How do I feel about undocumented people?
Personally I am not in favor of ilegal immigration nor do I agree with breaking the law. Having said that I do need to let you know that I lived in Guatemala in 1983 and 1984 and I have been back twice since then and the living conditions in 1983 comparred to 2010 are almost the same. I learned to love the people, food and the culture. Conditions are very different from the US. Most of the small towns only have dirt roads, no hot water, limited access to mediocre healthcare and the list goes on. It really is a beautiful place although it is very different. When I visited the school, there was not a fax machine,a computer or even a phone and there were very few text books. I could have counted the books in the library without taking very long. People find out what United States is like and they will do just about anything to give their children a better life. While I was in Guatemala in Aug of this year I still saw naked kids out playing and found out many people can't even afford to send their kids to school so they quit school and go into the fields to work.
I do understand why people come here to the US without getting in the legal line. For many of them there is not a legal line to get into. There are 9 legal ways to get a visa to enter this country and most people south of the border don't qualify for those options. My mother in law has applied 4 times now legally and been turned down for a vistors visa all 4 times. I was with her on the 3rd time and she cried and said I should go over wet. We talked her out of it but it is hard for her because she has grandchildren that she has never met here in the US. It is $300 each time for her to apply and each time they said no and they kept the money.
I did research on the cost of living in a small town in Guatemala (not having a car but a small motorcycle and taking the bus) Living in the City has a higher cost of living although the wages are a bit higher as well but so is the crime rate and Government and police corruption is off the charts. The murder solve rate is less than 2%.
The cost of living in "La Libertad" is about $600-650 per month which would allow you to pay your living expenses, food, transportation, utilities etc... The problem occurs when you find out the wages are $60 to $100 per month so having 3 people in your household working will only bring you up to maybe 1/2 of the cost of living which keeps most people living in extreem poverty. Some of the jobs on the banana farm make $15 per day instead of $3 to 5 per day. This adds up to $300 a month and in 2008 when I was there my father in law had 60 guys on his crew that he was supervisor over yet this year after the "Agatha" storm his crew was down to 12 and a large percentage of the banana farm was destroyed.
This is not a justification but a reality. When your cousin writes you and tells you that if you go to Utah or California you can make 20 to 30 times what you are currently making it is very appealing because you could send your wife 200-$300 a month and still save money left over. That is why they come and even share a small house with more than one family.
Yes many undocumented people bring crime, sickness and drugs with them and those things should be dealt with harshly and swiftly. We do need to control the border but it is not happening. They pull trucks with ladders up on both sides of the fence or wall and they dig tunnels. The Border Patrol has even found cement tunnels under the walls and fences.
Those that are here are people, they are our neighbors, our kids friends our friends, our family our brothers and sisters and they fall in love the same way we do. Telling them they need to go home and get in the legal line when the wait is over 30-40 years or more is not a solution especially when we are talking about ripping families apart.
I feel that we should treat those that are here with respect, understanding, compassion and we should come up with a reasonable method to document them, count them and allow them to apply and get into an eventual line for citizenship. They should not be put in line ahead of anyone who has applied legally but the current rules for a Husband and Wife with a 2 year old US Citizen son are that they need to leave the country and wait 19 years to apply (When the son is 21 he can petition the parents) and another 13 to 20 for processing. Is 39 years away from your family a reasonable time period? Giving them an ID with a smart chip by taking their photo, prints, eyescan will give us a baseline. We can charge them a fine, back taxes and loan them the money at reasonable fair rates. This would generate Billions. They do send about 24 Billion out of the country each year but this does not hurt the dollar it helps it. Anyone that has studied Macroeconomics understands that. When they trade the dollar outside the US it helps the value of our dollars. They also earn about 250 Billion that stays within the country. Taking them out of our country would cause such a large gap that the consequenses would be devistating.
Ok, I get it, these people should have thought of that before they came accross illegally and that is true, but if we send them all back who will pay the rent on 4-6 million empty homes and apartments that they will leave behind. Who will pay the foster care costs on millions of US Citizen children they will leave behind. Many say the kids should be deported with the parents but many families have some kids that were brought when they were young and others that were born here. Do we deport the US Citizens as well back into starving conditions? Imagine Mexico alone having an influx of 7 million unemployed people. The country could not handle it and it would hurt the US as well.
Yes undocumented people do cost the country money in healthcare, crime etc... They also pay rent and house payments which ends up paying property taxes which funds education so this crap about us spending millions on their kids when they don't contribute is just that (untrue) . They pay gas tax, sales tax and the estimate is that 75% of them use false social security cards and pay Federal, State and FICA and Medi taxes. The mismatched FICA fund received over 9 Billion dollars last year alone. With all the undocumneted people deported that will leave a massive hole in the Social Security fund. Deporting Millions of youth will also hurt the FICA fund in years to come because white Americans are not having children at a rate that will support the fund for future retirement benefits. Am I justifying illegal immigration? No, I am pointing out realities of the economic situations that we will be dealing with years from now.
The estimation is 4 million US Citizen children have undocumented parents, the Gov estimate is that there are 10.8 million undocumented people within the country but others feel the number is closer to 22 million. Without having real numbers it is difficult to estimate the impact of mass deporation. It would take over 20 years to deport 11 million people at our current high rate of deportation. This is assuming none of them come back over the border. People keep saying the Federal Governement is not doing anything about it but the deporation rates are at their highest they have ever been so they are doing quite a bit but not enough. In order to allow the Government to do what is needed they need more funding and that would mean higher taxes.
Understand that in order for the Government to deport people they need to identity them, gain a warrant or deportatin order and then serve it in a legal manner. The other method is raiding companies. When this was done in Southern Utah we ended up with over 100 kids in the foster care system that did not have parents to come home to. It caused a wide range of problems. Emotional problems and logistical problems. We sent buses down south to handle the influx of kids into the system and the system was hardpressed to deal with it. That was just over 100 kids, now times that by thousands....millions, We can't and should not do it.
Keep in mind that these children 4 - 7 million will vote someday. This group of children will most likely have a higher birth rate given the race factors and religious background of most of them. How we treat them now does matter greatly. They are US Citizens and they will petition their family eventually as well making that number grow many fold within very few generations. Changing the 14th amendment is very unlikely. People can try and I comend those that feel what they are doing is right although we will have to deal with the consequenses of how we treat others. Many sites are calling them objects or refering to them as anchor babies which also objectifies them. Many say they are parasites. This kind of attitude will make the situation worse. We need to treat them as people not objects.
Coming over the border illegally is a criminal class B misdemeanor and if you are caught the consequenses are deportation and a 10 year bar from coming in legally.
However if you are not caught or if your visa expires and you don't leave it is "unlawful Presense" and that is NOT criminal it is a CIVIL infraction yet it is still punishable by deportation and in many cases you will be separated from your family.
Many of them take their kids but many know the children will have a much better life in the US so they leave them with others such a family or even friends after making arrangments. In many cases the State takes custody of the children and sometimes the State makes the decision that sending the child back with the parents is not in the best interest of the children. There are many factors considering the dangers of countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador etc....
What did Rosa Parks not understand about illegal when she got on a bus and sat where it was illegal to sit? It was the law, and you should respect the law.
What did Susan B Anthony not understand about illegal when she voted in 1878 and was fined $100 dollars for voting when it was illegal for women to vote?
Am I saying the law is wrong? I don't think all of the law is wrong, there should be reasonable controls on our borders and we have to have limits and we have to have control on who comes into the country to protect the country from sickness, crime, drugs etc... We buy more drugs than any country on the earth so we have created a market for it. We pay undocumented people so they keep coming in. This is our fault. We want the cheap prices for construction, hotels, food, and goods so we continue creating more of a problem because we create the demand and the undocumented people fill that need. The 25 million people in the US that are not employeed are not going to jump in and take the jobs the undocumented people leave behind when they go. Many of those unemployeed people are professionals and there will always be a small percentage of people that just won't hold down a steady job. Cleaning toilets, hotel rooms, picking fruit in the hot sun, construction jobs etc....
Many of the construction crews are over 50% undocumented. This does create problems for American workers many times. If a qualified trained tile setter makes $17 dollars an hour in TX and the undocumented tile setter will do the work for 7 dollars an hour the contractor can make more money and the customer pays less but this type of thing does hurt the American worker and so to say that these type of things don't happen is not true either because they do. The US takes advantage of these people because we don't have to pay them benefits, overtime or pay their health insurance. We are using them and they are using us but there are more problems that are created as they have children and set their roots within the country.
When NAFTA passed we sold corn to Mexico at lower prices than they could farm it. There are two types of corn, feed corn and food grade corn and now the US Sells Mexico feed corn at very low prices and the feed corn is now being used to feed people instead of animals. One in 3 tortillas is a product of animal feed corn rather than food grade corn. After the US did this it put more than 1 million Mexican farmers out of business and then illegal immigration trippled. Hm, is there a corelation? The issues are a bit more complicated than these simple examples but I would express my feelings in the hope that people would become educated and not believe all the negative comments that are being spread about UNDOCUMENTED PEOPLE. Many of these comments are not true. Some of them are and we need to deal with that.
We need a reasonable immigration reform that addresses these people as people not objects. We need to understand where they come from and know we can't just send them back. My dad wanted to send all the blacks back to africa and he really did not know how crazy that sounded coming out of his mouth. Many others don't stop to think about families. My wife is currently in deportation and we have spent thousands of dollars fighting the system and filing legal forms. When she came into this country she went to the immigration office and applied legally and the lawyer is telling us that was her mistake because if she would not have done that we would not be in this situation especially since she does not have a criminal record. She has worked for 16 years now with a a valid social security number issued by the US, she has paid taxes and worked 2 jobs so she could provide for her children and now the Government is telling us she needs to leave. This is not reasonable to separate 3 US Citizen kids and a US Citizen husband from their wife and mother. Yes I am biased but know that even my wife does not condone illegal immigration although she understands it better than most of us because she took almost a month to get from Guatemala into the US, being robbed and going hungry on many of the days. She went to a US citizen swearing in a while back just so she could picture herself getting her citizenship and swearing to be loyal to the US. She still loves the country after all that has happened and to me that helps my faith in my country. I took my oath in the Army in 1982 and since I have taken the same oath to protect the constitution on the committees and boards that I have served on for the State of Utah and I know the country on a whole is better than how we are acting. Give me your tired and your poor.....
I write these blogs and many have had much of the same information in them. Not many people read them because they are so long. In a sense it is a type of therapy for me to just flood the page with words and I get this frustration out of me. I have so many friends that are undocumented and they have families, goals, dreams, many of them have homes with real mortages that they are paying. Let us think about the affects years from now that our new laws will have on our children. Who is our neighbor?
This is where my family cooks and the rock sink is where they wash clothes, they have 2 rock sinks. My family is not poor like many people in the town. Americans have no clue as to what life is like in Mexico or Guatemala
There are 9 ways to get into the country legally and most people from the south don't qualify for any of those ways. Many of my white neighbors have no clue about how hard it is or that there really is no legal way for them to come here.
I understand that we can only let so many people into the country and I also understand many people are trying to enter legally and they should not be punished and others be rewarded for going about it the wrong way although the people that are already here need to be dealt with and there are families involved, children involved, US Citizens involved and deportation is not always the best solution but putting them in the front of the line is not either.