U.S. Illegal Immigration

[Goalie]

What should be done about all the illegal immigrants in the United States. I believe the total is up to 12 million now.

[Strike For The South]

Here we go agian

[Crazed Rabbit]

Secure the border, then start deporting all the ones we can find. Enough whining about how it'd take a long time. Sure, it would. But it'd also get the message across that we will find you, thousands of miles from the border and maybe years later, and we will grab you and your illegal family and throw your sorry butt on the next prison bus to mexico.

Quick deportation and harsh punishment for hiring illegals will reduce the number trying to get in. Another amnesty and half-hearted enforcement of existing laws will not.

Crazed Rabbit

[Lemur]

What bothers me is the essential unfairness of letting lots of immigrants into the country just because their nation is next to ours. I've known people who came here from Ireland, Serbia, Nigeria, and all of them had to jump through some serious hoops to make it happen. They couldn't just wade across a waist-deep river and start their life in the U.S.A.

If we're going to expand immigration, as the President seems to want, we should do it across the board, and not play favorites with Mexico. Lots of people want to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and they should have a fair chance to get in.

Oh, and BetterKick, it's something of a tradition in the Backroom to include a Gah! option for people who don't agree with any of the options presented in a poll. You can declare yourself Gah!-proof, but there are consequences. Just ask Pindar about his mauling by geese.

[Taffy_is_a_Taff]

Oh, I'm a hoop jumper, wish I were a river-wader...

...so I say deport all the river waders

[Proletariat]

What bothers me is the essential unfairness of letting lots of immigrants into the country just because their nation is next to ours. I've known people who came here from Ireland, Serbia, Nigeria, and all of them had to jump through some serious hoops to make it happen. They couldn't just wade across a waist-deep river and start their life in the U.S.A.

This is my main beef in a nutshell, aside from the absolute plummet in wages for menial jobs over the last couple decades. Where I work there are tons of nurses and medical technicians who go through pretty daunting ordeals to come here from the Phillipines and Africa and other places to earn a living.

I'm also really sick of people shouting the old line, 'BUt AMERIKA WUZ BUILT BY IMMIGRANTS'

This canard shouldn't need to be gone over and over again, but we keep hearing it. America wasn't built by one culture storming the border. It was by an immigration process that allowed many different groups to come in at a time.

Everytime you have another Mexican person come here, it opens the door for another Mexican person. People rarely migrate to a country where they won't have any friends, family or contacts to help them with the process. So for all the people who are saying, 'If you're anti-(illegal)immigration you're racist against Mexicans!' you really need to understand that by saying this, you're giving one group a massive amount of leverage with which to overwhelm the immigration system. In essence you just want the Mexicans to immigrate.

It's as if people in this country have forgotten that hard working people also come from other cultures besides our Latin neighbors. There's a ton of Eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians and so forth that are dieing to come here and for all their following the rules and regulations, they get sent to the back of the line to wait behind a sanctimonious group who's screaming 'poor us' when they are themselves the problem.

Anyone caught hiring illegals oughta face twice whatever punishment the illegal gets (2x slap on the wrist LAWLz!11). Seriously, let's deport the people who hire these illegals.

[Xiahou]

In a perfect world, they should all be deported- thus my vote. By granting some form of amnesty we're rewarding them for breaking our laws, which punishes immigrants who play by the rules and encourages more to come via illegal means.

However, at this point, I don't even want the issue of what to do with current illegal immigrants addressed. Before we can do anything productive on this front, we have to secure the border. It's infuriating to me that our Congress seems intent on lumping these two issues together. What's likely to come of that is some half-assed border security plan that will do little more than waste money and give beaurocrats job security, while granting some form of amnesty to current illegals.... all the while they'll continue crossing the border by the thousands.

I want Congress to pass a border security measure that will work- first and foremost. Once the border is proven to be secure, then decide what to do with the illegals that are already here. I agree that its grossly unfair to let them stay without repurcussion, but if these are the last ones we have to deal with in such numbers, I really wont care what Congress does.

[Kagemusha]

My opinion is in order to limit the problem you guys should punish severerely the employers that employ workers without work permission.After one of the reasons that the illegal immegrants flow in in my opinion is that they know how easy is for them to get job in US without work permission. The employers that hire the illegals should be considered as traitors becouse they are just leeching your system.

[doc_bean]

The employers that hire the illegals should be considered as traitors becouse they are just leeching your system.

Can't you get them on breaking some ancient slave labour laws or something ?

[Haudegen]

My opinion is in order to limit the problem you guys should punish severerely the employers that employ workers without work permission.After one of the reasons that the illegal immegrants flow in in my opinion is that they know how easy is for them to get job in US without work permission. The employers that hire the illegals should be considered as traitors becouse they are just leeching your system.

I support the idea.

(EDIT: Though I think the term "traitor" is a bit too harsh. IMHO the crime has the quality of an average fraud, no more and no less.)

It has also the advantage that employers have an address. They can easily be found and checked by the police. It´s probably more efficient than searching in every house in the USA for illegal Mexicans.

Employers can´t easily hide from the authorities, which makes them more likely to follow the laws if the punishment is sufficiently deterring.

[Major Robert Dump]

No one is going to go after employers because the employers who employ them are by far and large small businesses. The law will be all over big companies, which is why big companies require a 2 page work legality form to be completed according to federal standards.

Yup, its the small businesses, and those small businesses add up, especially when you consider word of mouth between illegals and potential illegals. And no one is going to go after small businesses unless said business is doing a whole slew of other illegal things.

I voted deported because of the word illegal in the poll. And while we're at it we need to clean up the guest worker program because companies can take advantage of uneducated immigrants ala the Ford factory towns that gave rise to the labor movement at the beginning of last century. Does anyone else see a theme here?

[Beirut]

Gentlemen,

Don't ever include options such as "machinegun them" in a poll when discussing groups of people.

Thread open - poll locked.

[Haudegen]

Yup, its the small businesses, and those small businesses add up, especially when you consider word of mouth between illegals and potential illegals. And no one is going to go after small businesses unless said business is doing a whole slew of other illegal things.

Enforcing laws costs money. But I think it´s better invested in an agency that investigates these employers than in a fortified border or an agency that finds illegals and puts them back to their home countries. Cause these last two options only deal with symptoms while the first should solve the cause of the problem.

[Redleg]

Can't you get them on breaking some ancient slave labour laws or something ?

Slave labor laws were struck down with a little thing called the American Civil War.

Or maybe your thinking of the child labor laws that went into effect to prevent abuse of children in the work force.

[Goalie]

Well since the fuzz shot down this poll, ill start a new thread and poll.

[Devastatin Dave]

I vote for "delete" them...

[Goalie]

I vote for "delete" them...

lol, so do i, please post on my new thread so we can get the poll going cause they closed down this one.

[Ser Clegane]

A new poll has been started.

Closed