Yes, it keeps people distracted from the real issue, but why give out free money to those unwilling to find a job and support themselves? Cut the funding on that crap and put it towards something useful to better this country. Yes, it's a small fraction of all the spending, but hey, a dollar is a dollar.

It's actually a little bit like making a huge deal about earmark spending. Earmarks are some trivial fraction of total spending, and its money written into the bills anyway. If we cut out 100% of earmarks we'd still be spending ourselves into bankruptcy at an unprecedented rate. But complaining about it appeals to populism and it keeps people distracted from the real issues.

• get people to listen to you
• do nothing
• Gulch it
• ineffective, quickly-suppressed violence by a lone actor

If your desire is that "people ought to stop freeloading in this country and expecting me to pay for it", mixing that message up with "illegal immigrants ought to stop freeloading" is well.. mixing up the message.

If that isn't what you are angry about.. and illegal aliens getting priviledges/freeloading upsets you more than native-born folks freeloading, i'm curious as to why. As near as I can tell, anyone that was against immigrants getting freebies but was happy with "locals" getting the same freebies is supporting the notion that we should reward people for being good at choosing where they were born. I don't think that's something I'd reward a person for...

thrash;287316 wrote:
The issue is that it is a misplaced anger. Are you more against illegal aliens getting money/breaks than native-born citizens? Why?

Because people focus on the illegal alien aspect of it, it becomes an immigration issue instead of the unsustainability of our entitlements programs.

The fact of the matter is that this country did very well on essentially an open immigration policy, until it started promising too much stuff to people who didn't perform.

So by making this an immigration problem, people can claim you are racist / xenophobic / whatever and distract the whole problem away from the real issue: entitlements.

[of course, they could also claim you were racist by attacking entitlements, but they'd be factually wrong and showing their implicit racism.]

Shit, they call me racist if I look at a black guy wrong. what the fuck does it matter any more?

And yes, it may cost more up front Chuck, but look at the money saved in the long run. Instead of paying all this money out to these deadbeat's, they could MAKE MONEY buy forcing this morons to actually get a job. If they don't want to get a job... well gtfo. Simple.

But of course with this being a "free country", shit like this will never go away.

DaveH;287310 wrote:
They removed that part from the speech. Thats what all the hullabaloo was about earlier last week.

Ahh, well then, I'm glad I didn't pay much attention to that.

Because people focus on the illegal alien aspect of it, it becomes an immigration issue instead of the unsustainability of our entitlements programs.

The fact of the matter is that this country did very well on essentially an open immigration policy, until it started promising too much stuff to people who didn't perform.

So by making this an immigration problem, people can claim you are racist / xenophobic / whatever and distract the whole problem away from the real issue: entitlements.

[of course, they could also claim you were racist by attacking entitlements, but they'd be factually wrong and showing their implicit racism.]

Link;287313 wrote:
Stopping the 10% is better than stopping 0%.

True, but it might cost more than the 10% we'd save to do this.

thrash;287312 wrote:
I don't like them any more or any less than people born here who live off of government money.

The laws are written such that there are incentives to do nothing and have babies, no matter where you are born. *That's *the problem. If we stop foreigners from coming here and living off of government money, we will have stopped at most 10% of the problem.

Stopping the 10% is better than stopping 0%.

Link;287303 wrote:
How about the immigrants who come here and live off the gov't money? Seems like these people are the ones driving the nice cars, have big screen TV's, and all the cool stuff a lot of us wish we could afford.

Where is this money coming from and why do they deserve it?

I don't like them any more or any less than people born here who live off of government money.

The laws are written such that there are incentives to do nothing and have babies, no matter where you are born. *That's *the problem. If we stop foreigners from coming here and living off of government money, we will have stopped at most 10% of the problem.

PSiedTSi;287305 wrote:
It is nice to hear something from one of our leaders that didn't include propaganda or any other political agenda.

They removed that part from the speech. Thats what all the hullabaloo was about earlier last week.

Grr;287297 wrote:
wow that was a really good speech, im actually impressed with him for once.

I should almost put that in my signature Gary....

Grr;287297 wrote:
wow that was a really good speech, im actually impressed with him for once.

It is nice to hear something from one of our leaders that didn't include propaganda or any other political agenda.

Where is this money coming from and why do they deserve it?

I'm a bit surprised by this argument though: everytime I hear about "the little guy" dodging taxes, I think "good man, good man". But that's because I'm generally not a fan of taxes and especially not a fan of what that money usually gets spent on.

And more concretely: there are many millions more "Americans" who do not file income taxes and who unlike illegal immogrants, do not work at all and provide NO value to the US economy (and questionable value to their fellow man).

IOW, if you are talking about drain on the economy, the non-working birth-right citizens are a much bigger problem than the possible-income-tax-evading illegal aliens that work 18 hour days. Personally, I want to kick the first group out and give the second group some legal safeguards.

The summary is: the problem is with the laws of America, not its border security. The things you don't like about the illegal alien population happen in the citizen population as well, and unlike illegals, the citzens have and continue to vote themselves a larger share of YOUR wealth, whereas the aliens generally work their ass off.

GarageAlchemist;287295 wrote:
and yet over a million illegal aliens are working today in the US, not paying taxes.

whos working and not paying taxes? i know of no such person... ;):eek:

This is a nation of immigrants, after all, and as I mentioned, what makes us "Americans" historically is our ideas about politics and hard work, not where we were born and what languages we speak natively.

I think we have to figure out how to disincentivize coming to america for the wrong reasons, and those reasons mostly have to do with the large blanket of public services offered to people, no questions asked.

I am worried about making an air tight border for a few reasons

• it will be really expensive
• it won't work
• it will be just as effective for keeping us IN as it will be for keeping others out.

This last point may sound paranoid, but the Berlin wall fell only about 20 years ago. In the past few years it has become much harder to enter/leave the US, even if you are a US citizen, and in an effort to try and get more money any way it can, the US government has been trying to change tax and accounting rules left and right to keep foreign money from US citizens back int he US, and to try and tax money from former Americans who have left. Don't think that the idea of Uncle Sam not wanting us to leave is completely unthinkable.

Basically, to "Fix" any immigration problems we have, we'd need to unroll much of the "progressive" agenda of the last 80 years. This country makes it very hard to work: you cannot work without a tax ID, you cannot agree to work for less than minimum wage, soon you won't be able to work unless you can find someone willing to give you health insurance as well. Also, your employer can't fire you without fear of breaking the law, so they are very gunshy about hiring people.

In effect, our current labor and welfare laws make it easier to be on the dole than to get a job in many cases.

Even though I am in the software industry, and the H1-B program amounts to protectionism for my line of work, I think it should be scrapped, and we should let in all of the Indians and Chinese folks that want to do software/IT/technology work. These are people that want to come here to work, with jobs already lined up. They pay our taxes but don't get our citizen ship rights. Why wouldn't we jump on that with as much haste as possible?

Because "our" lawmakers are trying to "protect" American jobs.

Well, I don't want protection in this form. I want every one in this country to have to compete based on their value/worth. That includes me. An "American Job" is one where the employed puts money into the American economy, and competes on their merit, not where they were born.