Glynch's comment about the US allowing favorable status to Israeli immigrants. What is everyone's take on immigration. Do you think it should be looser? Stricter? Should it take nearly a decade to become a citizen? Should your kids be eligable for citizenship if they came here illegally at a young age? More questions, should we have a fence? Should we be more protective of our borders? How so and why? Many different questions pertaining to immigration. I think the US should automatically open its doors to refugees. I think that should be the number one priority of our immigration policy. Anyone else feel similar? Or completely different. I would like some more prospective on this issue. As a nation of immigrants we should be more welcoming of immigrants and refugees who see this country as a "beacon of light" as Reagan and many others put it. Whenever I meet someone with a heavy accent, I always talk to them about where they came from, we are so sheltered in America I feel we are afraid to learn about the rest of the world, we're so afraid that evil will flow through our gates along with the immigrants that we forget and become blind to the reality...all of the dangers associated with immigrants can be felt by the hands of those already residing here. Anti-immigration is based on fallacious logic and I think it should change. Please enlighten me with your opinions!
You will have to enlighten me with your assertion that the anti-immigration idea is based on fallacious logics. What are those fallacious logics?
E-Verify needs to be a requirement for all businesses. After that more opportunities for legal entry need to be created. The United States is dependent on immigrants.
As someone who actually works with NGOs that get refugees into this country, the process is nowhere as easy or as delightful as you think it is. We cannot say "Okay, you're a refugee? Great, come on in!" 1. The fact is, there are crapton of people out there who are perfectly willing to play refugee when they're really not. The US used to have a policy where basically a refugee could request that a relative from another country would be allowed to come in. There were so many requests that that was the main job of refugee resettlement. About 5 years ago, agencies conducted DNA testing. And found out about 70% of those cases were fraud. The program has been put on hold and has been so ever since. Now we deal with things on a case by case level. But the fact is, we have to determine that people really are refugees, as we cannot go "You want to get in? Fine. Welcome!" And that takes a long time given the distances and the primitive communication where we're at. 2. Furthermore, getting a refugee into the United States is about half the battle. Making sure that they can survive in this country is the other. Most (90% at minimum) cannot speak English or even Spanish. A lot of them have massive health problems from living in **** camps in Thailand or Ethiopia - I can give you an absolute horror story that resulted from one pregnant refugee we picked up from the airport. And even more of them just do not have skills that will get you work in this economy. Why should a business hire a refugee when they can get an American whom even if he's a high school dropout, can speak English and knows American culture better than people who have lived in peasant farms in Burma for most of their lives? To top it off, getting welfare for them is incredibly difficult as they are not American citizens, and it's always for a limited amount of time, 90 days at best. Not to mention, obviously, it's up to refugee resettlement departments to teach and help them regarding how to apply for welfare to begin with. The fact is, most refugees do not have great lives when they get here, and so we really have to make sure of their long-term viability with the limited resources which these agencies have. This isn't generally true. Most refugees come really from either Somalia or Burma where I worked, but a few were Iraqis who had helped our soldiers. As a whole, they were better educated, knew American culture relatively better, most spoke English, and at minimum Arabic is a more valuable language in our marketplace than Khmer or Oromo. And a lot of them have skills. The one case I enjoyed the most was an electrical engineer. But the fact is that a lot of them just have massive difficulties adjusting to a completely different world. I could go on a lot more. But the fact is that while there's a MASSIVE amount of red tape to get refugees into this country, a lot of it's necessary. Given the serious risks we're dealing with for both their sakes and ours, we have to be careful.
This is all very interesting to me as I've worked on the other end of the spectrum with those who have already made it to our borders and are asking for Asylum. The farming out of refugee determinations to NGOs has always seemed a bit opaque to me. What type of training is involved for those making determinations? Do you guys just follow the asylum officers handbook? Could you tell me more about the actual process you go about making the determinations from start to finish?
Interesting. A lot of things a didn't consider, mostly the fraud part. Do you think, like CPS, a much larger staff would be more beneficial to spread out casework? I know that is a big struggle with CPS as I witnessed many workers testify just a few weeks ago at the HHS committee hearing. The 70 % of fraud discovered, so people claimed to be refugees but were really what? Dirt poor trying to escape a country that offers them nothing nor a future for their families? Maybe they don't get full refugee status, but I suspect that many are coming from difficult situations. I was reading a story about modern day slaves and how this woman took years to ensure he children would be able to come here to join her. It's just sad that people with real problems can't get into this country. And to the poster who asked about the fallacious logic I am referring to, that higher crime rates are associated with immigrants, they don't pay taxes, parents have kids just to remain in the country, they are criminals, they will take our jobs. Those are a few of the BS arguments I have heard over immigration. I don't know near enough about the subject, which is why I ask for your opinions and suggestions. I try my best to keep an open mind and although I have an opinion on things I am more than willing to alter it if evidence of the contrary is provided. Also, how would you suggest getting started in NGO work. I was a government and a middle eastern studies major, I also studied arabic, and would like to get involved in that sector. Message me if you have any suggestions Koji. Thx
Many of the periods where the U.S. was more amenable to immigration occurred when the industries and infrastructure needed a steady supply of cheap labor. Other than a few minor industries, we don't need that any longer. At least, we don't need it on anything even close to the scale we did during earlier periods. What we need now is quality and not quantity. We need engineers, scientists, and so forth. Immigration policy should recognize this fact and then be amended to reflect this new world. The most idiotic, r****ded, straight-up stupid idea in this whole debate is that we're somehow, ever, going to manage to round up all the illegals who sneak across the borders. It's a fool's errand. The only way to decrease the flow of undesirable immigration is to go after the people signing their paychecks with severe penalties. Those are the people who can't run, who can't hide, who can't disappear for a few weeks at a time. Maybe then some of the owners who hire illegals will have to increase the wages they pay.
I do think if you get a masters or a phd in a university in this country you should be given a green card (or at least a visa that will work its way to a green card) Its stupid that we help educate a bunch of people only to make it difficult for them to stay due to our terrible immigration rules and quotas.
I think effective penalties against those who employ illegal immigrants will, eventually, lead to reduced border-crossing. Laborers come here because there are employers who will hire them. If there are no employers who will hire them, then they will gradually stop arriving. This strikes me as a much more practical and humane solution than taxing our cops with hunting all of them down, jailing, then deporting them.
The immigration debate is full of misassertions. One of the best researchers on the topic is David Card. The man is brilliant at teasing out natural experiments with difference-within-difference, and mitigated counter-factuals (well, as much as that can be done.) http://www.nber.org/papers/w3069 Is the New Immigration Really So Bad? David Card http://www.nber.org/papers/w11547
Even the economic effects of low-skilled, illegal immigration, are something that is not cut-and-dry at all. Immigrants of all kind contribute to this society. I would, in fact wager, that they benefit more than they cost, and perhaps significantly so.
I did a paper on it last year. The nation as a whole benefits $2 billion from immigration, as of 2004. Locally it can be a problem, New York and parts of California are burdened by immigrants though I forget the values. I've been lazy reading what was posted earlier, but if anyone has any questions immigration is my focus in school and I'm currently interning at an immigration firm I'll answer what I can after I get done working on some stuff.
This is kind of a random question, but one that has been on my mind for a while. Is there any movement on the possibility of mass waves of climate/disaster refugees in the system in the near future? Is the topic brought up at all? Something that occurs to me is that there is a big possibility of the United States being swamped with refugees fleeing from climate change-related disasters, and I'd like to know if the system is moving to the point where there is some planning for this contigency, or is this a shock that the system has put off for later? If there is some planning, what would be the general policy; bar the gates, or let some in, or WHEE, REFUGEES (I doubt the last one).
This. It is absolutely ridiculous that so much attention is being given to amnesty for illegal immigrants, and tens of thousands of lottery visas are awarded to random yahoos worldwide every year, yet you have untold numbers of hardworking engineers and scientists waiting in line for an endless green card process, with some of them being sent back home after their H1-B visas expire (plus many other incredibly smart and qualified people who are not even fortunate enough to land an H1-B in the first place). I cannot understand how you give away hundreds of thousands of free green cards to completely unqualified (and often uneducated) people and yet have engineers who have worked in this country for 10+ years and still do not have a green card. An engineer friend of mine recently was trying to re-enter the US with his girlfriend. He has lived here for about 12 years, gainfully employed, owns a house etc. but hasn't yet received a green card. His girlfriend was on a student F-1 visa. She went through immigration in about 5 minutes. He, on the other hand, had to wait in a room for an hour while an officer pored over his form and ran all sorts of background checks before deciding to let him through. Backwards.
I'm sure you know that there is a major difference between an asylee and a refugee to begin with. Most of the refugees who come here get here through a plane that first arrives at an airport near the border, generally New York or California, and then after getting their papers processed, some of them go to Minnesota which is where I live. Determining which refugees get here isn't part of my job, I'll admit, so I don't actually know what training my bosses used - I emphasize the whole "Making sure that these people survive when they get to this country" because that is my responsibility. I know they talk a lot with officials at the refugee camp as well as receiving a lot of papers given their status and stuff. There are certain things which they prioritize, such as their health, any contacts they have within the country which we verify, and having a family ( if you're a single male/female who knows no one in the United States, you're pretty much not getting in), but the whole actual process and decision are not things I'm super knowledgeable about. Oh god yes. The resources we get to help these people out are terrible. Forget more staff, if we just had equipment and technology which was made in this century, that would help a ton. "Fraud", I'll admit was the official term which was used on my first day when they showed the new people presentations, but I don't like the term. After all, it's a DNA test. Perhaps it's people they consider an extended family, and no doubt the people who want to come here are not exactly wallowing in luxury. I have no proof one way or the other, but these are probably what people call economic refugees, aka people who are trying to get out of a **** life as opposed to the official definition of a refugee which is a person who's trying to avoid persecution. But the fact is that the United States just is not capable of letting the entirety of the world's destitute come to this country. We just can't. So we emphasize political refugees, which is why like I said most people come from Burma and Somalia - the former are Khmers who are fleeing from the thugs who run that country, while the latter is well, Somalia.
I have never heard of any plans. Right now there are so many unauthorized immigrants here the government only has the power to deport around 3% of them a year. It's possible for it to happen though. Certain groups get labeled as a protected group when something devastating happens. If the numbers were too great for the government to take all the refugees, people would more than likely be accepted on a case by case basis, similar to how Canada approaches immigration.
You said you will keep an open mind, yet you have already concluded that those arguments are BS. Where are your facts? You said the fallacies are: 1) Several of these are disputable, "high crime rates and not paying taxes". I would not assert that they are 100% true, I would not assert that they are 100% not true either. Many more crimes are committed in poor neighborhood. Many work for cash -> no taxes. 2) "parents have kids just to remain in the country", how do you know that is not true? 3) "They will take our jobs", of course they did. Were you here 30 years ago? I were. Then, I saw whites, blacks in all kind of jobs, road construction, yard work, house construction, ... These days I do not see any in the 1st 2 jobs, few in the 3rd. There are many more examples. Don't give me the usual, "they only take the jobs nobody wants". That is not true. Other people want the jobs, just not with the small wages that they bring these days. Wages goes down when labor force goes up. Immigrants who are willing to to work for less drives wages down so others can not afford to take those jobs for less than it could be if the number of people wanting those jobs goes down. Does that make sense? You didn't mention health care and other social services. What do you think about those?
