Arizona governor signs immigration bill

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by Kevin

RC, I haven't been to Boston, MA, but do you guys really have an illegal problem up there? This is an issue for which many of the negative aspects do not receive media coverage except through the unreliable right-wing fringe media. Here in Oklahoma, the problem isn't so bad. I deal with illegals, they're good folks, mostly pay payroll taxes under a fake SSN and above all and most importantly, they pay their attorney's fees.... every damn dime. Never had a bad experience. I understand that back home, attorneys can have them thrown in prison for failure to pay their fees, so that might be a cultural thing (wouldn't that be nice?).

At any rate, as you move South, the violence, drugs and kidnapping problems grow much, much worse. Maricopa County is pretty much an immigration war zone. Phoenix leads the world in the number of kidnappings per capita. The hospitals and social service programs are stretched thin, and no, I really doubt there are enough payroll taxes coming in from illegals to cover those expenses.

To reduce this issue to a racial/racist issue is maybe partially accurate, but it ain't the whole enchilada.

I would imagine that any large metropolitan area would have a considerable problem with illegal immigrants--not just the Southwest!

In NYC, there are a lot of illegal immigrants from Asia; what ends up happening a lot with them is people come to "visit" family members and never use the return portion of their trip. Where I grew up, our illegals are those from Eastern Europe who come to work at the tourist attractions in the summer and clean snowbird condos in the winter. In both locations, the illegal immigrants tax resources, and can make living conditions unsafe (in terms of people living 10-12 to a small apartment and causing electrical fires, which is pretty common in the winter).

But, you don't see the legislatures of either state passing laws that allow the arrest of anyone who "looks" like an illegal immigrant from China, the Phillipines, or the Czech Republic. Why is that?

[AOII Angel]

Originally Posted by Munchkin03

I would imagine that any large metropolitan area would have a considerable problem with illegal immigrants--not just the Southwest!

In NYC, there are a lot of illegal immigrants from Asia; what ends up happening a lot with them is people come to "visit" family members and never use the return portion of their trip. Where I grew up, our illegals are those from Eastern Europe who come to work at the tourist attractions in the summer and clean snowbird condos in the winter. In both locations, the illegal immigrants tax resources, and can make living conditions unsafe (in terms of people living 10-12 to a small apartment and causing electrical fires, which is pretty common in the winter).

But, you don't see the legislatures of either state passing laws that allow the arrest of anyone who "looks" like an illegal immigrant from China, the Phillipines, or the Czech Republic. Why is that?

Yeah, there are tons of immigrants in the MD, DC, VA area. I live in a neighborhood in Baltimore that is one block off of a heavily weighted hispanic neighborhood. I'm quite sure that a big proportion are illegal immigrants (personally I don't like the word alien as it makes me think of space aliens or nonhumans.) Every once in awhile they raid the Peruvian chicken places in the area and find some undocumented workers, but nobody tries to blame the entire economy on this group.