Whatever we do we better be careful what we ask for. By that I mean all the manual work that they do (farms, construction, etc). In all seriousness, if not them who in the hell would step in?

A lot of people would step in, if the pay was commensurate with the amount of labor required. We're enjoying a free ride on the backs of people willing to take less than the market rate would be if they weren't here. Even Cesar Chavez recognized this. He was no fan of illegal immigrants because he knew they were depressing wages. They still do.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Maybe :) of course we the consumer will wind up footing the bill in terms of increased prices for goods & services

Of course we are. But we want our (cheap) cake and to eat it as well (or our cheap lettuce... whatevs ;-), so we turn a blind eye to the kind of exploitation that we normally scold other countries about. But that's because we like reasonably priced Nikes and iPhones and soccer balls and all that other stuff.

Yet, even with what these folks are making here they're still making many times what they'd make back in the hellholes from whence they came. If they could even find employment, that is. So on that point, I do sympathize with them. But we need to help them over THERE. Not over HERE.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Here's what will happen with the immigration debate: You will continue to make the same arguments that you have made for decades, and half the country will find them utterly unconvincing, while the other side embraces them fully. Likewise, I will make different arguments, and half the country will reject them. The result will be two sides even further apart and incapable any bipartisan legislation. Eventually, after several decades, one side will gain a sufficiently strong upper hand that they will "win" and their partisan legislation will be passed. The end result will be even greater anger and bitterness on the part of the losing side.

I prefer "illegal aliens." "illegal" has no noun form (other than illegality), so it's just a pejorative colloquialism applied only to immigration-related crime.

Are you implying that's some sort of change?

Am I reading this right? You want to force all illegal aliens out, but you just want the method to run through their economic choke points (the employers)?

Honestly, I think the immigrant community and their protectors sees either type of enforcement -- at an individual level or at an employer level -- as equally inhumane or racially motivated. The issue isn't picking one enforcement method or the other for them. It's picking any effective enforcement method.

Sure. Far easier to regulate economic choke points than physical choke points. And it directly attacks the core motivation for illegal migration - economic incentive.


For former assertion isn't quite true. There are many immigrants and immigrant lobbyists who support expanding/improving the H-2A Agricultural Guestworker program. Take the organization Farmworker Justice, for one. And H-2A is primarily enforced at the employer. The immigration debate has a broad spectrum of ideological position on both sides. The extremes are what you describe about any enforcement being inhuman on the one side, and lining of a long row of 0.50 cal machine guns on the other. There's "50 shades of gray" between those two depending on who you talk to.

For the latter, point, it's not about effective enforcement methods, it's about *cost-effective* enforcement methods. And beyond that it's about whether we really want enforcement at all. We send very, very mixed messages to illegal immigrants. We have many (large) business actively recruiting and waving them over, setting up housing for them, providing services, and helping them send money back home. Those businesses are in both "red" and "blue" states. Those business kind of tuck the workers out of the way so they're not seen regularly by "the electorate". For example in Florida's orange groves, the housing is often tucked inside the orange groves so that workers literally never have to leave the grove. And those business are given political protection by state governments. Even in "red states" where politicians may pretend to be "anti-immigrant" to quell the populists masses, they're far more expedient in terms of actually doing anything. That's a huge part of the reason nothing ever happens. We don't know what we want. We're all over the place.

Expanding a worker program doesn't mean anything when it comes to ascertaining a group's feelings about true enforcement of illegal immigration.



Look. Obviously nobody's talking about 50 cal machine guns. But with the two methods we are discussing, both end up requiring the illegal immigrants to head back home. Therefore both methods achieve the same goal, and both methods largely cause the same pain.



Yeah, we send mixed messages to drug lords too. We say we don't want the mass killings, but then we buy the coke and the heroine that finance it all. I understand. However, it is unclear why you bring this up. Is it to say that until there are no mixed messages we shouldn't enforce the law? Because if that isn't it, then the mixed messages argument is kind of a red herring in terms of whether we'll choose enforcement method a or enforcement method b. I mean we established why the illegal immigrants come here long ago.