Quote:
Originally Posted by PiKA2001
Aww I think it's cute in a bleeding heart kind of way. 
I've noticed that a lot of people who participate in this debate don't understand the immigration system or how it works. The system is designed to be most advantageous to the nation, not the individual immigrant. It's this way in every country in the world, probably will always be this way too. Our country had a totally different set of needs 100-200 years ago. We needed immigrants to grow the population and settle and develop the country. Look at the Homestead Act. Should people still be entitled to free land today because they did it 50 years ago?
Since there was really no sort of welfare back then, the possibility of an immigrant becoming a public burden was nil. Back then if you didn't work, you didn't eat.
Today's "desired" immigrant needs to be educated (or willing to be), able to financially support him/herself and their dependents at entry, able to contribute to society and not be a threat to public safety.
But once again...
Our immigration policies are written to address to needs of our country, not the needs of the individual immigrant. While becoming the worlds refugee camp and feeding, housing, and supporting the worlds poor and downtrodden may give us all warm and fuzzies we just can't afford to do it with our currently broken entitlement system. |
Not exactly. There are many European union nations that routinely take in refuges from African and middle eastern countries that are not educated or of some use to the admitting country. These countries also have fairly open borders with the countries around them...because it's pretty hard to patrol your entire border with a neighbor. Greece isn't exactly a great neighbor at the moment, but no one is suggesting they build a fence around it. Comparing Europe to us is like comparing apples to oranges, but ignoring Mexico and pretending our policies with regard to our neighbor hasn't caused a large part of our problem with immigration is ludicrous. We'll never fix our illegal immigration problem without being a better neighbor to Mexico and improving the living condition discrepancy that can be overcome by simply stepping over a border.
Threaded Mode
