Immigration

As we know the Senate passed an immigration bill which Speaker of the House, Boehner says, they won’t consider but will make their own. Ah congressional cooperation.

Now it is clear we need an immigration bill and the Senate’s does not seem bad except for one teeny weeny thing – the amount of money they want to keep all those Mexican immigrants from coming across the boarder. One reporter said it would make the immigration force larger than the FBI and would be able to post a policeman every 250 yards. Does anyone have a clue how they would pay for the wall etc.?

It also seems, as this is a solution, abet a bad solution, to a non-problem. Are illegal aliens really streaming across the border in such great numbers and taking away American citizens jobs?

Check the numbers congressfolk, the flood of immigrants doesn’t exist.

True, it used to be a problem in a way. Illegal Mexican immigrants were coming across the border a few years ago, but they were mainly taking jobs that other folk didn’t want. Also many came and went; the came, worked a job, and went home. Our economy needed them.

But we pretty much solved that particular problem by ruining our economy with trickle down economics. So, now many Mexicans are saying, “Who wants to go there?” And others are saying, “Hey, the Mexican middle class is growing, let’s go there.”

Indeed the country has changed and there are many more people of Mexican descent in our country than years ago. I suppose some could say we should blame the Roman Catholic Church, which most Mexicans belong to, because they tell them to have lots of good Catholic babies.

In the 1990s immigration surged, dropped in 2002, grew in 2004 slowed in 2006 and were down 40% by 2008. Admittedly these numbers are hard to come by that appears to be the trends we have seen with large numbers now emigrating to Mexico. The Census Bureau shows that there are about 7.4 million Mexicans, legal or illegal in this country since 2009 when things leveled out.

Now we can check some of this out by border patrol figures.

You can take that data as you may but it doesn’t lead me to think we need to beef up the border patrol.

One can go on with more and more charts and speculation but it seems to me the trends are pretty clear.

We need a clear path to citizenship for folk who are already here and contributing to our society and the Senate bill seems pretty good at accomplishing that with a slow process. But the money to be thrown at a non-problem on hoards of Mexicans entering the country is a waste of money and out of touch with reality.

So, House, all you have to do is take the Senate bill, rewrite the border patrol issues to be more sensible and your job is done. Do I think that will happen? Naw, it doesn’t have enough posturing power.

One of these days we might run out of scapegoats and have to fix the real problems in this country: the election process, the diminishing middle class, the increase in poor folk and taking away programs that help them, tax reform that distributes the wealth of the country more equitably by proven economic policies that have worked in the past and getting rid of those that have not worked for the past 3 decades, rebuilding our infrastructure, and improving our educational system so we can remain competitive in the world economy.

Call me a dreamer, but I think those things are possible, but it will take informed active citizens to get organized and reclaim the government. On this note we can see it happening in that Oregon has become the 16^th state to call for an amendment to overturn Citizens United.

Data for this article comes primarily from here.