Illegal Immigration

[Yonadav]

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.