Comments on: Immigration Debate

By: Tom Smith

Tom Smith — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 12:21:41 +0000

"'Why does citizenship in a particular nation grant one rights to a job over and above aliens?'
It doesn’t, over legal aliens."

Okay, what I'm getting at is, why is the right to a job dependent upon land boundaries?

"Counterquestion: Why don’t nation-states have the right to determine who does and who doesn’t enter their territories, and under what circumstances?"

They do. But that seems to be a non sequitur — I asked about employment, not immigration.

By: Funky Dung

Funky Dung — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:32:07 +0000

I can't speak for Tom, but for myself I can say that I don't dispute that right. What I question is our particular nation-state's choice to be so anal about who gets in. Quotas seem rather pointless to me.

By: The Waffling Anglican

The Waffling Anglican — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:30:13 +0000

Why does citizenship in a particular nation grant one rights to a job over and above aliens?
It doesn't, over legal aliens.

Counterquestion: Why don't nation-states have the right to determine who does and who doesn't enter their territories, and under what circumstances?

By: Tom Smith

Tom Smith — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:51:45 +0000

I really don't have an opinion on the matter (not yet, anyway), but I do have a question. . .

Why does citizenship in a particular nation grant one rights to a job over and above aliens?

By: The Waffling Anglican

The Waffling Anglican — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:17:01 +0000

Fred - I would think an AK-47 de rigeur for the serious revolutionary. A Latin Aamerican geurilla with an M-16 would be like a Hell's Angel with a Honda - it just wouldn't look right.

The Indians we outsource to don't have kid's in Texas public schools, don't drive in Texas w/o insurance, don't fill up Texas jails, don't use Texas hospitals and ERs, and don't receive other forms of Texas public assistance. They also speak English, so teaching them Texan is fairly easy.

I'm not a huge fan of outsourcing, but my entire dev team is in India, and it seems that the more we expand there, the more folks we hire here as well.

(BTW, white collar jobs are the easiest ones outsourced. Outsourcing production jobs means you incur shipping costs for the product. Since the actual labor costs involved in making stuff are so low, it is much cheaper to manufacture it here for $10/hr than to do so overseas for $1/hr and then have to ship stuff. You can save, however, save money by hiring an engineer overseas for $25K + bennies versus one here for $100K + bennies)

By: Fred K.

Fred K. — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:05:38 +0000

ha. I love what the waffling anglican said about ak47's (but why for crying out loud a russian rifle?). It would seem that the stability of Mexican government (corrupt or not) is another benefit of illegal immigration to the US. Mexican corruption would seem to be in the US's best interest for a number of reasons.

Perhaps it's time to crack down on businesses who accept payments from illegal aliens

If anybody's going to take jobs from American citizens, it should be folks living in India, not aliens living in the US.

By: The Waffling Anglican

The Waffling Anglican — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 16:35:14 +0000

I would submit that the reason Americans won't take (some of) the jobs performed by illegals is that they don't pay enough. To use illegals for those jobs maintains an artificially low wage structure for those jobs in order to maintain an artificially low price structure for the respective products. It leads to a permanent exploited class who lives in the country but owe no allegiance to the country and which maintains a separate culture within the nation. This is bad all the way around - as demonstrated by huge crowds of people demonstarting in this nation-state while flying foreign flags. Illegals do indeed take jobs from Americans. This may not show up in New York City or Tacoma, but it sure shows up around here in the building trades. If you build a house, you will be lucky to find anyone in the crew who speaks English. In addition, by acting as a safety valve for the Mexican economy, it removes a lot of the incentive for Mexico to become a decent, viable nation. They can continue to have their economy subsidized to the tune of many billions per year without reforming anything, and the USA accepts being a cash cow in order to keep getting artificially cheap lettuce / cotton / houses / whatever. I have always believed we would be better off paying a quarter a head more for lettuce and a couple thousand on the cost of a house in order to eliminate the problem. I don't blame the Mexicans for wanting to cross the border; in their situation I would do the same. I blame us for letting them. And I think claims to the moral high ground by those who want to keep them here are at best mistaken and at worst blasphemously cynical. If you want to help the Mexican people (who, remember, are not starving or brutalized by islamofascist thugs), I think you could do better by meeting them at the border, giving them an AK-47, copies of the US constitution and declaration of independence, turning them around, and telling them where to get more ammo. Mexico is a well-resourced land that ought to be a nice place to live; the fact that it is not is largely a testimony to decades of corruption and incompetence on the part of those who should have been its stewards. The longer that reckoning is put off, the more catastrophic it is going to be.