It's certainly true that there's a difference between being "anti-immigrant" and "anti-illegal-immigrant". Sorry for being sloppy with my words. In the absence of any pure Native Americans on the board, all of us Americans are immigrants or descendents of immigrants. 'Course, depending on how far back you're willing to go, nobody except the original inhabitants of Olduvai Gorge are natives anywhere. But I digress...
Tom made a similar point about illegals being paid below minimum wage and therefore off-the-books. As I responded to him, better enforcement of the minimum wage law would have the same practical effect as raising the statutory minimum wage by raising the effective average minimum wage. If you're correct that a lot of the people working subminimum wage are illegals, then trying harder to enforce the law addresses the same problem.
The wall works. San Diego saw a reduction in crossing and easier apprehension where the wall was built. Arizona crossing increased proportionately.
Bingo! The wall around Fortress America has to cover a complete circle, or all you do is move the illegals around the map. You're underestimating the meaning of "southern border"--illegal immigrants can cross water, man, so we have to erect a wall along all our shores too, down the length of California, across the Gulf states and around the tip of Florida and north a ways. These "get tough" policies only have a prayer of working if they're taken to their ultimate conclusion, and that's expensive.
Sorry, but The Southern Wall is a pipe dream. The solution is something else.
That doesn't make the words of Reagan's speechwriter any less stirring. That's a nice piece of writing and I'll leave it alone.
You then start talking about encouraging immigration, and I want to point out that the nearest body of potential immigrants who could hear that call is those same Mexicans just south of us. They seem to have already gotten the message and now we're talking about the problem of their enthusiastic response. Do you really want to crank up the pressure any more? Wouldn't it be better to find a solution that gives them a reason to stay home?
Legal immigration allows us to balance the flow of influx to keep diversity equal.
But should we? Isn't adjusting the mix of immigrants deliberate social engineering? If we're not getting enough immigrants from one country, should we offer inducements we wouldn't offer people from another country? And we already know about the opposite problem of an abundance of volunteers. What a nightmare it'd be to implement that policy!
s it fair to legal immigrants to arrive to the promised land and find everything written in Spanish for illegal immigrants?
What, like city names and street signs? California's always been a distinctly Hispanic place to me, and I can't imagine why anybody'd resent it. Same for all of the Southwest. Why does it matter so much?
For that matter, is it fair to legal immigrants to come here and find everything written in English? Maybe not, but I guess they'll have to deal with it. Spanish, English, either way most immigrants have to learn a new language. What was your point?
I don't think that legal immigrants are that badly wounded if Spanish is used widely alongside English in America. You should conserve your instinct to defend the aggrieved for somebody who's been more substantially wronged.
...and not pander to those who break our laws, simply because it is politically convenient to do so.
I don't know what "political convenience" has to do with it, I just think your combination of a "get tough" policy and encouraging legal immigration won't work. The roots of the problem are economic and the result of market forces, not law-enforcement or military deployment problems. You're just proposing another kind of Prohibition, and how well did that work out?