Yeah or something really close. So pretty much the worst tool to put in charge of it.
Kewl. The form is 3 pages long. I have a home office copier. When can I start?
This “problem” is so easy.
We can just hand them out like after dinner mints. Then send them out to make their merry way in a land of opportunity. They will fill the jobs that current residents evidently don’t want. Heck, we can even give them a jab as we filll out their forms. Win-Win.
Because there are limited resources and a lot of ppl who are trying to immigrate here ‘legally’ so these people are effectively jumping the line… nobody cares about those people? Are you suggesting that people who jump the border should be rewarded for doing so and what kind of precedent is that setting
Those people can get in as well.
Line jump “problem” solved.
The precedent was set long ago. Somewhere and at sometime, we will find members of your family tree who were not born here. Just about all of us posting on this board are decedents of immigrants. Lord only knows whether they all qualified per today’s standards.And it doesn’t matter a bit to me.
If that makes me a scofflaw, I’m ok with that, too.
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Both of my parents were born in America, none of grandparents were born in America
31 of my 32 3rd Great Grandparents were born in England (some Scotland, maybe an Ireland or 2) and died in the US (mostly Utah). They would have come over sometime around the 1850s. The other one was born here, and had some ancestors that were here in the 1600s.
Costa Rica is an example of a country that works reasonably well in Central America, primarily because it abolished its military. A problem in most of :Latin America that you can’t pin the blame on the US is racism. It is most extreme in countries like Guatemala, Bolivia, southern Mexico and parts of Honduras with large indigenous populations . Where there is a mixed population, the whiter you are, the wealthier you are.
The other problems that prevent any progress in these countries are extreme levels of wealth inequality and government corruption. Aside from explicit corruption, government jobs are given out favors to the well connected. More recently extreme climate changes from drought to floods have compounded the misery in these countries.
There are things that can be done to help. The Peace Corps used to do some good work but I don’t know how active it is now. In return for recognition, Taiwan does some useful things such as helping improve agriculture and providing a market for products.
All of this is accurate, and still doesn’t change that the United States has a long history of having interfered with governments in Latin America to satisfy the business interests of a few individuals or to “root out Communism” even when those moves came at the expense of the citizens of those countries.
Hence, were the United States to show up and say “we’re here to help” governments there would likely say “thanks, but no thanks” and then start making plans to have to fight us off expecting we won’t take “no” for an answer, like we didn’t in the past.
While conditions in these countries are terrible, without US aid either direct or in the form of remesas from people on TPS they would be catastrophic. These countries cannot develop on their own. The US is their only hope. Aid just has to be spent more intelligently. Forty percent of foreign aid to these countries is military which is a total waste.
The U.S. is their only hope if the United States does it without being selfish and those who receive aid put it toward those for which the aid is intended to help. Even pretending the 2nd point will be true (which you’re addressing), there’s ample reason to think the 1st won’t be true (which is what I’m addressing). If we decide to extract even more “value” out of those countries to our benefit at their expense, they’ll be even worse off while we claim a grand victory for promoting democratic ideas in other places.
Our “fight against Communism” in Latin America didn’t just kill the bad guys, and we were certainly silent if not encouraged some of the things that happened there in the 70s and 80s that were to the clear detriment of ordinary citizens living there.
I am the number one critic of US foreign policy in Central America in the 1980’s. I have always stated that Ronald Reagan was complicit in genocide in Guatemala. When Iranian money couldn’t be used to fund the contra war, money came from Columbian drug cartels. This continues today as they pay bribes to top government and military personal to be able to refuel their planes in Honduras.
Unfortunately the left wing governments in Nicauragua and Venezuela have not proved any better at helping ordinary people. With respect to extracting value, foreign investment is not a zero sum game. Companies will not invest without being able to extract more than they invest. This possible without horrific labor conditions with sufficient over sight by the host country and American consumers. My may point is the idea that if we just leave them alone, everything will be fine is somewhat naive.
And if we don’t leave them alone, their citizens tend to suffer because of our frequently misguided policies and we run a greater chance of them turning away from us and then we go on yet another “nation-building” exercise for people who don’t want us or at best are ambivalent toward us.
Quite the conondrum.
“Limited resources” isn’t really a good argument when there are so many jobs unfilled. Instead we seem to be in a situation where we have more resouces/opprotunities than we have workers to use them.
Beyond that our immigration system is a nightmare. We don’t allow in nearly enough immigrants (as you can tell by the labor shortage) and those that we do allow in need to jump through all kinds of excessive hoops. But we have a labor shortage and a bunch of people wanting to come here. Seems like these problems kinda solve eachother to a degree. I don’t understand why youd get stuck up on “line jumping” instead of focusing on how we can improve our immigration system to allow enough people in.
Of course it is a good argument. What is the point of immigration policy if people can simply walk into the country unchecked?
I know it sounds really mean or harsh to say this, but countries should be doing what is in their best interest for their own citizens. You are almost certainly right that immigration policy needs to be improved in several ways but to simply say there’s a labour shortage and therefore keeping borders secure is pointless is missing the mark in a big way.
Immigration systems are theoretically in place to pick the best candidate for the citizenship pool. It’s like hiring at a company, would you support removing HR hiring practices and letting anybody join whenever there’s a position to be filled? I hope not for your companies sake.
What does this have to do with what I said. You said you dont want immigrants because of limited resources. I illustrated how that argument doesn’t hold up when you consider the labor shortage.
Ok? doesn’t change anything I’ve said.
This is a strawman. I never argued anything about making the borders less secure.
But they don’t really do that very well. We need lots of low skilled labor that would be easy to attract but we aren’t doing it.
And if we needed a bunch of unskilled workers and there were lots of them applying, I’d hope we’d consider hiring some of them.
Borders are part of immigration law and policy; you might not have said it explicitly but that’s basically what i interpreted. If you aren’t saying that and are for keeping borders secure and simply allowing for some kind of fast-track that still vets good ‘candidates’ then fine.
One thing I will say is that I think fisking responses is really hard to read and often times results in a lot of nitpicking. Just respond to the body of text with a cohesive argument and be done with it.
Completely agree. I didn’t even read the replies because they weren’t concise and couldn’t get to the point.
We provide poor people with benefits that are worth more than the money they make. As long as that is the case, I’m not convinced that there is an economic argument for filling low wage jobs. At least, it’s not obvious.
Imo, the conversation needs to be split between ideals and practical reality.
Hype is speaking more to ideals. What the laws should have. How we should implement them.
JB is speaking more to reality. We will not pass good laws. We will not pass any laws. “US immigration reform” means a series of presidents overturning each others executive orders. All we will ever do is either crackdown or not-crackdown. And JB thinks not cracking down is better for the economy.
Interesting how the migrant caravans no longer exist.
(There was at least one in January 2021 that never came to the US.)
Point is, that was such a political (I would personally say, xenophobic) kludge.