Immigrants, even illegal immigrants bring a vitality to the US that cannot be denied (as I will explain later).
If it cannot be denied, then you do not need to explain.
Regardless, it can be denied, and I will proceed to do so once I see the basis for your assertion.
The shortage in unskilled labour is estimated to run in the hundreds of thousands of workers “per year”. For instance, construction workers produced 185,000 jobs annually. Workers earn between 30K and 50K a year. Employers in masonry and dry walling cannot find enough young Americans to do the work (remember we are at 4.5% unemployment).
One could just as easily argue that this is a problem created by immigration, not one to be solved by it. Americans have increasingly sought higher education since the 60's because that is increasingly the only option available to them now that manual labor fields are being made economically uncompetitive by mass immigration.
Restaurants are in worse shape. Their field employs 12.5 million workers, the nations largest private sector employment. Their demand is expected to grow at a rate of 15% between 2005 and 2006. Native born work force (teenagers/adults between 16 to 24 years old) will not expand at all, and overall native born workforce will only expand 10%. So the question is, are older Americans willing to bus tables and flip hamburgers? Some might be, but odds are that the majority will not.
The restaurant industry is growing because population is growing. Immigration accounts for the vast majority of population growth; the last set of statistics I saw had the American population actually slowly declining without immigration, although those statistics were admittedly outdated. At any rate, this is another case of a problem caused by, not solved by, immigration.
A majority of older Americans will not work those jobs
at current wages. Wages will have to go up to encourage employment in those fields. Last I heard, that is a positive thing.
Mexico to the South of us does have unskilled labour to spare. For instance the move from subsistence agriculture to economies that require investment capital means more labour will be free’d up, couple that with the failure of Mexico to provide jobs for its population is also an issue. Even if Mexico would suddenly cease its corruption and economic errors and become a first world country tomorrow, the US would still have a large job shortage.
Do you mean job or labor shortage? If there's a job shortage then logically all immigration (legal and illegal) should be cut off immediately.
Even legal immigrants who account for 2/3’s of the total immigrant flux, are not eligible for welfare benefits.
I suspect you have this reversed; legal immigrant visas are capped at roughly half a million last I heard, while annual illegal immigration exceeds twice that.
Labour force participation of foreign born men is higher than native born. Illegal immigrant men have the highest job percentage, roughly 94%. Immigrants are less likely than natives to be unemployed.
All of which could be taken to suggest that immigrants do, in fact, put Americans out of work.
Whether immigrants consume more in government benefits than they contribute in taxes, can be calculated after a measure. Consder that they pay as much as the comparable poor and unskilled. They pay sales and property taxes, just as native or legally born residents to. Thus contributing equally for schooling.
Everyone who buys anything in America pays the sales tax, including tourists. This is not a suitable basis for granting them citizenship.
And they only pay property tax if they own property. So far as I know, most do not. That immigrants pay property tax is irrelevant -- the cost of the services for which property taxes pay would decline without immigrants, so a rough equilibrium would be achieved.
And even if all of this is true (it is not), economics represents only one end of the equation when it comes to immigration. Admittedly, neocon apologists' for mass immigration don't care about anything else, but that does not change the existential fact that there are very real non-economic reasons to oppose mass immigration, ranging from the sociocultural to the environmental.
Justinian, in my short time here that is the most blatantly racist post I have come across.
"Mexican" is not a race.
Do you think your lilly white behind belongs here more than they do simply because you were born here? BS! The land this country was founded on was stolen by white men from native Americans. NEVER FORGET IT!
All that being said, I think this is another example of putting ones proverbial finger in the dike to try to solve a problem that has grown completely out of control. But the focus should not be solely on one group of illegals, but on them entirely. Whether they be hispanic or asian or african, or european...or martian, it doesnt matter. Either you were born here, or you go through the correct immigration guidelines set in place, or we send you home unless there is good reason such as political asylum.
The land was not "stolen," it was "conquered." The Amerindians are not indigenous to this area, either, having immigrated here from east Asia many years before. (I assume you won't acknowledge anyone as indigenous who is not living within a mile-radius of the place from which their unicellular ancestors crawled from the primordial ooze while the earth was still cooling).
Whether or not you're willing to admit it, conquest is legitimate. Case in point: I defy you to name a single nation whose borders were not fixed by it. We do not invalidate any of their national sovereignties off-the-bat because of it.
It was stolen, even Lincoln thought so. Thats good enough for me.
Hell, Lincoln contributed to it. As I recall, he signed the single largest writ of execution in American history, all American Indians.
And again, to say the land was "stolen" rather than "conquered" is silly and revisionist. How does one go about "stealing" land? You can't move land, you can only move people onto it and off of it. Doing so is the definition of conquest.
Justinian, I will still remind you as has Baldar that your comments are blatantly racist and I wonder how you would feel if it was white Canadians spilling across the border, come on the record and answer that question for me.
Once again, "Mexican" is not a race. You're going to have to invent a new epithet for him.
The problem with the scenario you pose is that it wouldn't happen. Canadians won't spill across the border because they have a workable First World society. The only way they would do so is if they didn't, in which case he would criticize them.
As for America being stolen...yeah it was. You may make yourself feel good sitting in the trailer park by thinking it was purchased, but lets take a look at the Lousiana purchase for instance, it was purchased from the French, who had no rightful ownership of the land in question as it had been settled millenia before by numerous Native American tribes.
And then conquered by the French. We finished the job.
I think you're the first person in the world who has insisted on using, as a derogative, a word that is actually less derogatory than the actual history would suggest.
One of the best pieces of news to date. Immagration bill fails. yippie yi yay ki aye.
