No, that doesn't make more sense.

The unemployed in our country are not unemployed because they can't seem to land a fruit-picking or dish-washing job.

Rounding up and booting out illegal immigrants is an irrational pipe dream, unless you're Lou Dobbs haha.

Can I just sum this up:

Illegal immigrants are here.
They are in OUR country.
They, therefore, are OUR responsibility and we should treat them like humans.
We should solve OUR problems in OUR country and be responsible for OUR people and should be working on such.

Fuck it........agree to disagree.

Let's start a thread about football.

Agreed. Go Lions.

Oh, by the way..........another 100 poster!

A few notes:

If you went to almost any other country in the world and announced you were not there legally you'd be picked up and deported pretty quickly. (Try doing this in pretty much any European country, for example.)

The '86 amnesty bill was supposed to also involve locking down the border after granting amnesty. That piece of the law was never fully enforced by Congress.

I think the big argument here is between people who have different (noble) goals that in this case conflict:
- helping the less fortunate
- enforcing the rule of law

My grandparents immigrated legally (I actually have their naturalization papers, which are very cool) and like a majority of legal immigrants, want people to follow the laws and go through the same steps they did to become citizens.

Honestly, Americans would do these jobs. Americans would do any job - it just depends on the pay. The reasons only illegals will do certain jobs is because they pay quite poorly. A chicken processing plant that was raided by ICE continued operations with US citizens afterwards - but had to pay them $3/hour more. The business still turned a profit, US citizens were employed instead of illegals, income & other taxes were paid, etc..

Similar things would happen in other areas if our laws were actually enforced (are you really telling me high school kids won't wash dishes? I sure did.)

You didn't really think this thread would end, did you? :)

"Honestly, Americans would do these jobs. Americans would do any job - it just depends on the pay. The reasons only illegals will do certain jobs is because they pay quite poorly. A chicken processing plant that was raided by ICE continued operations with US citizens afterwards - but had to pay them $3/hour more. The business still turned a profit, US citizens were employed instead of illegals, income & other taxes were paid, etc..

Similar things would happen in other areas if our laws were actually enforced (are you really telling me high school kids won't wash dishes? I sure did"


I didn't say that Americans wouldn't do those jobs. Obviously, for fair pay they would. I said that the reason unemployment is high is NOT because illegal immigrants are taking those jobs.

A common argument made is that these are jobs "Americans won't do." My apologies for making the assumption you were part of that camp, but I hear that frequently and believe it to be largely erroneous.

While not all unemployment is due to these jobs being unavailable, certainly some of it is, both directly and indirectly. And more citizens employed in any job, even high schoolers, would stimulate growth. And there are a huge number of contractors and lawn care providers collecting unemployment right now that would not be otherwise.

Again, this is not an all-or-nothing situation. Both "they're stealing all our jobs" and "they're not taking jobs from anyone affecting the unemployment rate" are both completely wrong.

Ouch. Consecutive sentences beginning with and. Where is that edit button?