05.18.07
Immigration Reform
“A bipartisan group of senators and President Bush agreed yesterday to a potentially historic deal on an immigration bill that would give 12 million undocumented residents the chance to become legal Americans while beefing up border security and cracking down on employers who hire illegal workers.”
Read the Boston Globe article here, with further analysis here.
Everybody agrees that the current system is broken. Roughly 4% of the people in this country are here illegally. The USCIS is drowning under a multi-year backlog of applications for citizenship. Legal immigrants with valuable technical training are stymied by a shortage of visas, while unskilled hordes swarm freely across our borders.
I do not understand the issue thoroughly enough to judge the proposed solution, but it sounds like this proposal tackles the problem on multiple fronts. The ultimate solution should welcome those who can contribute positively to the country while restricting the flow of those who have less to offer. (A selfish view, perhaps, but I am not ready to embrace unrestricted immigration.)
Most importantly, all those who live and work in the United States must be documented and taxed. We need to provide legal avenues to meet legitimate business needs, then crack down on those who continue to bypass the law.
Your thoughts?
Spok said,
May 20, 2007 at 7:22 am
Some interesting discussion of the immigration bill over at Obsidian Wings:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/05/immigration.html
David said,
May 21, 2007 at 10:15 am
Legal low income workers pay very little in federal income taxes. They often pay payroll taxes (partially through their employers), property taxes (through their landlords), and sales taxes (through their merchants). Illegal low income workers, of course, pay no federal income taxes at all, but pay all the others. They also use fewer government services than legal low income workers.
Legalizing a large number of currently illegal low income workers will almost certainly increase government spending more than tax collections and in the short run be bad for the budgets of our local, state, and federal governments.