A letter to my senators
"To: Sen. Barbara Boxer, Sen. Dianne Feinstein
Consider the law of supply and demand. The war on drugs concentrates not on the users, but on the distributors. So should the "war" on illegal immigration. But in the issue of immigration, the "supply" is not the illegal immigrant workers - they have essentially no power. The "supply" that is feeding this system is JOBS, not the workers to perform those jobs. The companies that illegally employ these workers are the ones fuelling this system.
How many young Americans would take jobs as fruit pickers if the jobs paid twice or three times what illegal workers will accept? Well, how many went into computers when that became a big thing? And law school? How many moved from the south to the big northern cities with the promise of factory jobs at living wages?
Any "immigration reform" that provides fines and penalties for illegal workers must also provide fines and penalties for the companies that hire them. Offer these companies the same sort of "amnesty"- identify yourself, pay a fine, be on probation, and in X years your good name will be clear - and then we may truly get workable immigration reform. Without it, we'll have this same problem 20 years from now, if not sooner.
PS, helping the Mexican economy wouldn't hurt, either."
Some yahoo (Mark Kirkorian of The Center for Immigration Studies, a guest on Monday's Talk of the Nation) disagreed with a caller to NPR that said the problem was the poverty and joblessness in Mexico. Kirkorian said something about how it wasn't that these people didn't have jobs in Mexico. Many of them did. But they came here for better jobs. Gee, why do you think they would do such a thing, Mark - risk death in the desert to sneak into a foreign country, hundreds of miles from home, in order to work illegally here? For the weather? Do you think they're laughing all the way to the bank with those wages? Do you think their families are living in the lap of luxury back in Mexico? Are they themselves taking extravagant ski vacations to Lake Tahoe on their unpaid vacation days? Get a life! Why, in your opinion, are we not having this discussion about illegal Canadian immigrants? Could it be because Canada, like the US, has a social welfare program that takes care of its poor citizens (at the expense of everyone else), so they have no need to come here? Or is it just that we wouldn't have a problem if it was white Canadians instead of Hispanic Mexicans?
Or do you think the Canadians just don't envy our weather as much as the Mexicans do?
9:41:58 PM 
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