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Originally Posted by Penguin
Germany did this in the 60s/70s and many problems we have today root from there. One former chancellor stated some years ago, that this encouragement of unskilled immigration was to keep domestic wages low - and, in hindsight, regards this as a mistake.
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The same goes for us over here Penguin. Also a lot of unskilled and low-education immigrants came here in the 60's / 70's. But at least they are legal... There's more of a cultural problem than an economical. Not that that problem is smaller, it's just different. One advantage of them being legal, is at least they pay taxes and they have registered places of residence.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Penguin
The demand is there for cheaper than cheap labour. People who are too cheap to pay normal wages have this demand - the demand of the consumer is always to have a product to the lowest costs.
However it is shortsighted if you only look at the price of products or services. Indirectly you pay higher taxes for federal/state services that these people use, for people who get umemployed because they can't compete with this cheap labour and anopther interesting aspect, that Armistead mentioned, are also enviromental costs. He mentioned it in an example, that illegal workers often dump their waste from their work just into the nature - it's the same here.
As I see it is that by all this this the taxpayer subsides these employers who are too cheap to pay minimum wage and taxes - and it is a slap in the face of the millions of legal immigrants who often went through considerable efforts to immigrate into the country.
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Well spoken and very true, but the fact of the matter is; we demand low prices. And we were -at the time- all shortsighted; the governments, the companies, but us consumers as well.
Besides, had those immigrants not come here back then, both our countries would have lost a lot of export revenues. Without those immigrants, we couldn't have kept competitive prices. We should however have foreseen these problems (yeah well easy in hindsight, I know), and maybe only give them temporary visas.
My point is -to get more back on topic- how will it help you throwing them in jail? That'll only cost you that much more. Have them returned to their countries. Yeah, perhaps they'll keep trying to get back, but the time they spend in their own country doesn't cost the US taxpayers money to feed them while they're in a US jail. Plus, do you have any idea how much time, effort and money it takes to find an illegal, find out if someone is illegal, than prosecute them? I don't, but I bet it's a hefty sum.
The ideal solution would imo be to really close up the borders, and come down hard on companies that employ illegal immigrants. The second part isn't that hard. The first part however... well you guys know more about that than I do. Clearly, it's very difficult. Complex problem this one
