As a hot potato political issue, immigration ranks near the top of contentious issues. Immigration could even be the defining issue of the 2016 elections. Some folks just really, really hate all immigrants and demand that all of them be deported. I'm definitely not in that camp and I absolutely do subscribe to the view that nations benefit from immigration. Healthy immigration and sane immigration policies are a win-win for everybody.
Heck, America is a nation that was built by industrious and hardworking immigrants. I know how hard immigrants work because I've witnessed it up close and personal. Most immigrants are here because they want to work, they do work and Americans seems to have gotten lazy about working.
In my opinion, the immigrants who are here that are productively working should be legalized, given green cards and have the opportunity to apply for citizenship. They earned it and they deserve it. However, I draw the line at entitlement dependent immigrants. The immigrants who built America were not provided with food stamps, Medicaid cards and other entitlements. They asked for NOTHING, they GOT NOTHING and they toiled for long hours at nasty jobs. There are indeed immigrants in America who mooch of the taxpayers and the welfare system.
This is where the issues gets very ugly. In the absence of truly free markets including labor markets, the corporatist-statist system is comprised of big companies who fill campaign coffers (bribe congress critters) in exchange for hoards of cheap foreign labor. These foreign labor pools are paid wages so low that most of them qualify for welfare. Effectively, the current immigration system is a taxpayer subsidy to business because it's the taxpayers who are picking up the social costs of folks who literally earn slave wages.
Entitlement dependent immigrants are not the kind of immigrants that America needs or should want. There has been explosion in what has been termed the minimum wage economy. America has off-shored so much domestic manufacturing that once was the bedrock of a thriving middle class with decent wages that it's going to be a nightmare to rebuild the middle class and lift the poor out of poverty.
The problem is so bad that some US companies are firing American workers and replacing them with cheap foreign labor. Disney fired American workers and forced them to train their foreign replacements.
Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements.
Lawyer For Displaced Disney Workers: 1,200 American Workers In N.Y. Are Training Their Foreign Replacements
Stories like this are not unusual. In fact, they are common place.
Government policies and the welfare state have made the problem far worse. Any nation that treats its domestic labor like America treats its workers is doomed. The open border folks literally have no problem with opening American borders to all 7 billion on the planet regardless of the damages inflicted by the welfare state and corporate welfare queens.
There is no way that America can even proceed with a sane discussion on immigration so long as the welfare state exists and the biggest beneficiary of the welfare state is corporate America. They spend a ton of money lobbying to import millions of slave wage entitlement dependent folks. This isn't capitalism or free markets, it's a form industrial feudalism where the serfs are barely given subsistence level wages and are so impoverished that they must go begging to their feudal masters for food and necessities.
40% Of US Workers Now Earn Less Than 1968 Minimum Wage
Way back when the Congressional Gang of 8 was attempting to pass an open border immigration bill, open border Libertarians were wild about it. With Libertarian leaning think tanks like CATO advocating for legalizing all illegals and opening our borders to everybody to create a borderless nation, none of them ever take into account the gargantuan cost of the welfare entitlement state and subsidizing corporate profits.
Much has been written about the economic effect of open borders and the welfare state. With hoards of low wage entitlement dependent folks, we increase the labor pool of tax consumers vs. tax contributors. In other words, low wage immigrants consume more in benefits than they contribute to the economy and tax base. A nation that is economically built upon such a system is destined to fail. The taxation and debt required to support such a system will implode. It's already imploding.
Until the entitlement state is demolished, re-engineered and/or massively downsized, there is no way to separate honest hardworking immigrants from the moochers who come here to mooch and many of them are caught up in the spiral of low wage jobs and poverty - folks just trying to survive in a global economy that has turned against them.
Between the non-working folks on welfare and the working poor on welfare, America has morphed into a hideous industrialized feudalistic society consisting of the rich and the serfs who serve them.
Want wages to rise? Abolish the entitlements and force businesses to compete for unsubsidized labor in a free labor market. Maybe then we could talk about immigration.
Still, it makes no sense to flood America with tens of millions of immigrants when our own people are profoundly suffering from an economy that had hit the skids and put many Americans on skid row.
My immigration plan is simple: deport the entitlement dependent and keep those who work and demand nothing except the right to work.
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