You know, the funny thing about the illegal immigration issues we are harping on now, is that most of them are liberal initiatives. They began back when the whole racial profiling issues arose, and we had a liberal-fest about re-writing all our laws to prohibit any kind of possible profiling of individuals, the ACLU backed it up, the NAACP backed it up, Jesse backed it up... and we made the laws less intrusive on personal privacy regarding ethnicity, nationality, etc.
It wasn't that long ago, California actually had an initiative to give illegal immigrants a driver's licence! Liberals are ready to sign them up to vote, get welfare, get social service entitlements, get hooked on government taking care of them, so they can have a base again.
Do you folks not remember Farm Aid? Big Concert... to raise money for the poor farmers who were losing their farms because they couldn't make it work. Well guess what? Illegal Immigrants were the solution to many poor farmers problem. Now what? Liberals are saying to fine the poor farmers our of business because they are providing a source of income for the illegal immigrant?
Then what's next? Do Liberals ever think ahead? Say we put Maw & Paw Produce out of bid'ness... what do we do with Pedro? Do you honestly think 14-20 million people are suddenly going to say.. oh well, no more work here, let's just sneak back into Mexico where there's no work either...? I mean, get real!
First priority should be to stop the leak. Seal the border. Once that is done sufficiently, we can discuss the rest of the problem, and there is a problem. Our social security and medicare system is not constructed to deal with another equivalent to the Baby-Boomer Generation. Even with radical modification, we simply will not be able to take care of future generations, if we factor in 14-20 million multiplied by their own reproduction. Our entire social services sector will crash eventually. It's being stretched to its limits now. At some point, these people either need to be participating in the system, or gone. Period.
So what is the solution there? I think this is where Bush got the "Guest Worker" idea, but it didn't fly too well because we haven't yet stopped the leaks. Nothing is going to work until that is done first. I don't know that I like "Guest Worker" so much as I like the idea of registering these people somehow, so we can conduct background checks on them and find out who we have in our midst. I don't suppose many of them would voluntarily come in and be fingerprinted and such, just to be nice about it. So, some sort of an "incentive" program like Guest Worker, might not be such a bad approach, as it would give them, not a path to citizenship so much as a path to legitimacy.
There is certainly no Quick Fix or Easy Solution to this problem.
