The Immigration issue by the RW unfortunately will work!

[RethugAssKicker]

Racism is as American as apple pie... This distraction has worked in the past and unfortunately continues to work...
Many of us here at DU know this immigratin thing is BS... and many of us predicted this months ago.... but the American people will fall for this hook, line and sinker....


WHY??? - very simply - We are a fucking racist country.

[SaveElmer]

1. Republicans already have the racist vote...

What they are going to lose for a generation is the Hispanic vote. Any inroads the may have made there are gone. Arizona, New Mexico are now in play, California is secure...

[Cleita]

2. I hope you are right, but when half of the liberals fall for

this wedge issue, it makes me wonder.

[PsN2Wind]

7. As an Arizona resident

I believe that the immigration issue is more likely to keep AZ red than turn it blue. We are probably more adversely impacted by illegal immigration than most other states. The financial cost of illegals is horrendous as the feds and the other states leave it up to us to bear the cost of educating, medicating and incarcerating those here illegally.

[kurth]

12. Other states feel it too

Witness the veritable explosion in the illegal population in Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland. The business owners love their new obedient workforce and perpetual low wages, but the long-time locals - white, black, whatever - ain't happy campers.

[Cleita]

13. Okay I have to really ask what policies you have in your

state that makes it a problem? In my state, California, we have had illegals from all over the world as long as I can remember and it didn't really impact our economy at all. As a matter of fact, it has helped it in the past.

I believe that the real problem is the feds not providing the funds that they used to. So what are we going to do to fire Bush and get a government that can undo the mess he has made and address these problems in an intelligent, effective and humane way?

[PsN2Wind]

16. Gee, you're going to fire Bush

and in a reply in another thread I was told that person was going to force corporations to pay better and be fair to all their employees. I'm glad the two of you have this all figured out and I expect to start seeing results by the weekend.
In the meantime once amnesty is given to those millions here ILLEGALLY it can't be undone. So you and others have no difficulty telling your fellow citizens that a little healthy competition is a good thing. After all there are all those good jobs just going begging so if a newly-minted legal resident replaces you just move up to something better. If you think there will be no cost, you're naive. And that cost may well be political causing this country more years of the same.

[Cleita]

17. There are 11 million illegals in the US today, just a little

factoid I dug up from the INS website. How are we going to round up all these people before we deport them? I mean if the anti-immigrants are serious about kicking every illegal out of the country, this is one big effing job.

Giving them amnesty is also a big job because each alien has to be interviewed and background checked, before they get a resident card. However, it is more do-able because they are already here, have jobs and a place to live.

[Alcibiades]

24. Undocumented workers work

So the place to regulate them is in the workplace. Maybe some kooks are suggesting that we deport 11 million, but I think we can have a sensible immigration policy without doing that. There are far fewer than 11 million workplaces where undocumented workers work, so we should enforce the law there. This is a workplace issue--after all, we don't say "Golly, there are X million workplaces in this country, we cannot possibly have OSHA inspect them all." we don't say there are X million drug users, X million prostitutes, X million tax cheats, etc. We go after violations of the law where we find them. It made the news the other day that someone in my town got seven years for selling ersatz cocaine. If we can regulate the quality of cocaine, surely we can make some effort to go after folks who undercut society by hiring illegal workers.

At a minimum, we could deport criminal illegal aliens. Contact with law enforcement (i.e., on the part of offenders, not victims) should initiate some sort of INS check if there is probable cause.

I also think some sort of amnesty program should be on the table, much like the Kennedy proposal, but it's only part of the solution. The solution will be more complex than 100% deportation or 100% amnsesty, but it's better than no policy at all, which is the current state of affairs.

[Cleita]

25. If you are going to deport criminal aliens, are you talking about

all criminal aliens or just the Mexicans. Of course that will put a lot of Asian and Russian prostitutes out of work.

[Alcibiades]

18. There are costs to Cali

It costs $600 million to incarcerate illegal alien criminals in CA, $1.28 billion for the education of the children of illegal immigrants.

Not to mention the costs to hospitals for charity care. Though I don't know anything about the group FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), they estimate the cost of illegal immigrants to CA to be $10.5 billion a year. That's just to the state budget, and does not include the effect of suppressing wages for legal workers, or the remittances sent to other countries, and thus out of the CA economy forever (minus whatever is spent on CA products by those receiving the remittances).

Of course, California has some unique advantages. It is hard to say whether the economy would have grown faster without illegal immigration. I did live in your fair state for a number of years, and I do think that it should put up signs at the borders reading "California is full. Go home." I'm not just talking about folks from Central and South America, I'm also talking about people from the other 49 states and the rest of the world. It's such a beautiful place that everyone wants to live there, which will in short order make it not such a beautiful place any more. California needs more people like Alabama needs more skeeters.

Source for the FAIR info: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/immigrationnaturalizatio/a/caillegals.htm

[Cleita]

21. People don't take into consideration the money they spend as

consumers and the taxes they pay. Most of them do have taxes deducted from their paychecks. It's the day laborers that are most often are paid under the table. And I honestly have to say that when I worked in doctors offices most of them paid cash. I didn't have a surplus of medi-cal patients that were Mexican. I'm sure the county hospital sees a lot of them, but everyone that goes to county is poor and it's their last resort.

[Cobalt Violet]

3. We are a classist country too.

[MS Liberal]

4. What part of not legal do you not understand.

I wish the Democratic Party would not support citizenship or any benefit for illegal immigrants. I know they have it hard in their home country and need jobs but I do not approve of them having jobs at the expense of our poor people. There is no job in the world that an American will not do for a fair wage. This includes working in a hot kitchen or back breaking work the field.

These people are here as cheap labor, nothing else. The fact is they are not here legally. You will feel differently when they cause you to lose your job.

[kurth]

5. Maybe we're just Americans who don't care to

wave Mexican flags and speak Spanish and pretend America belongs to Mexico. What's wrong with that?

[Toots]

6. nada

:shrug:

[Cobalt Violet]

8. I'm more in agreement with you than not.

I have been replaced from jobs by illegal immigrants. I lost a house painting job before.

I was merely stating that we are in a classist society.

And if the Democrats don't address the concerns of the blue collar, low income, and working class people they will continue to turn away from our party. And the elitist Democrats will continue to wonder why the lower classes aren't voting for them.

[kurth]

11. Hey, I know guys in the same boat

Computer programmers and engineers replaced by Indians in India, roofers and painters and drywallers replaced by Mexicans. The middle class is being hollowed out from both ends.

Utopia and love and world peace is nice, but you gotta eat and pay the mortgage and make the car payments.

[EFerrari]

9. We are a racist county but it won't work.

Because the Thug base wants to lynch brown people but the Thug corporations want to use them as cheap labor.

It will backfire if we keep our heads.

Keep your head.

[wishlist]

10. It will only work if Dems oppose shoring up border security

Dems need to voice strong support for the border security measures and not allow Repubs to frame the issue to manipulate issues to make Dems look weak on national security/law and order.

[Disturbed]

14. Prison time for anyone hiring Illegal Immigrants.

One year, 1st Violation. Three years for the 2nd and 5 years for the third. That may put a dent in the hiring practices.

No Guest Workers and no Amnesty.

Take away tax incentives of Corps that Outsource and Insource.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

15. Appealing to the fears and xenophobia of people is as old as politiics.

Politicians have been able to manipulate the people with fear of the outsider since the founding of the nation.

Now, everyone is shocked that the outsiders are fighting back. Just as the Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, Poles, did in their turn.

It may work, it may not. The reactionary right seems to think so.

[Alcibiades]

20. Fear and xenophobia

Are not what motivate concerns about immigration, at least not here at DU.

The US is a liberal nation, founded upon enlightenment principles of humanitarian universalism such as that expressed in your sig line, yet it is also a state and, as such, cannot be universal. We have borders, and occupy a discrete place in time and space. I would be in favor of abolishing all borders and establishing a world state, but that's not due to happen for a while. The social order in this country is predicated upon certain arrangements that are undermined if we extend the benefits of citizenship to everyone.

It is not just the reactionary right who are concerned. I'm pretty much an old-school leftist, and I think that illegal immigration is bad for workers who are here legally, bad for the US as a whole, and bad for the nations of origin of the illegal immigrants. The issue as I see it isn't one of opposition to legal immigration, and certainly not to immigrants, but a question of the pace of mass immigration. In the earlier phases of rapid immigration, this country was still rapidly expanding economically. Now our industrial base is contracting, and illegal immigrant workers are competing with the native born and legal immigrants for the shrinking pool of jobs for which a person whose main qualification is the willingness to sweat are qualified.

I doubt that true reactionaries are "shocked that outsiders are fighting back." On the contrary, most are racist separatists, convinced of the fundamental inability of people to get along. They expect, and hope for, social conflict along lines of race and ethnicity.

This country needs to step up and accept responsibility for our support of "anticommunist" corrupt kleptocratic dictatorships in Central and South America during the Cold War. I'd like to see a future where people don't have to come to this country for a decent standard of living, but can enjoy it in their own native lands, surrounded by all the comforts of home.

[MazeRat7]

19. All countries have "racists" - be it toward color, religion, heritage, etc

Every county on earth has "passion" (aka racism) against some other people that they perceive threaten them.

Name one country on this planet that does not have some facet of internal strife between another group within that country.

So no.. this is not an "American" problem... its a "human being" problem.

MZr7

[rman]

22. The racist claim is hard to maintain

with Latino immigrants protesting this immigration legislation. Or would those be self-hating latinos?

[radfringe]

23. looks like a trip to the frame shop is needed

http://radfringe.tripod.com/