:eyes:
Read "
Paul Krugman: The Road to Dubai"
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Imagine ... a future in which America becomes like Kuwait or Dubai, a country where a large fraction of the work force consists of illegal immigrants or foreigners on temporary visas — and neither group has the right to vote. Surely this would be a betrayal of our democratic ideals, of government of the people, by the people. Moreover, a political system in which many workers don't count is likely to ... have a weak social safety net and to spend too little on services like health care and education.
<snip>
As I've said ...
Exploitative employers have several sources of cheap(er) labor that cannot vote and exercise their political rights of self-determination in this country:
(1) illegal aliens who have no intention of immigrating or bringing their families (i.e. "undocumented" guest workers)
(2) illegal 'immigrants' who live under the radar with some immediate or extended family who may or may not be legal residents
(3) "guest workers" admitted under poorly-run programs
(4) incarcerated felons serving time in a prison and working in "prison industry"
(5) ex-felons from our over-populated prison system who've been denied the entitlement to vote
(6) legal residents under a variety of work visas (e.g. H-1B) who allege no intention to immigrate
(7) permanent resident aliens ("green card") who have not applied for citizenship for a variety of reasons including language skills
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/TahitiNut/386To grant citizenship wholesale is not the answer. Unless people have a vested interest in the future direction of the body politic ... a deep concern for the nation in which their children, their family's children, and their children's children will inherit ... I'm not interested in more short-term, sell-out voters. Political self-determination is meaningless without a legacy perspective. It's one of the more tangible manifestations of Rawls' "Veil Of Ignorance," the paradigm of political fairness and the extension of one of our more familiar tactics for achieving equity between two children and one candybar:
One child gets to cut it in half and the other child gets to pick which half they want. If we could only draft our laws and regulate our economy in the same way ... without knowedge of how we would gain a narrow advantage by the choices we make.