American citizens or legal workers in this country (no amnesties, no "guest workers," no "legalizations") regardless of how they got here; to confront employers who hire illegals with draconian financial and criminal penalties; and to affirm that while health care (and the right to provide humanitarian care to all humans) is an absolute right for all people within our boundaries regardless of status, a paycheck, education, or subsidy is not.
The Republican (and Democratic) corporatists who want a cheap labor force, and the Republican (and Democratic) racists who want to build a fence and punish humanitarian aid workers, are equally corrupt and anti-progressive. As long as employers are willing and able (without severe penalties) to hire illegal workers, people will risk life and limb to grab at the America Dream. When we stop hiring and paying them, most will leave of their own volition over a few years, and the remaining few who are committed to the US will obtain citizenship through normal channels.
This is, after all, the middle-class "American Dream." And how much better this hemisphere would be if Central and South Americans were motivated to stay in their own nations (because no employer in the US would dare hire them) and fight there for a Mexican Dream and a Salvadoran Dream and a Guatemalan Dream (and so on).
This is the historic Progressive vision for all of the Americas...
OMG!
You are the most complete moronic fool on the face of the earth. Not only do you know about politics, but you try to paint me as a verbal handjob extrodanaire, when everyone on this board knows that right now, your hand is gripping Mookies small 3in while he types for you a brand new comeback line. Sadly you're the biggest fakes ass, unoriginal wannabe Mexican revolutionary- bag, with old repeated and ignorant rhetoric, sucking commie!
Remember the qoute that made you cry like a big got and led you to exile from here for 2 months? I believe it was this:
"If gay butt ing becomes an olympic sport, we'll have CBF to thank.
Well it holds true to this very day.
Do you always have to talk about rich people and white people, do they scare the bejeebus out of you?
Or are you mad because you walked in on a redneck named Randy, chillidoggin your mom's ties?(BTw, a chillidog is when a man takes a between a woman's breast and ty s her)
Is that why you sound like a weak envious little pussy?
^^^ needs psychotherapy.
^^^^^ get out of here with that crap
As for not prosecuting people that help illegals come over...
You are a moron... the coyotes are the WORST part of the equation and deserve the most punishment.
What crap?
It is sad that these protestors do not understand the gravity, and negative image, it casts upon them to fly the flag of another country. They do their cause a great deal of harm, and certainly it does not foster sympathy for them.
I lived in SA my entire life until last August. Now I'm in a rural area of Pennsylvania; about 97% Anglo. These people have never much talked about latinos, and are fascinated when I talk about Mexican food, or the fact that I was literally in the minority in S. Texas; they really have no clue.
However, now, with the scenes they are witnessing on TV, they certainly have opinions. (those opinions are not positive ones)
How old are you?OMG!
You are the most complete moronic fool on the face of the earth. Not only do you know about politics, but you try to paint me as a verbal handjob extrodanaire, when everyone on this board knows that right now, your hand is gripping Mookies small 3in while he types for you a brand new comeback line. Sadly you're the biggest fakes ass, unoriginal wannabe Mexican revolutionary- bag, with old repeated and ignorant rhetoric, sucking commie!
Remember the qoute that made you cry like a big got and led you to exile from here for 2 months? I believe it was this:
"If gay butt ing becomes an olympic sport, we'll have CBF to thank.
Well it holds true to this very day.
Do you always have to talk about rich people and white people, do they scare the bejeebus out of you?
Or are you mad because you walked in on a redneck named Randy, chillidoggin your mom's ties?(BTw, a chillidog is when a man takes a between a woman's breast and ty s her)
Is that why you sound like a weak envious little pussy?
Green, white and orange.
The difference is that coyotes do it for money... whereas people in churches help immigrants out of humane compassion.
Besides it's not like church ministers are actively bringing people across the border... they simply feed and clothe them....
For all of you ing at the protests, think about it, you think the illegals are gonna say "oh well, ok we'll go back where we came from now" no! The 11 million are here to stay, face it. And most of them don't really give a about the new laws, they still rather break their back cleaning your and get harrassed than eat in their 3d world countries as they were probably doing for years. they took the same decisions your ancestors took long ago. all these laws are doing is uniting the immigrants even more. And no, the wave is not gonna stop as long as US economic policy keeps pushing 3rd world countries deeper and deeper in .
so NO the protests are not gonna stop, NO the 11 million are not gonna go, and NO we won't stop talking in our languages and waving our flags in your face. after all this is mostly political propaganda to divert from the catastrophic war in Iraq and other .
I have said it in the past, and got blasted and earmarked as a socialist (by some posters whom I respect), but as long as the 1st World does not help the 3 World develop, the inmigration problem, which is as big in the US as it is in Europe, will not go away.
And I'm not talking about giving away money but helping create the conditions for 3rd World countries to develop. Doing away with trade barriers and state subsidies would be a good start.
Oh, by the way, I'm as far away from socialism as an Argentine could be.
You're getting dangerously close to espousing a world wide "trickle down" theory there Smeagol.
Internal and external free-markets, along with education and at least the hope of class mobility is what will pull 3rd world countries up. India is doing it. China is doing it. France is peddling backwards.
China and India are huge economies that will eventually muscle themselves out of poverty.
But how can other poor countries who's survival depends on the export of a couple of crops develop, if those crops are being subsidized by the rich nations, or worse, rich nations impose trade barriers to protect their own inneficient farmers?
They cannot.
But in the political climate of the big nation, eliminating those subsidies or barriers would be seen as simply more "jobs going overseas".
In other words, how can a rich nation maintain it's population's standard of living if it has to compete with workers from a country whose living standards are nearly a century and a half removed?
An enigma.
SO, you are saying it's the chicken and the egg enigma. i.e. the poor countries won't develop until the rich countries drop their trade barriers but the rich countries won't drop their trade barriiers until the poor countries don't start paying decent salaries and stop "stealing" jobs from rich countries (i.e. develop).
Well, who is the one who is suffing the most? The poor farmer in Ecuador who was to subsist with $2 a day, or the poor/middle-class American who might lose his job but will be able to find another one or, in the owrst case scenario, is contained by the socail security net?
Go check out the conditions the poor people live in Africa or LatAm and compare them to the conditions of the poor in America or Europe and then come and talk to me.
Mexico is not a third world country. They have tons of oil and are benefiting from so many companies moving there from U.S. The problem is that they have such rampant corruption that the money never gets to the people who need it.
Until Vincente Fox addresses the corruption problem, nothing will EVER change!
I agree with you.
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