4th generation Democrats no longer and a lot
more street smaart than you.

The situation you suggest should be more likely to be issued a warning that they may face action if they continue employing illegally. Although an alternative might be just to allow people to work if on a valid guest/student visa – is there any good reason to stop people doing so? You would think if someone has a valid reason to be in the country, then they should be able to work if they want/need to without having to dodge the law. The limited duration (I presume) of such visas should implicitly act as the break on them being used as defacto permanent immigration alternatives I think?

Moreover, even with the Mexican border – crossings themselves obviously don’t create any costs and corruption; if there is a meaningful rephrasing of the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, the “border crossings” must be it.

People come to the US to work, not to create corruption and costs, and this is exactly where you should look for the solutions: make sure they have decent jobs in Mexico, or that the US employers don’t hire them, or preferably both and the problem will go away. This is not rocket science.

Do we really think it would be sensible to put, say, the Balkin resturant that I like to go to out of business because it payed a woman from Belarussia here on a student visa to work under the table as a waitress? Especially given that the other option wasn’t hiring an American to do the job but rather the owners working longer hours themselves, or having their kids work? I don’t object to some versions of employer sanctions, especially for large-scale violations, but think they would have to be very carefully crafted to not be perverse. (I don’t mean to attribute the bad view to Stuart here, just to be clear.)

69: The problem is indeed deeper; one non-”wall” solution is to discredit those who support IllegalImmigration in one way or another. Once it’s considered a fringe opinion a la, say, support for legalizing heroin, it will be easier to deal with.

With that said, I look forward to this site discussing this issue again.

More seriously, people like myself, who think the level of net immigration to the US is a problem, can hang it up when so much of the support for this side of the issue comes from racists.

By the way, Arriana Huffington’s statement that no terrorists entered the US illegally so far, therefore it can’t happen that way in the future, is almost as embarrassing as Tancredo.

If you want to deal with illegal immigration you go to the source of the problem – ensure that all companies have to account very clearly for all their employees, and make it a serious offense (harsh enough fines to shut down most small companies, for instance) for them to employ people that do not have a legal right to be in the country. Of course, conversely this also means the government has to make it easy for companies to check up on these things, and thus they can only be blame if they have followed best practises in ensuring their employees are legal.

Of course because the US has basically encouraged illegal immigrants over the last two decades to fill gaps in the unskilled labour force during boom times to the point there are so many, any action the government takes will have to be measured, at least if the aim is to eject rather than give amnesty to previous illegals (and equally amnesty could be seen as a dangerous precedent for continued illegal immigration).

At something like 4-8% of the US population even if they could all be removed in a short time doing so would be damaging to the economy – it would lead to labour shortages, business failures, wages at the base of the economy would probably rise pushing inflation, house prices at the low end of the market in the south particularly would likely drop and this would probably spread to other areas, and higher up the market. It would seem very likely that a serious recession would be caused, and possibly a period of stagflation, especially given the continued weakness of the dollar and the large amount of deficit spending during a buoyant economic period that has passed recently. The cure could be worse than the disease. (Probably a bad phrase to use given Lou Dobbs recent anti-mexican screeds about leprosy, but I couldn’t think of a better one offhand)

Crossing the border illegally is merely a misdemeanor. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to build thousands of miles of walls to prevent misdemeanors; there are plenty of serious crimes to be concerned about.

And as far as the rest of the immigration laws – border control may or may not be used as a tool (one of many and highly inefficient at that) for enforcing them. So, yes, it is entirely possible to be consistent in opposing the walls without opposing any of the current immigration laws, or even while favoring stricter and better enforced immigration laws.

Has Tancredo proposed changes to immigration law? If so, that’s what you need to concentrate on. If you believe that a wall would by itself make matters worse, then that can only be because you oppose current immigration law, in which case that’s what you need to concentrate on. This obsession with walls is like discussing the War on Drugs purely in terms of how fast the DEA’s cars are.