All in all I like your proposal. Except I would like to point out that you need one more item, and that is real penalties on companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants and better controls on day laborers. If you make it much harder for illegal immigrants to find work, you reduce the incentive for people to become illegals and increase the incentive for people to go with point 3 you made above.
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Bill
I’m not sure how effective a solution this is. I realize everybody talks about it as if it is a solution, but I don’t think it is.
Employers cannot, by law, question ID that’s valid on its face. It would be “discriminatory” if they did. Most fake ID I have seen that illegals have looks pretty good. (Some of it is actually valid, but stolen. Hispanic wallets and purses are much more valuable commodities than those of “Anglos”.) The only way employers can do anything when they suspect they have illegals on board is to call up INS and see if they want to review the ID. Possibly ICE will then pull a raid if there are a lot of them. But then everybody raises thunder for the government “seizing people at work”. If employers don’t get in bed with ICE, and ICE pulls a raid, the employer gets fined. It’s a no-win for employers.
Lots of employers of illegals are illegals themselves who hire out crews as subcontractors. If ICE gets too close to them, they disappear as do their “employees”. Those people pay no taxes at all and there are a LOT of them. No health insurance, unemployment insurance, no workers’ comp. Nothing.
People believe illegals are paying SS, Medicare, etc and get nothing for it. But somebody does. It’s not a “gift to the government”. Every illegal I have ever seen uses a real SSN. Employers can check SSNs with the government to see if they’re valid numbers. But that doesn’t mean the guy whose applying is the guy who “owns” the number. So the benefits actually go to the other guy, who got his SSN lifted somewhere.
Lots and lots and lots of illegals conspire with green card holders about taxes. It is common for any number of them to claim the same children as exemptions; to get the earned income credit, welfare benefits, etc. I have known people who do that, and they just think it’s funny and clever, as well as remunerative.
One unacknowledged result of the government’s refusal to get serious about illegal immigration is the corrupting effect it has on the illegals themselves, their relatives and ethnic bretheren. It’s a whole subculture of cheating, and I’m sure I don’t even begin to know all the ways it works. I just know some of the ways.
One has to realize also how profoundly corrupt are the societies from which many of them come. One thing about previous immigrants was that this society and our governments fully expected them to live according to the law, and honestly, and made it clear. Whatever place they came from, and however corrupt it was, they at least knew things were different here. You worked, and you were entitled to what you earned. You stole and it wasn’t going to be tolerated.
Things are different now. Dishonesty is rewarded. Honesty has become a joke.
Not everybody knows all that. You have to have quite a bit of experience with the interaction between illegals and immigrant legals to know. One other cost of all this is that the people in this country who know the most about it are working people; the people who compete with them for jobs, but who also know them and know what they’re doing.
I don’t know how it is everywhere, but the resentment among working people around here toward illegals is pretty serious, and growing. And it isn’t racial. It has to do with honesty, living on what you actually work for, and staying on the right side of the law. But as I said, when someone sees some guy with a green card operating a subcontracting operation with illegals and putting Americans out of work doing it, it doesn’t go down well. When the whole “benefits” staff in a factory sees health insurance cards (which few Hispanics, legal or not) buy used by people who are pretty clearly not the real holder of the card, it just breeds resentment and cynicism. When HR people see “Jose” come back as “Pedro”, and they know he’s “Jose” but his seemingly-valid ID now says he’s “Pedro”, and the plant needs people so they hire “Pedro” knowing full well he’s “Jose” (or somebody) and all the plant workers know it too, it breeds contempt for Hispanics and for the government. You see, they can’t insist that he’s really “Jose” because they don’t want to be accused of “racial profiling”, or thinking “They all look alike”.
And the irony of the ironies is that all this talk about how “we can’t round up 12 (or whatever number) of illegals and deport them”, is just bunk. They go home voluntarily all the time. Many have no intention of remaining here, and know they are really on a temporary “capital raising” venture into the U.S.
I would favor increased immigration on all levels, balanced by national security concerns and the needs of the economy and people who really are citizens or legal the right way.
But what we have now is all wrong. And this government is fully complicit with it, knowing full well that it’s corrupting and wrong. And this government is fully aware how cynical and corrupting it is being, but does not care.
Let me make one more thing straight. There are a lot of Hispanics in this country who came here the right way, or were here from the beginning. They’re a whole different bunch from the illegals and the people who live off them. But the more this country tolerates the “cheaters”, which, sad to say, often includes legal green card holders of recent vintage, the more the ones who want to live straight are tarnished. Maybe I just don’t “get it”, but if I was a multi-generation Texan of Mexican antecedents, I would be furious about the toleration of illegal immigration.
