Gut TSA, and suddenly you can afford a lot more Border Patrol Agents. Gut BATFE, and suddenly you can afford a bunch more. Get my drift? We CAN have a tighter border if we adjust what we're willing to pay for, and it isn't necessary to extort more money out of the taxpayer to pay for it. Gut welfare and people will go back to work to take the jobs they used to fill when I was a mere laddie, and the illegal immigration population will dry up. The vast majority of them did not come here for political reasons. They came here for economy reasons. If you remove those reasons by removing welfare, forcing people to work, then those jobs will dry up, and illegal immigration will dry up with it.cb1000rider wrote:karder,
I generally agree with our assessment.
I think it's a great example of fear-mongering that has resulted in constituents with massively opposite views. As such, the Republican party can't do anything that doesn't include "increasing border security". I'd like it if they just framed it in reality: It's going to result in a tax increase. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But it will hit eventually. I'm bet some of those guys are smart enough to know that doubling our border patrols (again) isn't going to solve the problem, but they also know that they need a token for their constituents.
You can erect a huge wall. As long as we essentially look the other way once you're about 60 miles off the border in terms of employment, the size and difficulty of the "border security" just makes it a little harder to get here.
We should accept the things we either can't or are unwilling to change, such as real enforcement against people or companies that benefit from this labor, we could have a constructive discussion of what we should do about it. There is a lot we could do to make it easier to go back and forth, with an emphasis on the BACK. We could tax the privilege to work here, as these people are spending real money to get here illegally. We could limit benefits (excluding emergencies) and do something about the current "anchor-baby" policy that is the origin of welfare and support.
With that discussion, we have to recognize and look past the fear mongering. We (US citizens) get very real and tangible economic benefits due to these workers. If they magically evaporated overnight, we would all feel it in our wallets... But no one talks about that.
Ben Franklin is alleged to have once said:
We do not do favors for the chronically unemployed by paying them to stay out of the labor force. The more people are in the labor force, the more tax revenues are collected. The less money they make washing dishes, and suffer a bit because of it, the more incentive they will have to do the things required to improve their existences. It's all part of a big organic whole, and we have to treat it holistically, not by paying people to stay home.“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
But instead of doing these perfectly sane things, we create generations of people who think they are entitled to the benefits they receive from the labors of their betters. And yes, these people ARE their betters. It takes a pretty low person to make the deliberate decision to just stay home and live off the public dole. That is a person who is deficient of character. The rest of us should not be required to support the character deficient. I am not talking about unemployment insurance. I'm not even talking about temporary state charity. One measure of a culture is how well it takes care of its less fortunate. But when you live chronically on the public dole, you are no longer unfortunate, are you? You HAVE a job, and your job is to stay home and get paid.
Instead of actually wanting to fix things, progressives are hard at work implementing the Cloward-Piven strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2 ... n_strategy), and it IS working. They don't want to fix the immigration problem because as long as it remains broken, they accelerate that strategy. If they can rig it by means of "immigration reform" so that these illegals can vote themselves more of the taxpayer's largess (and they WILL) then that strategy will accelerate so fast that we'll see it come to fruition in my lifetime.........which, because I'm 60 years old, means within the next 20 years. Think about that for a moment........the COMPLETE collapse of the USA as a world power, as even a country able to meet its obligations to its citizens.
We HAVE to close the border.......not to prevent immigration, but to prevent ILLEGAL immigration. Traitors.... excuse me, I meant to say "democrats".......don't WANT to control the border. It is not in their party's interest.