Get a Widget for this title
RSS FeedWould a wall on America's southwest border reduce illegal immigration or provide an expensive bandaid?
Results so far:
| Reduce | 35% | 73 votes | Total: 211 votes | |
| Bandaid | 65% | 138 votes |
Reduce
Write now
Print
Invite a writer™
Add to FavoritesOf course it will REDUCE the number of illegal immigrants coming over our border. It will NOT curtail illegal immigration. Where there is a will, there is a way.
An article in the Los Angeles Times reported that the border patrol at the Otay Mesa port of entry found three (3) adult illegal immigrants under the hood of a Ford pickup truck.
One of them suffered burns from being against the hot engine. She was taken to a "medical facility" and treated, for FREE, for her injuries. The driver of the pickup was detained at our expense.
A second article in the Los Angeles Times reported that the city of Baldwin Park is being sued by Day Laborers because their First Amendment rights are being violated by the ordinances prohibiting them to block the sidewalks.
The problem is, it will cost Baldwin Park an enormous amount of money to defend a law their citizens support. Further, the majority of these "day workers" are illegal immigrants who do NOT have any First Amendment rights.
Some say the Mexican government should tighten up their border guard. I highly doubt it is illegal to stand on the Mexican border and look into the United States. I further doubt that "escaping" from Mexico is a capital crime.
So, the potential illegal immigrant isn't breaking the law until they take "that step" across the border into our country. Once they do, it becomes our problem unless we want the Mexican police in our country. I don't want them...
Mexico should pass a law that it is illegal to touch or climb on the fence or to be in the separation zone between the fences and the penalty should be high. That way, there is a way to capture them in the act before they step foot on American soil AND they would be criminals in Mexico when we send them back if they manage to make it undiscovered.
Of course there are going to be immigrants who enter legally and overstay their visa. We get to determine how many visas we want to issue. For every visa that is overstayed, that country's visas allocation is reduced by one. That would put pressure on those countries to have better control of their citizens.
When a legal immigrant becomes illegal due to their visa expiring and they are apprehended they would have to produce the original visa or be presumed to have climbed the fence. There should be consequences in the country the overstayed person comes from when we deport them.
The fence, along with some common sense laws and enforcement would make it less attractive for people to take "that step" onto United States soil and become our problem.
In the meantime, we need to issue a National Identification Card to every legal resident in the United States. If the person is a foreign national here on a visa the card would have an expiration date. It would also have information about what services they are entitled to and if they are allowed to work.
No valid card, no work, no services paid for by the Tax Payers, no incentive to stay or come to the USA. We won't have to deport many people. They will leave or starve.
The system should be simplified to allow an EMPLOYER to be able to reward good employees on temporary work visas by getting their status extended. The current system is too costly AND too cumbersome for small businesses to manage.
Pass a law that ALL government (city, state, federal) documents are printed in English only. Think of the energy, labor, money and trees we would save. Also, ALL public education would be in ENGLISH only. Leave it to the private sector to fund alternative language education, but you couldn't graduate high school until you could speak, read and write in ENGLISH at the same level as public education.
If I had my way it would be illegal to have an answering machine say press a number to hear this menu in ANY language. This is the United States of America, not the United States of Mexico or any other country. English is the language of this country.
Learn more about this author, Poppa Dave.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.
Bandaid
A wall sounds like it will keep people out (or in, depending on your perspective), but if people really want to be on the other side of a wall, they'll find a way. They can dig underneath the wall. They can climb over the top. They can walk around it. They can swim around it or take a boat. And people really want to get to the other side of this wall!
The way to stop illegal immigration is to eliminate the benefits of coming here. The reason Mexicans forsake the law in order to get here is not because they are lawless, evil people. It's because they can make comparatively more money here than they can in Mexico. The kinds of jobs they get here don't pay much by our standards, but by theirs, it's a lot of money. They can send money home and provide for their extended families who might otherwise be starving. This is a great incentive to come to this country, and one for which we can hardly blame them. But we must force them to follow legal methods of doing it.
This money/job incentive needs to disappear. That's the ONLY way we will stop the influx of illegal aliens flowing across our borders. If no one will hire them here, they will not come. There would be no reason for them to do so.
Does this take an act of Congress? No. All it takes is someone with the guts to stand up and start enforcing the laws that are already on the books. It is illegal in this country to hire a non-citizen without proper documentation. Yet companies are knowingly doing it every day, because they can pay these illegal aliens much less than they'd have to pay a citizen. American citizens must get the minimum wage. Illegal aliens don't often get paid that much. Companies know they won't complain, because then the complainer would be discovered as illegal and tossed out of the country. So the aliens keep quite about the illegal pay rate, the companies keep quiet about the fact that their employees are illegal aliens, and it's only the law-abiding citizens who lose ground when other, undeserving non-citizens use up public services put there for the benefit of our citizens. Greedy corporate America wins. We, the people, lose.
Make the corporations who have knowingly run slipshod over the law for the sake of their own bottom line pay the price. When they lose more money than they save by hiring illegal aliens, they will finally do the right thing. Corporations aren't humans. They have no conscience. We must buy their willingness to do the right thing by severely hampering their profits when they don't. Make sure this happens and our illegal immigration problemes will be solved.
Forget the wall. Enforce the law!
Learn more about this author, Kim Brockman.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.
Difference of opinion? Debate now.
- US Immigration
- Should landlords be penalized for renting to illegal immigrants?
- Guest worker program: The solution to the immigration issue?
- Should illegal immigrants be entitled to receive benefits?
- Should US immigration laws be reformed?
- Should US immigration reform focus on amnesty for illegal aliens or tighter enforcement of borders?
- Should the US allow for more lenient immigration policies toward highly skilled workers?
