(January 11, 2019 at 1:02 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:

(January 8, 2019 at 11:45 pm)bennyboy Wrote: The question is simple-- does the US have enough people, or would it like to have more people?  I think it has enough people.  Therefore, it should invite those who fill roles which are under-represented.

We are a vast country with a low average population density. With its aging population and reproduction below replacement, the USA absolutely needs more people to sustain its long-term tax base and labor needs. The Hispanic immigrants we allow in now will produce the generation that we need to be in place when all the Baby Boomers are over 70.

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(January 8, 2019 at 11:46 pm)bennyboy Wrote: There are many unemployed people, and yet most of them don't want these jobs.  Are they lazy?

You can offer $20 an hour to be a ranch hand or $12 to pick watermelons, and still won't be able to meet your labor needs if you exclude migrants. There just aren't enough non-Hispanic American citizens familiar enough with that kind of work and able to perform the heavy labor involved to meet the needs of farmers. When you do get a non-Hispanic citizen for the job, most of the time they can't do it well enough to justify paying them even $10 an your.

Peach-picking in Georgia typically pays $12 an hour. When they clamped down on illegal immigrants, the peaches were rotting off the trees, because they couldn't get enough workers to bring in the harvest. This kind of crop loss associated with 'getting tough on illegals' has been repeated multiple times.

If the laws on the books require us to shoot ourselves in the foot, maybe they're bad laws. And if we can't change them through normal processes, maybe they're being kept the way they are for irrational reasons, like nativism.

Bolded - I still struggle with quotes and replies here...

What you say sounds as though you think there should be immigration regardless of the intention to work toward citizenship because the US needs breeding stock.

(January 13, 2019 at 11:31 am)arewethereyet Wrote:

(January 11, 2019 at 1:02 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: We are a vast country with a low average population density. With its aging population and reproduction below replacement, the USA absolutely needs more people to sustain its long-term tax base and labor needs. The Hispanic immigrants we allow in now will produce the generation that we need to be in place when all the Baby Boomers are over 70.

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You can offer $20 an hour to be a ranch hand or $12 to pick watermelons, and still won't be able to meet your labor needs if you exclude migrants. There just aren't enough non-Hispanic American citizens familiar enough with that kind of work and able to perform the heavy labor involved to meet the needs of farmers. When you do get a non-Hispanic citizen for the job, most of the time they can't do it well enough to justify paying them even $10 an your.

Peach-picking in Georgia typically pays $12 an hour. When they clamped down on illegal immigrants, the peaches were rotting off the trees, because they couldn't get enough workers to bring in the harvest. This kind of crop loss associated with 'getting tough on illegals' has been repeated multiple times.

If the laws on the books require us to shoot ourselves in the foot, maybe they're bad laws. And if we can't change them through normal processes, maybe they're being kept the way they are for irrational reasons, like nativism.

Bolded - I still struggle with quotes and replies here...

What you say sounds as though you think there should be immigration regardless of the intention to work toward citizenship because the US needs breeding stock.

As long as we depend on a continuously growing economy, we actually do need to replenish our numbers. And if it were not for the millions of immigrants that we have accepted, our social security shortfall would be far more dire.  I don't think that it was suggested that immigrants be used for breeding stock. The immigrants can come in and have the same low birthrate that we have and that would be just fine as long as we kept replenishing our numbers with new immigrants.

(January 13, 2019 at 11:54 am)Yonadav Wrote:

(January 13, 2019 at 11:31 am)arewethereyet Wrote: Bolded - I still struggle with quotes and replies here...

What you say sounds as though you think there should be immigration regardless of the intention to work toward citizenship because the US needs breeding stock.

As long as we depend on a continuously growing economy, we actually do need to replenish our numbers. And if it were not for the millions of immigrants that we have accepted, our social security shortfall would be far more dire.  I don't think that it was suggested that immigrants be used for breeding stock. The immigrants can come in and have the same low birthrate that we have and that would be just fine as long as we kept replenishing our numbers with new immigrants.

Well thanks for that...you aren't who I was 'asking' and I am not a fan of your stances on anything.

I don't care for using the ignore function but know that you will be ignored without technology.

(January 13, 2019 at 1:15 pm)arewethereyet Wrote:

(January 13, 2019 at 11:54 am)Yonadav Wrote: As long as we depend on a continuously growing economy, we actually do need to replenish our numbers. And if it were not for the millions of immigrants that we have accepted, our social security shortfall would be far more dire.  I don't think that it was suggested that immigrants be used for breeding stock. The immigrants can come in and have the same low birthrate that we have and that would be just fine as long as we kept replenishing our numbers with new immigrants.

Well thanks for that...you aren't who I was 'asking' and I am not a fan of your stances on anything.

I don't care for using the ignore function but know that you will be ignored without technology.

You're welcome.

The real issue is how everyone looks at this.   Lots of people believe its a race issue that you don't want them here because they are Mexican or not what ever.  Yet the reality is you would not have a party at your house and let just anyone walk in.  You invite those you trust. If you have a open door policy eventually someone will enter the party who doesn't like the music and try to change it. The owner of the house then gets up set that his music was changed and then there is a controversy. Its about providing a safety net for those who are already here.  Simple solution is for the left to give the money for the wall with stipulations on the amount of immigrants who can come in every year. The right would have to agree to a certain amount of immigration.   Then both sides get close to what they want.  Then the people who feel death is going to ride in from the south unchecked are happy. The people who feel that the poor and desolate people of Mexico need to  have a place to come look for the dream are happy.  Yet  the dream seems like a night mare anymore.  I suppose when your country will let Chevrolet work you for 2 dollars a day though  America does seem like a dream.  That was a guess on the two dollars don't take that literal.

(January 13, 2019 at 1:33 pm)camoman Wrote: The real issue is how everyone looks at this.   Lots of people believe its a race issue that you don't want them here because they are Mexican or not what ever.  Yet the reality is you would not have a party at your house and let just anyone walk in.  You invite those you trust. If you have a open door policy eventually someone will enter the party who doesn't like the music and try to change it. The owner of the house then gets up set that his music was changed and then there is a controversy. Its about providing a safety net for those who are already here.  Simple solution is for the left to give the money for the wall with stipulations on the amount of immigrants who can come in every year. The right would have to agree to a certain amount of immigration.   Then both sides get close to what they want.  Then the people who feel death is going to ride in from the south unchecked are happy. The people who feel that the poor and desolate people of Mexico need to  have a place to come look for the dream are happy.  Yet  the dream seems like a night mare anymore.  I suppose when your country will let Chevrolet work you for 2 dollars a day though  America does seem like a dream.  That was a guess on the two dollars don't take that literal.

The my-country-is-like-my-house analogy is starting to make me sick.

The primary reason for the wall is that Trump doesn't want to 'look foolish' to his base.  The primary argument against the wall is that walls don't work.  You lot may as well spend the $5 billion on a huge pile of candy floss along the border, hoping migrants will get stuck.

If you think the two sides on the US political divide are going to agree amount of legal migration, you're living in a fantasy world.

Boru

(January 13, 2019 at 1:33 pm)camoman Wrote: The real issue is how everyone looks at this.   Lots of people believe its a race issue that you don't want them here because they are Mexican or not what ever.  Yet the reality is you would not have a party at your house and let just anyone walk in.  You invite those you trust. If you have a open door policy eventually someone will enter the party who doesn't like the music and try to change it. The owner of the house then gets up set that his music was changed and then there is a controversy. Its about providing a safety net for those who are already here.  Simple solution is for the left to give the money for the wall with stipulations on the amount of immigrants who can come in every year. The right would have to agree to a certain amount of immigration.   Then both sides get close to what they want.  Then the people who feel death is going to ride in from the south unchecked are happy. The people who feel that the poor and desolate people of Mexico need to  have a place to come look for the dream are happy.  Yet  the dream seems like a night mare anymore.  I suppose when your country will let Chevrolet work you for 2 dollars a day though  America does seem like a dream.  That was a guess on the two dollars don't take that literal.

I don't follow your reasoning. It is pretty much a given that Democrats and Republicans will negotiate immigration quotas. That actually has nothing to do with the wall, since quotas will be negotiated with or without the wall. So you are suggesting that Dems should give money for the wall in exchange for nothing, since quotas will be negotiated with or without a wall. Further, quotas and asylum are different things. We have a quota for immigrants who have the necessary skills (or the necessary relatives) that qualify them for immigration. In addition to that, we accept those who qualify for asylum. The first is accepting 'desirable' immigrants. The second is accepting immigrants for humanitarian reasons. The quota applies to the first category. The second category is additional immigrants.

So the issue is mainly that the Trump administration wants to block requests for asylum by hindering prospective asylum seeker from the opportunity to officially request it, and the administration is also attempting to change the grounds under which a prospective immigrant can qualify for asylum. For example, the administration is attempting to remove those from eligibility who aren't specifically being persecuted by their government in their country of origin. So a prospective immigrant might come from a country in which narco-terrorists are burning down villages, raping the women, killing the men, and forcibly recruiting the boys, and yet those villagers will not qualify for asylum because they are not being persecuted by government officials. This definition would remove pretty much all people south of our border from refugee status.

Further, there is no reason to fund building the wall, even if we wanted to stop asylum seekers, when there is no reason to believe that a wall would effectively stop them. A wall just isn't that much of an obstacle. Its cost to benefit analysis just isn't very promising. It is a dog of an investment.

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(January 13, 2019 at 1:58 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(January 13, 2019 at 1:33 pm)camoman Wrote: The real issue is how everyone looks at this.   Lots of people believe its a race issue that you don't want them here because they are Mexican or not what ever.  Yet the reality is you would not have a party at your house and let just anyone walk in.  You invite those you trust. If you have a open door policy eventually someone will enter the party who doesn't like the music and try to change it. The owner of the house then gets up set that his music was changed and then there is a controversy. Its about providing a safety net for those who are already here.  Simple solution is for the left to give the money for the wall with stipulations on the amount of immigrants who can come in every year. The right would have to agree to a certain amount of immigration.   Then both sides get close to what they want.  Then the people who feel death is going to ride in from the south unchecked are happy. The people who feel that the poor and desolate people of Mexico need to  have a place to come look for the dream are happy.  Yet  the dream seems like a night mare anymore.  I suppose when your country will let Chevrolet work you for 2 dollars a day though  America does seem like a dream.  That was a guess on the two dollars don't take that literal.

The my-country-is-like-my-house analogy is starting to make me sick.

The primary reason for the wall is that Trump doesn't want to 'look foolish' to his base.  The primary argument against the wall is that walls don't work.  You lot may as well spend the $5 billion on a huge pile of candy floss along the border, hoping migrants will get stuck.

If you think the two sides on the US political divide are going to agree amount of legal migration, you're living in a fantasy world.

Boru

I agree that the wall is one hundred percent a political symbol. And it is probably symbolic of racism. It is certainly symbolic of nativism.

(January 13, 2019 at 1:58 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: The my-country-is-like-my-house analogy is starting to make me sick.

The primary reason for the wall is that Trump doesn't want to 'look foolish' to his base.  The primary argument against the wall is that walls don't work.  You lot may as well spend the $5 billion on a huge pile of candy floss along the border, hoping migrants will get stuck.

If you think the two sides on the US political divide are going to agree amount of legal migration, you're living in a fantasy world.

Boru

I'm going to disagree with you here.  The primary argument against a wall isn't that walls don't work.  That's a red herring.  Republicans want us to argue that walls don't work because they can argue right back that walls do work.  But whether walls work or not isn't the issue.  The issue is that THIS WALL isn't cost effective.  You're spending what will probably be $50B to increase the ladder and shovel market in Mexico. 

THIS wall has hundreds of problems.  Cost, Upkeep, Ineffectiveness, Environmental issues, Property Rights issues, structural issues, size issues, and more. 

All the wall really is a monument for Trump to build for himself on Taxpayers dimes.  (And possibly divide the country and shut down the government for Putin)