I find immigration debate mind-boggling. US has an ability to attract wealthy, educated and intelligent people from all over the world. Instead we are having debates what to do about uneducated and poor illegal Latinos.
Why?
Well, what do you think we should do with them? Theres a whole bunch already here.
Ideally - path to citizenship via education.
Also stop green card lottery and start immigration based on merit - academics, engineers, lawyers. Even if they can't get guaranteed job here within their specialty, you still have high-IQ people having high-IQ kids.
Ok sounds reasonable enough to me.
What about all those jobs Americans just won't do? Are engineers and academics (we have more than enough lawyers already) going to do them, or do you want the engineers to create more automated systems so that we eliminate even more jobs? So we're clear, you argued against the evils of automation in another thread.
The best solution is to enforce the laws we have, and allow for larger (much larger) numbers of guest worker visas to be issued. As someone with intimate knowledge of the migrant worker community I can tell you that many, if not most, of them do not want to immigrate here, they just want to work to take care of their families back home, whatever country that may be.
If you give the people who just want work the ability to come here legally and work, they will, and you will alleviate many of our border related problems. The cartels lose their mules, the people coming across illegally at that point are obviously up to no good and can be treated as such, fewer illegal crossings gives border agents more freedom to do their jobs of protecting the U.S. from real criminals, no more shadow workers, companies would be forced to pull from the available pool of legal workers (why is everyone not already using e-verify?), etc.
The long and short of it is, everything that has been proposed in Congress is a knee-jerk reaction to a problem that no one has done serious research on and everyone seems to just see as a new pool of prospective voters. All of their arguments are framed in such a way (much like most of yours sini) to make anyone who disagrees with them appear cold, callous, and heartless, when the real truth of the matter is that (much like with most of your arguments) that is a false choice, but the sheeple in the country don't care to listen to a real fact based argument because it takes more than a 10 second sound bite to explain the situation.
I'm afraid that our founders were right that the price of liberty is constant vigilance and we now find ourselves in an environment peopled with folks whose attention span is typically less than 30 seconds. With those kind of people voting, we will surely lose our rights in short order. For the record, I'd much rather have a hard working immigrant who truly pines for liberty and freedom in the voting booth than one of the privileged, snot-nosed brats, that we've created over the past few decades in this country.
Of course, I also want politicians to tell the truth, but we all know it will be a cold day in hell before that happens. Hell, its so rare now, that when one does, he gets labeled a kook or a conspiracy nut.
I think Kaotic makes some good points as well.
Though I disagree about the e-verify, I think that shit is not needed and extremely dangerous.
So we're clear, you argued against the evils of automation in another thread.
Evils? No, I rallied against all productivity increases getting channeled to investors at the inclusion of labor.
Look at this way - You have 100 people producing 100 widgets a day getting paid 100$. You buy a machine that lets 50 people to produce 100 widgets a day. If they are getting paid only 50$ then all productivity went to the owner of the machine. This creates great deal of wealth inequality, because 50 people now cannot create economic activity of 100, not even close. Now if 50 people producing widgets got paid 75$, then this would be closer to progress.
Automation is here to stay, eventually in the future you will have 10%, if that, of population doing what we recognize today as work. Rest of the society will be in the service industry. If this 10% of producers do not get compensated comparable to what current 90% do without automation, then you have bunch of unemployment and other social ills and nation, despite being more productive, falls down in quality of life.
What about the people who make the machine, and sell the input materials? I dont like this line of thinking, because it assumes that just because there is less demand for widget making that there is nothing else those people could be doing.
Under this line of thinking, the remaining farmers would all be making millions a year - agriculture once consumed upwards of 90% off all human economic effort. Now less than 2% of the population can feed the rest of us.
Had we applied your way of thinking in the past, I dont think we would have made it very far as a species.
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As an aside, I would not mind seeing states add education credits to unemployment insurance.
I think it has to reach some sort of balance though sini. What good is X amount of production if you can only sell X-Y amount of products because people are unemployed?
Besides, in the olden days, lack of gainful employment was one of the drivers that motivated people to innovate, and innovative people come up with new products, that employ people to make them until automation replaces them and then innovation creates new products, and on and on, ad nauseum. Unfortunately we now make people comfortable in their poverty so they have little/no motivation for innovation.
Derid,
School me on e-verify. I had to use it when I was running a business but all I ever took out of it was that it was saving me a step in not having to fill out and verify I-9 identification any longer. As long as their photo ID matched their social (I know these were strictly forbidden from being used as identification but that ship has already sailed) and the system said they were legal, then I could hire them.
What happens when some data entry clerk screws up the e-verify database entry? No job for you, no reasonable recourse. Just welcome to non-citizenship.
The only way to make it so its not easily bypassed by fake ID is biometrics, which is somewhere else we absolutely do not want to go.
Besides, I dont like the idea of yet another govt database tracking everyone's employment. Then wait for changes to regulations , to include more types of employment that are required to get "verified".
Pretty soon, we will all just be asking the govt for permission to have a job. Sure, just having a little box that saves you paperwork seems innocuous enough at first. The only reason its an issue in the first place, is because of systemic failures elsewhere in govt.
In reality, there should be no need for ID that isnt covered by existing State-issued ID.
Well, I agree with all of that. Guess I hadn't thought it through. Why can't innocuous seeming things actually be?
Ideally - path to citizenship via education.
Also stop green card lottery and start immigration based on merit - academics, engineers, lawyers. Even if they can't get guaranteed job here within their specialty, you still have high-IQ people having high-IQ kids.
This. The purpose of having immigration- at all- is to improve the country. No one has a right to move to another country, you do it at the country's pleasure. Try immigrating to Iceland or China, it can't be done.
As for the so-called jobs Americans won't do. I don't believe they exist. The reason Americans "won't" do them is because of the welfare state.