Emergency treatment and emergency relief are not benefits. They’re humanitarian outlays.
Next you will be trying to tell us that refugees are different than immigrants.
I don’t know how important it really is but California does offer benefits to illegal aliens, er, undocumented want to be citizens. Heck , they can get in state rates at the state universities.
All this discussion of the perils of illegals taking public money, and no mention of the employers who illegally employ them making money by paying wages less than the market rate of pay for legal residents, effectively taking money from American workers. It’s almost like there’s a blindspot in the American psyche about illegal immigration, looking away from the underlying economic engine of illegal employment.
If you really want to reduce illegal immigration, crack down on illegal employment, with enforcement at the employer level. If you complain about illegal immigrants without complaining about illegal employers, you are displaying ignorance and blindness to the real issues (and probably some xenophobia/racism as well).
On a related note, how important is religion to those that are pro-Wall, anti-illegal, etc? I think each Trump supporter that truly believes they’re Christian (or otherwise adheres to a religion that follows similar beliefs) needs to ask him/herself what’s more important. Is it money and guns and political wins or do you actually truly believe in God/Jesus/etc? Because holy fuck, they’re failing miserably at it. I was raised Catholic but gave that up long ago. And yet somehow my beliefs on immigration, etc, line up better with Jesus than a large percentage of Christians in this country.
It’s so obviously hypocritical to give lip service to all these Christian beliefs while turning your back on thousands and millions of people much less fortunate than you. All the fucktards on Fox News, Sean Spicer and his oh so holy Catholicism, the whole Trump mafia, etc - all hypocritical shitheads.
A Kevin Drum post along the same lines:
So what’s the holdup? The answer is that no matter how much social conservatives think they own the Republican Party, they don’t. Corporations and rich people own the party, and they don’t want ICE agents raiding them. They don’t really care very much if Trump screws around with a wall, because they know a wall won’t make much difference. But they do care about E-Verify, because it would work and it would cost them money. So it lies around unloved, even though it’s almost certainly the best immigration enforcement option we have. And when I say “best,” I mean it’s both the most effective and the most humane.
That reminds me of my wife telling me about a guy she saw interviewed near Mt. Olive in NC. Dude was complaining that illegals were taking all the jobs but when asked if he (unemployed) was going to work in the field, of course not.
I think the Catholic Church, at least here in California, has been very pro-immigrant. They are involved in the sanctuary stuff, they have aided immigrants, legal and otherwise. Now, you could argue that is because most of the immigrants we are talking about here are Catholic…so there is that.
Also, I don’t know how much the follows of the catholic church agree with what the church itself does regarding the immigrants.
I believe that individual would work in the fields if the wages were high enough. That’s another aspect of this issue: the underlying economic issue is wages. By employing an illegal pool of labor that is willing to accept lower wages than the pool of employees that would normally be available via American population growth, employers have for decades been cheating the system, and causing lower wages to for a whole tier of the economy.
I think the number of undocumented with “good” paying jobs would surprise you, but yea, no unemployed white guys are going to pick fruit or veggies.
And yes, employers should be punished and yes, as I think someone has brought up here or in another thread, we need a quick and easy way for employers to verify SSN’s for new hires.
Maybe. What would you consider a high enough wage. The days of ag workers getting really crappy wages are over. But it is still really hard work. And it is the kind of work that requires you to travel because the fields don’t come to you, you have to go to them.
like this? . We already have such a system provided free of charge by the US government but right now under the law it is voluntary, not mandatory. We could improve things by simply making the existing system mandatory. We could improve things even more by expanding and enhancing e-verify, and by using additional enforcement methods, like having the IRS notify the enforcement entities of invalid social security numbers, and more agents, more audits, etc.
Also, the choice seems to be between giving benefits to undocumented immigrants and sexually abusing children. I’ll choose giving benefits to immigrants, but hey, you be you.
I think I have mentioned here that I am currently working for the IRS. A good percentage of my work is attempting to verify SSN’s, and then either allowing or disallowing them. You would be amazed (well, probably not) how many SSN’s are used and abused. They are even running a check this year on tax returns whereby everyone with wages and an ITIN has their tax return inspected for regular SSN’s.
This is an example of why I’m not a socialist: the “high enough wage” would be the market wage it takes, in a fair market not distorted by illegal employment, to incentivize US workers to take those jobs. This is an area where a fair labor market would produce good results and the market is the answer. It just has to be a market where the laws are actually enforced.
Eventually machinery will replace most the workers. They already have with many crops where the corp farmers can afford the technology.
It is the time and travel question that for now cannot be resolved. Even with the illegal workers available to them there is currently a shortage of ag workers.
I wouldn’t be amazed but I think most people would be. It’s something like 5% of all socials, from my understanding. The IRS is well aware of this, as scuzz says, but under current federal law it does not notify the taxpayer or the employer, and does not notify the enforcement entities (Dept. of Labor for employers, ICE for employers).
Basically, the entire illegal immigration problem is a result of very intentional loopholes in the law (like the ridiculous reality that e-verify is currently voluntary, not mandatory) designed to allow employers to cheat the system by accessing a pool of illegal low wage labor to depress wages.
And somehow both sides have a blindspot on this, although I think more and more liberals are waking to it. But the right is still blind, screaming about “invasion!!!” when they should be screaming about employers who routinely evade the intent of the law, to the harm of American workers.
The IRS uses the info to deny dependents on tax returns. I spend my evenings making people disappear.
Fair enough, but how do you think that would impact the prices we pay at the grocery store? It isn’t just farmers cheating the system. Our whole society (or the vast majority of it) has turned a blind eye to this for decades for a reason. Migrant workers, day laborers, people paid in cash without 1099s and on and on it goes.
It would probably increase the price of produce a few percentage points somewhere between 5% and 15% most likely depending on labor market conditions - ideally we would do this in a phased fashion to avoid a “cabbage price shock”. A 5% to 15% increase in produce prices spread out over a few years would raise overall inflation a bit, but not too much IMO. In my view, we have quite a bit of slack in inflation to use to push wages upwards. If wages go up too fast, we might have to take our foot off the gas pedal but that’s something to monitor over time.