The Last Best Hope
The president claims that the immigration bill now being debated in Congress is the last, best hope for immigration reform.
Not exactly.
The best hope of stopping the influx of illegal aliens is with a physical barrier; along with severe punishment for those who hire illegals. As well as raising wages for Americans.
Stopping the flow of illegals will not happen with this bill as it gives amnesty to almost everyone that is here illegally. Just like in 1986, this bill will increase the number of illegals. Should this bill pass, I imagine that in another twenty years or so, we will have to pass another bill—except the next one will be written in Spanish.
This bill is crap.
Note that it is receiving bipartisan support. That means that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have the best interests of the citizens at heart. That’s no surprise to me, as I have been saying that for years.
The sole purpose of this bill is to keep wages down, and exorbitant profits up.
We are told that illegals will do the work that Americans won’t do. That is the biggest lie in the immigration debate
Illegals will do the work all right, for a lot less than Americans will do it for.
Take the construction industry. Forty years ago, ten bucks an hour for building houses was a decent, average wage. Forty years ago, houses cost $26,400 on average.
The average price of a house has risen to $305,900, according to the census bureau.
(In a perfect world, the guys building houses would be making eighty four dollars an hour, but that’s another essay.)
Yet the developers still want to pay ten bucks an hour. Damn right Americans won’t do it for that paltry amount! How can they afford to buy the houses they are building?
You want to keep the flow of illegals down? Pay a decent wage to construction workers!
“Won’t the prices of houses go up?
The costs will, the prices won’t. They won’t rise above what people are willing to pay.
The truth is that PROFITS will decrease if they have to be shared with the folks who actually do the work of building. And if you check how much money the housing industry is giving Congress, you can see why this bill has a good chance of passing.
Labor costs as a percentage of home prices are a fraction of what they once were. As long as they are not paying eighty-four bucks an hour to the workers, high wages are not the reason for high home prices.
You want Americans to pick your crops? Offer fifteen dollars an hour and see how many applications you get!
Americans will do the jobs all right, they just need enough to pay their bills.
Another big lie told in the immigration story is that unemployment is near record lows of 4.5%. We “need” more workers.
A number of years ago, the federal government “recalculated” the unemployment statistics. As it stands now, essentially once you stop receiving unemployment, you’re no longer unemployed. Add to this the “underemployed.”
A good rule of thumb to gauge the true unemployment rate is to simply double the official government number. That would make 9% as the true unemployment rate.
9% of Americans are out of work. Is it possible some of them would want to make $15/hr picking fruit? I know I would if I needed a job! The price of produce may rise a bit—but not past the point people will pay.
The last, best for immigration reform is to attack it at the root cause—greed.
Comments
I was unsure how I felt about this issue until I talked to an immigrant, from a country other than Mexico.
This young man's family came here from South Africa. It took them five years and much of their savings to get citizenship here. They originally came to Southern California then moved north. To their disgust, the community they came to was filled with immigrants from a nearby country who totally skirted the immigration laws. You can imagine how they felt upon seeing this.
I thought about this situation and came up with a scenario for others to use. Imagine that you are the father of 6 children and every night at the dinner table they all make requests for money. You don't have enough for all of them but you do what you can when someone's need is great. However, the kid sitting nearest to you routinely picks your pocket of most of the money, and the other kids know it, as do you. But you look the other way and tell the others there's just not enough money to go around, which earns you their eternal disrespect.
This is our situation with Mexico. They get favored immigration status because they live next door. They get to break our rules and cut in line and this has a negative impact on all the other immigrants around the world who would really like to live in America, the greatest nation on earth.
This is an unfair system, and I agree with you Quentin. Before we do anything else about immigration, we need a strong border security system. I will be unhappy with BOTH political parties if they fail in this matter.
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Thank you for writing Dane. I can always count on well-reasoned opinions from you, sir.
Excellent analogy!
I trust your last statement indicates a move toward one of the parties that truly represent Americans.
Quentin
Posted by: Dane Langston | June 6, 2007 10:44 AM
Quentin, I gree with you, we have been sold out by both parties.
Bush has been a real disappointment to me and I just don't understand his agenda on this one, clearly 2/3rds of the people want meaningful immigration reform.
So, what's going on here? Why are we being fed this garbage bill that is just an amenesty program? It's going to make American citizenship worth about as much as Confederate money.
We could have and should have resolved this problem a decade ago! Now it's acute and costing us billions more than it should be had we acted in a timely manner and we're still not there yet.
We've writen about this subject extensively on Post Scripts and basically came to the same conclusions you have.
Maybe we should vote em all out and start over?
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Thank you for writing, Jack.
No maybes about it sir, we DEFINITELY should vote them all out!
Posted by: Jack Lee | June 7, 2007 11:28 AM
From Post Scripts....
"Mr. President, may I remind you, your current stance on illegal immigration was not what you promised the American people when you ran for election and further it conflicts with the Constitution of the United States....
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence." Section 4. Article 4. U.S. Constitution
As the President of the United States you took an oath to uphold and defend our Constitution and that Constitution demands that our borders be protected from invasion. We are being invaded by millions of law breakers...look at our prisons! California in particular has been inundated, our crime is rising and our prisons are over flowing with illegals."
Jack
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Thank you for sharing this, Jack.
I had predicted that even the staunchest of Republicans would eventually see the truth about Mr. Bush:
He needs to be impeached for the good of this country.
Quentin
Posted by: Jack | June 8, 2007 11:49 AM