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If the immigrants we get are the educated, wealthy ones what we are getting are the selfish, entitled people who came here at the expense of their own nation to improve their already better than normal situation.
I would not want Lady Liberty to say 'Give us your selfish, your entitled, your select elites yearning to gain more'.
Those who risked life and limb, those who had nothing to lose are the ones who built this country and gave it its unique character. There may be no frontiers left, but in a sense WE are the frontier, where a person can arrive with nothing and make of himself what he will, without regard as to his place of origin or the status of his birth. Therefore, we still draw the pioneers - those who are willing to risk walking away from the poverty, and security, of the dirt farm in Mexico to cross mountains and deserts to come to a land where, by their hard work, they can become more than the semi-literate dirt farmer.
As for you, are you really afraid you can't compete in the job market with some foreigner who doesn't even speak the language or understand the culture? Judging by your writing you are intelligent and educated - what are you so afraid of? Is some Mexican going to take your lettuce picking job away?
WE are not supporting the immigrants. They are supporting themselves. Just as every immigrant group before them has. A hundred years ago people were saying that we could never assimmilate such huge numbers of East European Jews and Italians. Most those saying so were the descendents of the huge waves of Irish, who themselves would never be assimmilated because of their Papist religion and inveterate drunkenness.
The money spent in Iraq this year alone would repay everything 'borowed' against Social Security to date. We can control the corporations' outsourcing if we try - we are still the largest market in the world and we CAN influence them to play by the rules, and keep jobs in this country if they want to do business here. It's a strange dichotomy to blame immigrants coming here for jobs going elsewhere.
As for Social Security, that is a straw man argument. Nobody collects at 62, and how many of the people hiking through the desert are 61? The overwhelming majority of the immigrants are young and healthy and will pay into the system for decades before collecting anything from it. And while there is a base minimum that citizen collect, what we collect is based upon what we've paid in. Undocumented workers, working with false papers, have been paying in for years and many will never collect.
What you have laid out as a thoughtful argument is, in truth, nothing but a fearful screed.
What are you afraid of?
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