I agree with a lot of your points, and it’s wonderful that you sponsored a family. However, re black youths that are unemployed, I’ve never heard or seen a study with reasons why. Yes, immigration could play a role, but are some of these youths high school drop outs, or do some of them have that attitude that’s very common among people today, that the pay isn’t high enough and they’re entitled to a better job then frying hamburgers, janitorial work, cleaning homes and toilets or even picking crops! I heard the other day that some farmers are paying $17 an hour for crops to be picked, but no Americans want to do it!
I think part if the problem is with the culture nowadays. Children are passed from one grade to another when they can’t read. Grades are inflated so a C student will get an A or B and failing students say the teacher doesn’t understand or they blame it on their poverty. Then when they get to the workplace, they aren’t coddled and either are fired or quit.
Maybe the immigrants don’t expect much and are hungry for any job, no matter how menial. Immigration laws do need to change, but deportation among people who aren’t criminals can’t happen, and as much as I like Trump, he has to know that.
I did not mean to suggest that there are no other factors in black youth unemployment. But I do think the United Farm Workers would dispute the assertion that there are no natives or legal residents who will pick crops. Them aside, I think one of the problems with all of that are the child labor laws. I picked strawberries for money when I was a kid, picked tomatoes and worked in a tomato cannery. I was glad to get the opportunity. But nobody paid any attention to the child labor laws then. I am going to guess that about half of my fellow workers were under the age of 16.
It could be that kids today wouldn’t do it, but just this past summer I saw some American kids picking for money…for a Hispanic gentleman who could barely speak English. It was one of those “pick your own” places. But people who just wanted the berries but didn’t want to pick them could buy them already picked by those kids. I can’t remember what the kids got per quart, but it was a lot more than I got back in the day. I think they were getting $1.25 per quart. Pretty good wages for a 12 or 13 year old. A good strawberry picker in a good patch can pick 50 quarts/day without too much difficulty. The most I ever saw anyone pick was 100 quarts/day, but those were all teenage girls years ago. I never saw a boy of any age reach that.
Again, illegals self-deport all the time. One of the reasons is that they are often investing their earnings back home. I know a guy and his son who alternate working here. Half the year, the father works here while the son tends their growing peach orchard near Mexico City. The other half, it’s reversed. I asked the man how much fresh peaches cost in Mexico City. “About the same as here” he said.
I know another man who sends his money to his wife in Guatemala. With it, she buys up banana-growing land there.
So, it’s not about starvation or even privation a good part of the time. It’s about currency differences. U.S. currency has been climbing relative to other currencies. Mexico and some other countries stagger from currecy crisis to currency crisis, and the dollar is much sought after.
Lichtenstein has the highest per capita income in the world. You can’t work in Lichtenstein if you’re not a citizen, and they don’t grant that very often. If I sneaked into Lichtenstein and made their kind of money in order to buy farm land or duplexes in the U.S., having an advantage over my fellow citizens in doing so, would Lichtenstein be unjust in kicking me out if they learned I was illegal? Hard to think so. And it’s hard to justify my going there, sneaking in and perhaps taking a job from a Lichtensteiner just because I want an advantage over my fellow Americans.
Similarly, I had an aunt whose husband had German citizenship. He died. She reached retirement age. She found out that the German version of Social Security is more generous than American Social Security (or was at the time) and she could gain by applying for the German version instead of the American version. She wouldn’t do it, because notwithstanding German laws, she knew that neither she nor her husband had ever paid a nickel into it, and she would be riding on the backs of Germans who had.
Certainly some foreigners, a lot of them, could get an advantage over their fellow citizens in their home countries by sneaking into the U.S. But I have yet to see anybody persuasively argue that it’s right or proper for them to do it. Remember, wages in Mexico are about 1/3 what they are here. But so is the cost of living. And unemployment is lower there than here.
What’s right about giving them an advantage over their fellow Mexicans when that’s really what we’re doing. And what’s right about their taking advantage of American taxpayers?
If the U.S. wants to increase immigration for rational reasons (and there can be some) that’s fine with me. But to encourage illegality and the fraud and forgery that goes along with it, is simply wrong.
Alas, the little one in my belly sorta prevents that.