President outlines new immigration reform
 

(Reuters) - Engaged in a fierce debate with Democrats over Iraq, President George W. Bush will seek momentum on Monday for an overhaul of U.S. immigration law with his second visit in a year to a major border crossing.

His trip to Yuma, Arizona, comes as the immigrant community worries about a new approach circulated among Republican lawmakers and Bush administration officials last week that appeared to be aimed at placating conservative opponents.

The idea called for a new "Z" visa that would allow immigrant workers to apply for three-year work permits. They would cost $3,500 each time they are renewed, a major expense for low-income workers.

A White House official said the visa concept was among ideas discussed by the administration and Republican lawmakers and was not a formal plan.

It was scorned by thousands of people who marched in Los Angeles on Saturday, demanding government action to allow an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to become citizens.

Bush, ending a long Easter weekend at his Texas ranch, will visit the U.S.-Mexico border crossing at Yuma for the second time since May. It had been the site of massive incursions by illegal immigrants, prompting a major increase in border security.

Bush wants an immigration deal with congressional leaders by August. His proposals to find a way to put illegal immigrants in a guest-worker program to give them a legal status have generally had more support from Democrats than Republicans.

But whether Democrats will be in any mood to help Bush reach a deal is uncertain. He is locked in a battle with them over a $100 billion funding request to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his remarks, Bush is expected to cite failures in past immigration policy as a reason for a new approach.

A 1986 law made it illegal for employers to hire illegal immigrants, but it has not worked well because it is relatively easy to get fake documents and some employers hire in violation of the law.

What does this have to do with the Easter Bunny?

So were are just assuming that everything you post is POL: and therefore doesn't need the prefix?

Okay JessePSUiak...

I can see where the thread title could be confusing...

It could've been about the President of Finland. Who would really believe that our President could read, let alone outline?

My point is if he is only here to start threads about politics, then he can follow in the fine FOFC tradition of fucking off (see: Ewiak, Jesse and Capsi, Cum.)

If that isn't the case, than maybe he could differentiate which of his posts are political and which aren't by using the easy to remember POL: prefix.

Does this bill include tolls for the NAFTA superhighway?

I do not believe this. I believe more illegal immigrants are employed by companies that KNOW they are illegals, and are just looking to cut wages and avoid benifits, than those who mistakenly hire illegals thinking they are Americans.

Why Political leaders, like the Bush administration, are bending over backwards not to punish Employers is beyond me. If you want to seriously try to take a bite out of the illegal problem in the US, you must first start punishing the people who employ them.

Its no more confusing than what is 2+2.

As an employer of Latinos, let me point out a few things from an employer's point of view

Here is a rundown of what happens when somebody new is hired:

1. All of our employees are required to have social security numbers, as is any legally employeed person in this country.

We've never had an employee (black, brown, white, green, or purple) that did not have a social security card or did not pay taxes.

2. All of our employee's information (I-9) is turned into the proper government agencies for processing.

3. Sometimes there are discrepenacies in social security information (obviously since they are using recycled numbers). The government at that point sends out a letter stating that the employee's social security number does not match the name. Then we are instructed that the employee must rectify the situation "in a reasonable amount of time."

4. This is where the big problem comes in. It is illegal to fire anybody on the basis of receiving this notice from the government. If we were to fire somebody on this basis and it turned out that they were a legal resident of this country we'd be opening ourselves up to major lawsuits.

Then the ambiguous wording of the notice does not help matters. Social Security does not follow up because they will gladly take the money they can get no matter if the person is here legally or illegally. That is the job of Homeland Security and to top it off, Homeland Security has a completely different set of protocols to follow than do other government agencies.

In any case, this whole issue as it stands is one big cluster fuck. The human smugglers are capitalizing and lining their pockets while our government has no idea of who is coming in.

I think the opposite sides of the spectrum are completely insane. The seal-the-border and end immigration crowd along with the free-for-all and open border crowd truly fail to grasp the reality of the situation.

Once you get past the ridiculous banter from both sides, there is a reasonable solution and thankfully President Bush has a grasp on this solution.

In most cases this is the "seal-the-border and end illegal immigration" crowd. Very few people want to see immigration go away, they just want to see people go through the proper channels.

I agree completely with you. That is not my quote, it is from the article.

I thought Bush's current solution is a guest worker pass that costs $3,500 to obtain. Where's a migrant who's likely to be doing agricultural work going to get that money?


There's an argument to be made (and I'm not making this argument, right now, because I'm not sure of the evidence behind it) that certain industries, such as agriculture, can only continue to exist by paying their employees so little, and so if you take away their labor pool, you'll cause these industries considerable harm. I wouldn't mind hearing from your take on this, lungs.

Fixed.

It is WAY more complicated than that.

There are several major industries in the US that are propped up by the government looking the other way. Migrant harvesters and in-the-trenches construction work are two major ones. If you look, the upper level management of these groups are two of the biggest contributors to political campaigns as a percentage of revenue. And they fund both parties almost equally. Reagan, who is considered a near god by many who are forcefully against immigration, championed and signed into law the largest immigrant amnesty bill in history. The politicos are not going to piss off major contributors to their campaigns.

A sudden crackdown and deportation of illegal immigrants would more than likely drive food prices up sharply, and cause large construction delays nationwide.

In the area around where I live, illegal immigrants are the preferred source of labor, and it is not just because of the lower wages. The work ethic and quality of work in most cases is superior to that of the American workers. I've heard numerous times that they can count on the guys from Mexico doing a good job and finish on time with little or no supervision, and that is not the usual result when using American workers.

There always will be illegal immigration into the US. Having 7,500 miles of borders with your two neighbors means you will not be able to stop people getting through, fence or not. The prudent course of action to take is to figure out the best way to manage the situation, taking into account the economic impact, legal impact, and personal impact.

I do believe that $3500 is pretty steep. I'm not sure if that was the renewal fee or was that the original guest worker fee and renewal fee? Regardless, right now the going rate to get smuggled by a coyote is around $2000-3000.

I'm not sure if some remember any of my previous posts on this topic, but my line of work is agricultural, specifically dairy farming. I'm guessing the low wages are a bigger issue of a necessity for produce farmers in California and such (ie: lettuce pickers). For dairy farmers, especially here in Wisconsin, it has become a culmination of factors that have forced us to turn toward mostly Latino labor.

In the not so distant past, most farms in the Midwest completely supplied the labor required to sustain operations completely through family. Maybe a hired hand or two. The scope of a farm's operations were small enough that family and perhaps one or two other people would be enough. It was enough to feed the family and make a modest living.

Basically what happened was that California and other western states were able to produce milk in a more efficient manner than we were in the Midwest. These California dairies were able to milk thousands of cows on one farm while we were piddling around milking 50-60 cows on each farm in the Midwest.

Basically, we had a choice here in the Midwest and a lot of us smaller farmers milking 50-60 cows had to get big or get out. What type of labor were the Western dairies using? I believe you can answer that yourself.

So faced with task of growing our farms or face going out of business, many chose to keep with it and grow. The problem with growing and the fact that not too many people want to have 10 kids anymore (much less the questionable ethics of working children hard like many farmers did in the past) was that there needed to be labor to help these farms grow.

This would be where finding the labor and pay would come in. In a fairly rural setting where the cost of living is not all that high, our supervisors make $15-16/hour and our entry-level workers make $9-11/hour. That is very favorable to many factories and such in our area. It wouldn't be as well paying as most construction jobs though, especially union. There are lower paying factory jobs in the area that Americans are more than happy to take.

The problem is the hours involved in dairy farming. We are working with living, breathing animals and certain things need to be done to them at certain times. Each cow is milked three times a day so that means we need to be milking cows almost round the clock. We can't just shut down our "factory" for weekends and holidays. Somebody needs to be there and somebody needs to make sure these animals are being tended to.

Other lines of work that may even pay less or that pay in line with how much we pay have perks like weekends off and holidays off. Don't get me wrong, our employees get time off, but a lot of times time off comes during the week. Not to mention, you are less likely to get covered in manure.

So it became hard to find anybody to work and it became hard to ignore these people that were practically pounding your door down looking to work. So we hired them just like any other employee. We've filed all the proper paperwork. They pay their taxes. The laws are horribly written on how to deal with any possibility they may not be a legal worker.

You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. A guest worker program would go a long way in my situation anyway. I can't comment on other industries but I'm not sure who's going to work at these packing plants.

Of course we could just import all of our food. But do we want to put our food into the hands of the very foreigners we are trying to keep out?

Sorry for the long rant, but this is obviously a subject that has a lot of implications for me professionally :)

Cartman, please don't complicate the issue with your facts and reasoning! ;)

and if you are correct, it may once again be time for more welfare reform. That's my answer.

Wouldn't that be "Cum, Capsi"? :p

SI

Out of curiosity, are the American workers being compared union workers, non-union workers, or both? I'm curious if union status makes a difference.

If the Mexicans were smart, they'd tap into our water supply and give everyone raging bouts of Montezuma's Revenge...it would be sort of like smallpox' less-deadly, gastrically-explosive cousin.

I'm seriously thinking that anyone who can't discern a bit of Political content from the title of this thread (and really most others) could stand to spend more time improving their reading comprehension skills than fooling around on a web site insulting others.

There aren't many unions in Texas, outside of the Teamsters for shipping and packaging, UAW at the auto places, and the unions related to the airline industry. It is my understanding that there aren't any well organized unions in Texas associated with the jobs that are the main employers of illegal immigrants

I invite you to read the posts by cartman & lungs, just above your post.

And thanks, lungs, for following-up like that. I've always found your posts on the subject to be very enlightening.

Good to know, thanks for the follow-up.

I'm with lungs. I think that anyone who is steadfastly against a guest worker program, is simply naive to the reality that exists for agriculture. The whole ag economy is right now based on relatively cheap labor. Not near as cheap as it used to be, but that is a good thing. It makes sense to provide for a mechanism to allow people who want to do these jobs into the country.

I'm not in favor of a prohibitively large fee like $3500. I just don't think that is reasonable, even with the most forgiving payment schedule I can imagine.

Ok agreed. So let's suppose we have a guest worker program. While it may satisfy our need for cheap labor, does it not open another can of worms as far as national security is concerned?

No problem. I just think it's in everybody's interests to get something reasonable done with a guest worker program. Right now, there are agriculture-specific regulations that make it HARDER for farmers to get guest workers than service industries. Actually, pretty much impossible. Of course those were written 30 years ago and seem to be ass backwards if you ask me.

And my trip to the states of Veracruz and Guererro in southern Mexico was probably the most enlightening experience I've had in my life. I specifically went to see where the people I employ come from. I certainly got all the answers I was looking for and then some on why they come here.

I could go on and on about the subject. But I think most would agree that the system right now is broken. The only question is how to fix it and some are just too stubborn to realize that us employers aren't all looking to drive down wages and screw the American worker. A very healthy portion of us simply don't have the labor pool to draw from. And that is based on the fact that a certain segment of the population is unemployable.

And my last point would be that the phenomenon of paying better wages to attract better employees also applies to the Latinos. Farms in my area that pay piss poor wages still get piss poor workers no matter where they come from or what language they speak.

If Mexico hasn't invaded us yet with totally open borders, I don't think they will do it through a guest worker program. There would still be some sort of registration and tracking of these workers and the Mexican government is not going to want to see a stream of jobs for Mexican people go away so they should have some desire to help make it work smoothly.

Don't you think having a guest worker program would IMPROVE national security by knowing who and where everybody is? As it is right now, we don't even know who the hell these people are and where they are. Many are using fake names.

A guest worker program would be beneficial to national security, not a detriment. And the simple reason is that there is no way in hell a fence is going to stop the steady flow of illegals.

Ladders work pretty well. So do tunnels. You can't stop it. You can slow it down but there is no way in hell you can stop it short of deploying thousands of troops on the border to shoot anybody that tries to cross (I speculate some here may be in favor of that, though).

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door
But realize these eloquent verses I speak
are before a jet airliner full of innocent people,
slammed into two large buildings screwing it up for everyone..

How does it open up a can of worms, exactly? I can think of at least three different ways you can contend that it does, each of which I can easily refute, but instead of me doing your work for you, why don't you convince me that you're not just parroting a right-wing talking point and that you've actually thought about this.

So, how, specifically, does a guest worker program compromise national security? Give me examples, even if they're hypothetical.

No, because it becomes much easier for those who mean to do our nation harm to get here in a LEGAL fashion. In other words, we might know who's here, but that doesn't stop those who mean to do us harm anyway. I'm not saying these same people couldn't get here without a guest worker program, but what I am saying is that a guest worker program would make it that much easier. Just so people are clear, I'm not saying I'm totally opposed to a guest worker program, but rather I am simply pointing out the potential pitfalls of this idea.

Speculate no longer, you can rest assured that's true.

Although I personally lean toward the use of claymores & the old "bouncing betty" as part of the equation.

The 9/11 hijackers entered the country legally, although under false pretences.

Timothy McVeigh was a U.S. citizen.

The Unabomber was (is) a U.S. citizen.

Try again.

What, are you trying to confuse the President even more? :D

While you are factually correct, you are also being totally irresponsible with this comment.

Let me point out a pitfall of not having a guest worker program then. If agriculture doesn't have the labor it requires, we will be forced to import our food to avoid a food shortage. I think the terrorists would have a much easier time tainting our food supply if they are able to do it in another country and perhaps have even far more reaching consequences than even a 9/11 attack would in terms of casualties.

America wants cheap and safe food and I'm pretty well convinced that no guest worker program will definitely eliminate the cheap part and as a consequence, may cause some food safety concerns.

There is a bill before Congress that is a specific guest worker program for Agricultural workers. Hopefully they can get it passed.

I will admit, I did have you in mind when I made that comment. :)

Explain.

Also, I'm amused that being "factually correct" is also "irresponsible" in your world.

Wrong!

Three of the 9/11 hijackers were in the country illegally on expired visas and six of them were in the country with no information. Only 4 out of 13 hijackers were in the country legally.

I don't have all the information on this, but saying they entered the country legally and that their Visas had expired are not mutually exclusive.

It is irresponsible to think that the majority of those perpatrating terrorist attacks against American targets/interests are American born, or even to a little lesser extent American citizens. I don't presume you are so dumb as not to realize this either. You simply just like causing friction here for some reason...especially when it comes to me personally.

I'm strongly in favor of a guest worker program. I am a social worker and many, perhaps even most, of my poor black and white clients, simply won't take the dirty, hard work jobs that illegals are currently filling here in Georgia. That's work in the poultry plants (which pays far better than TANF and Foodstamps combined), peach picking, etc.

It's a dirty little secret, and politically incorrect to agree with, but Vincente Fox was right when he said Mexicans were needed in the United States because they take the jobs blacks won't even take. He should have added whites as well, but the point is the same.

A well put together guest worker program which allows foreign workers to traverse the border in an organized, well documented manner would best serve everyone. It makes them taxpayers, it addresses security concerns because we'd be able to know who they were and where they were, it provides American business with the labor it needs and it keeps the price of products in the United States down.

I fail to see the point here. There are plenty of people who enter the country legally and illegally. A guest worker program isn't going to change this substantially. Plus, motivated terrorists are going to find a way to enter the country, guest worker program or not. Additionally, you're not even considering American-born terrorists, whether they be independent (Unabomber), acting with other Americans (McVeigh), or recruited by foreign agents (John Walker).

The fact is that all 13 of the hijackers walked through immigration with information that was sufficient to satisfy local immigration officials. If you have a beef with immigration documentation, I would think it would be with the lax documentation surrounding temporary visas, such as visitors or students visas. As lungs has pointed out, the proposed guest worker program calls for significantly more documentation and tracking than any of these programs do. It is, in fact, much safer for the country than the existing methods of entry.

You didn't read what I wrote. The terrorists I mentioned were either American citizens or entered the country legally.

As I've asked you many times before, what is your argument, specifically? Convince me you've actually thought about this, and you aren't just parroting talk show talking points.


Cut the persecution complex, crybaby.

Except that it doesn't, actually. The proposed guest worker program provides for considerably more scrutiny, documentation & tracking than the current visa programs.


If you're that paranoid, then we shouldn't let anyone into the country, right? And while we're at it, we should deport or lock up anyone who exhibits any antisocial tendencies whatsoever as well, right?


Much easier? Much easier than flying into JFK, telling the authorities you're here to see the sites of New York for a week, and then doing whatever it was you were sent to do?


Any proposal on any topic has potential pitfalls. What you're failing to do here is even rudimentary risk analysis.

"". Good stuff.

Re: Legal Immigration, you have nutjobs like Tancredo that intend to stop that as well. Fundementally, what these people don't get is that you're adding talent to a nation. Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without the legions of people who were "FOB's".

I have never believed this arguement.

Increase the pay and benefits for the job and eventually you will have a package that an American worker will gladly take. It will mean less profit for the business owner and a rise in cost to the consumer, but it will also mean lower unemployment and more jobs for Americans.