The Problem With Immigration "Reform"

Ace of Spades Opines:

Although reasonable people may disagree on this, I think the main problem with the immigration plans offered by Bush and the Senate is this:

Most Americans saw the words "immigration reform" as meaning enforcing border security and allowing some legal guest-worker immigration. The idea, we thought, was no to increase the numbers of immigrants working in America, nor to increase the numbers of legal immigrants, but to regularize, legalize, and recognize some fraction of the immigrants working here already.

I didn't think "immigration reform" was going to be an amnesty, or a bonanza of new legal immigrant citizens, or a huge new number of legalized immigrant workers.

Bush and the Senate seem to think the only problem with illegal immigrants is that they're 1) illegal and 2) immigrants. So they have a solution-- we'll just make them all immediately legal, and in a couple of years, non-immigrant citizens.

Well, that does solve the problem, in the sense you won't have illegal immigrants anymore. You'll have legal citizen workers.

But that's not the way most of us were looking at the problem. We sort of thought the main problem was that we had too many low-skilled workers coming into America, displacing Americans who would otherwise be doing those low-skill jobs (as they historically have), and furthermore creating problems with public services, as they simply don't pay nearly enough in taxes to reach the break-even point as far as public services. I trust most conservatives understand that it's the rich who pay the lion's share of the taxes, federal and property and so forth; importing millions of people who pay little to no taxes, while having a great need of public services, just means that everyone else has to pay more.

Read the whole thing...

UPDATE:

Victor David Hanson comments on illegal immigration (excerpt):

Zealots may chant ¡Si, se puede! all they want. And the libertarian right may dress up the need for cheap labor as a desire to remain globally competitive. But neither can disguise a cynicism about illegal immigration, one that serves to prop up a venal Mexican government, undercut the wages of our own poor and create a new apartheid of millions of aliens in our shadows.

We have the entered a new world of immigration without precedent. This current crisis is unlike the great waves of 19th-century immigration that brought thousands of Irish, Eastern Europeans and Asians to the United States. Most immigrants in the past came legally. Few could return easily across an ocean to home. Arrivals from, say, Ireland or China could not embrace the myth that our borders had crossed them rather than vice versa.

Today, almost a third of all foreign-born persons in the United States are here illegally, making up 3 to 4 percent of the American population. It is estimated that the U.S. is home to 11 or 12 million illegal aliens, whose constantly refreshed numbers ensure there is always a perpetual class of unassimilated recent illegal arrivals. Indeed almost one-tenth of Mexico's population currently lives here illegally!