scrubbedexpat099

Lion in Winter

Of course he didn't invent them, so I'll certainly accept that point. And for Comrade Boiler, too, I hold no brief for Obama. While certainly light years better than Trump and symbolically important in this deeply racially divided country and the first president to manage to get his foot in the door of Fortress Health Care Industry, he still bombed the shit out of a lot of places on the planet and failed to close Guantanamo. What has come after him has made him look much, much better, however.

robin1234

For god's sake, roll on election day, to put an end to this ****ing nonsense.

If you're registered to vote, get out on Tuesday and vote!

carcajou

Thank you very, very much for posting this. Taking 300,000 as a rough mean - there have been 3 million births to unauthorised immigrants in the last ten years according to Pew. I had absolutely no idea it was so many. That is just staggering, and a response is needed.

I had just assumed something like a six-figure total over a ten year period. I didn't know we were talking about millions. Wow.

Lion in Winter

I think we need a little more light and a bit less heat in this discussion. The thread is about the children who are born here acquiring citizenship, therefore they arecnot "illegal". Their presence is completely legal, which is exactly what Trump is making a fuss about - those 85 years of living in the US, remember? That is what he is proposing to stop. So my question was, what harm do these children do to the US, especially when you consider how tiny a percentage of the US population they actually are. The answers you provide are not about these children, but about all undocumented immigrants and while they do only represent less than 4% of of the population, they are not the people I asked the question about.

To the points you have made, however, I don't at all disagree with you on the toll of cheap labour. I think it's naive to think that the permanent underclass in this this country is down to illegal immigration however and your historical memory isn't going back far enough or wide enough. Every capitalist economy requires a surplus of labour. That's how they work. It's always somebody, and always has been somebody. The deep-seated racial divides in this country, founded on genocide, built with slave labour, and sustained by a very long history both of racism and the suppression of workers' rights, have left us where we are today. This is irrespective of whether an immigrant is here with the state's permission or not. If you felt that their lack of status is what allows US business to pay them less, then you could fix the problem by simply making everyone legal. But I'm guessing you don't want that, and I certainly don't think that would fix the gross inequalities here. How will less than 4% of the population make life better for the vast bulk of the rest of us? Do you think if they were gone there would be no underclass? That is not what history suggests, anywhere.

Questions of race (a social, not a biological construct), national origin and immigrant status have been used very successfully to divide and conquer in this country. These things have lately been worked up to fever pitch again because of the electoral and economic goals of the powerful running the country. Here we all are, fighting about immigration (again, it's a trick as old as the hills - Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese have all had to take their turn) instead of about what matters. And some of the people on the losing end will vote for Trump, thinking he will make their lives better. Guess who wins here.

You might also want to be a bit careful about making assumptions about the lives of people you are talking to who you don't actually know at all. When you are thinking about the "haves", I might tell you about living in a woman's shelter with a small child. Or I might not. Knowledge is better than assumptions, on the whole.

Lion in Winter

Lion in Winter

The population of the US is 326 million. So what, less than one per cent?

scrubbedexpat099

If they were a City they would be 4rd, just behind LA.

carcajou

Plus their parents, who currently get to stay - so that puts the figure at (give or take) 10 million.

10 million people! That's not a hundred thousand here and a hundred thousand there. At 10 million, pressure and competition gets substantially increased on all sorts of public services and infrastructure, and financing gets sliced and stretched even more than it already is. Where does the money and land come from, for instance, for so much additional social housing and hospital space? Who has to take the hit in their benefits payments?

Please do not try to pretend that this figure is nothing, because it isn't nothing. Ten million in ten years is a "wow" figure. It is adding a Chicago each decade.

The United States does not have the capacity to add a city the size of Chicago of illegal migrants every decade.

Something has to be done about this.

I am actually shocked at the scope of the problem. I thought it was just the usual Trump dramatics and corresponding Newton's Third Law media howling.

Lion in Winter

And if they were all on a rubber raft it would have sunk.

But they aren't, nor are they all in one place although I'm not sure what difference that would make. They are somewhere in the 3.8 million square miles that is the US.

scrubbedexpat099

Ten million in ten years is adding a New Jersey.

Lion in Winter

Brush up on your facts.

These children are not illegal. They are legal. That is what Trump is getting people worked up about.

Their parents do not "get to stay". They can be, and are, deported. Hence the discussion about separating parents and children.

These children can file to bring their parents here legally once they, the children, turn 21.Bit of lag time there.

These children aside, the rate of immigration from Mexico has been declining for about 8 or more years now.

If you are going to make statements about what the US can and can't afford, you might want to research the question a little more thoroughly, in particular the contributions of immigrants, including the undocumented, to the US economy. Businesses and in effect the state have been letting and in some cases encouraging this to happen for a very long time. Why do you think that is? Is it out of charity? Emotive statements not based on fact are the very essence of the populist politics we see now. Who do you think is benefitting from that?

Lion in Winter

Allowing for the dubious hypothesis that 10 million is an accurate number, do you think we could squeeze them in somewhere, in the 3.8 million square miles?
It might bring their percentage of the population up to, what, 3%?

robin1234

Me, at breakfast time:

kimilseung

unsustainable growth would be a good argument, so what is your evidence for this claim?