They won't get them. The immigrants are after the American Dream (whatever the hell that is...). That's why they came to N.A. All the immigrants I know are first and foremost savers and investors.
They want to own real property, become landlords, shopowners, contractors. Paying 1/2 (or more) of what they earn into taxes ISN'T why they came here.
Oh really? A great number come here precisely because *you and I* pay more than half our earnings into taxes. Their own socialist nightmares back home can't support them, so they come to beg off the dole here.
Our hospitals, schools, jails and service "entitlements" are swamped and sometimes bankrupted by them.
Others come here to "reclaim" land that was "originally" theirs. The reasons are many... It's not all about "the Dream".
Others do come here for the right reasons, yes, but doing so against Law isn't honourable or right.
Ran; if they're 'illegals' how do they qualify for welfare? Don't they need a SIN# (or whatever you guys call it)?
Yeh, we've got the leeches here to, but they're by no means representative. In B.C. our agro-bus would collapse without the immigrant farm workers. Same for the hospitality industry and healthcare. I don't think they're a majority but our hospitals are maintained by immigrants and the PNs and RNs are largely Filipino.
Part of the problem is that the leeches are highly visable whereas the workers aren't (too busy working.)
There are now MILLIONS of faked SIN/SocSec numbers, Dan. Often state laws prevent taxpayer services from being denied to those who have no insurance or even records of address.
I'm a legal immigrant: earned my visa, citizenship and passport the square way, and by taking jobs at lowww wages to do it. Never once thought of skirting US law. All for immigrants and immigration, from all over. LEGAL, peaceful immigration, properly vetted and honourably accepted.
Anyway, Reynolds & co. are right: ANSWER is looking for ground troops.
Prof. Reynolds has a good point.
A.n.s.w.e.r. is attempting to turn all illegals into its constituency so that they can then use them to beat America over the head and to accuse her of every sin known to leftism.
Whenever discussion of illegals takes place what I find surprising is that few every talk up the economic angle of the whole issue.
DinV pointed out something very important concerning illegals and the agro-business; it would collapse were it not for the presence of this cheap labour.
That's true, we can see them working in the fields. However, what many people don't realise is that the other end of the agro-business, the processing end, would ALSO collapse were it not for the presence of illegals.
I think the "welfare-leech" aspect is overplayed. Many, many illegals are highly motivated, not at all given to sitting on their butts collecting state benfits. In fact, their employment rates are probably higher than Canada's native born working poor.
Nonetheless, I'm against illegal immigrants, but I say that in full acknowledgment that many of them contibute to our prosperity and economic growth.
There is, however, a dangerous downside to this. Allowing employers access to abundant cheap labour removes most incentives to invent and develope automation and robotics.
Japan's national chauvinism, for example, precludes the massive importation of most foreign labour. This refusal to rely on cheap workers, coupled with the country's ageing population, has given an enormous boost to the robotics industry. They're comming up with some pretty surprising stuff, both practical and marketable! As one Japanese pundit put it; "the 2001s will be the last decade of humanity's pre-robotics history".