by Garrett Anderson

Created on: February 27, 2009

Let me get straight to the point. The chief reason we have an immigration problem in the U.S. is that greedy American business had to import cheap labor. Government and business conspired to improve margins as cheaply as possible without labor unions and benefits. Your government did nothing to stop this. They simply looked the other way and collected taxes. Your former president comes from the border state of Texas. Think he might have had a few friends in need of cheap labor? It may be too late to do anything about illegal immigration.

In the 1960's, the United States of America had a controlled and orderly method of immigration that allowed about a million legal immigrants each year. It worked fine. In the mid 1980's we had the Immigration Reform Act which as it turns out, was one of the most ineffective and non enforced pieces of legislative garbage ever signed into law. It was designed to prevent employers from employing illegal aliens, (*wink) but the flood continued. The government simply abandoned the southern border by taking away funding and lowering staffing levels to skeletal levels. American business flourished under this lack of enforcement. As long as business was happy and paying taxes, so was our government.

Fraud and human trafficking has risen dramatically in the Bush years. Congressman Charles Rangel has called the guest worker program, "the closest thing I've ever seen to slavery." In the process of trying to obtain guest worker visas, workers typically fell victim to debt loads at high interest rates in order to land short term and low wage jobs that are far worse than they were originally promised. Under crushing debt and legally bound to work for the employer who sponsored them, they work long and hard hours under poor conditions and without insurance and other benefits. Employers hold their documents so that they will not leave. The exploitation begins when recruiters promise workers in other countries a better life and many of them- already impoverished- mortgage everything they have to pay the recruiters for travel expenses to get to the U.S. Once they are on the ship, they are at the mercy of employers and the guest worker program. It is a sham.

American taxpayers bear the additional costs of illegal immigration. Infrastructure strain is swelling government costs. Our health care system, judicial systems, public school systems, criminal justice systems, and even highway and insurance costs have risen to dramatic levels. Our tax burdens

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