Let me take you to S Miami where the street signs are in spanish and english... That's a good start why I think it's bullshit. Castro let all the prisoners loose on us in the 80's and now this... I still stand behind Teddy 100%. How do you be an American you ask?? re-read the quote and think of how many "immigrants" have forign flags waving from their houses, cars, etc.:disgust

I have 3 generations in this state so you can trace my family back to when the indians came to Florida. If we should be giving anyone anything we should start with them!

It's all about the money money money.

Whenever you hear someone say that they "do the jobs americans wont do", it means "do the jobs for half the price that americans would" and thats all there is to it.

If I needed a drywaller and one was a company who paid taxes and insurance and $25 an hour, why wouldnt I go find a guy in the parking lot of Home Depot and offer him $10 an hour and no benefits and tax free?

What also gets to me is that the REASON they leave Mexico is because Mexico does jack shit to prop up it's own people with decent wages and services! WTF.

I have no good notion of a real solution, but it's sure screwed up how we're being force fed sound bites until not even the news people question the truth of them.

Thats the point of this tread idiot.

Who picks lettuce, flips burgers, washes cars, mows laws, in fucking Alabama or Oregon, or Ohio and the other 46 states that dont have a large population of illegal immigrants.

Why doesnt a hamburger cost $25 in Alabama?

You don't have to take me to S Miami to show me those deeply offensive signs in spanish and english, I live on the border. Are you intimidated by spanish?

Never been to Oregon, I see. So where are you from? You seem pretty sheltered if you think mexicans are only in California.

Exactly.
But the bigger lesson is that *because* illegal immigrants take these jobs the wages have been dropped so low that most others won't want them. If the wages rose to a decent level, there would be plenty of unemployed who would gladly take these jobs.
A chicken/egg thing.

WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK I AM FROM???

Los Angeles, California.

Why do you think i care so much.

Why not start by questioning the veracity of political ads?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/s...-elections-utl

Why don't you move to Idaho?

Why dont you move back to Mexico?

Because you lost your job washing dishes at Denny's to a Mexican?

I'm moving to Mazatlan when my son gets out of school.

PS - I was born in Seattle

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh
Great comeback. How original.

Myths and migration
Apr 6th 2006
From The Economist print edition


Do immigrants really hurt American workers' wages?

EVERY now and again America, a nation largely made up of immigrants and their descendants, is gripped by a furious political row over whether and how it should stem the flood of people wanting to enter the country. It is in the midst of just such a quarrel now. Congress is contemplating the erection of a wall along stretches of the Mexican border and a crackdown on illegal workers, as well as softer policies such as a guest-worker programme for illegal immigrants. Some of the arguments are plain silly. Immigration's defenders claim that foreigners come to do jobs that Americans won't?as if cities with few immigrants had no gardeners. Its opponents say that immigrants steal American jobs?succumbing to the fallacy that there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around.

One common argument, though not silly, is often overstated: that immigration pushes down American workers' wages, especially among high-school dropouts. It isn't hard to see why this might be. Over the past 25 years American incomes have become less equally distributed, typical wages have grown surprisingly slowly for such a healthy economy and the real wages of the least skilled have actually fallen. It is plausible that immigration is at least partly to blame, especially because recent arrivals have disproportionately poor skills. In the 2000 census immigrants made up 13% of America's pool of workers, but 28% of those without a high-school education and over half of those with eight years' schooling or less.

In fact, the relationship between immigration and wages is not clear-cut, even in theory. That is because wages depend on the supply of capital as well as labour. Alone, an influx of immigrants raises the supply of workers and hence reduces wages. But cheaper labour increases the potential return to employers of building new factories or opening new valet-parking companies. In so doing, they create extra demand for workers. Once capital has fully adjusted, the final impact on overall wages should be a wash, as long as the immigrants have not changed the productivity of the workforce as a whole.

However, even if wages do not change on average, immigration can still shift the relative pay of workers of different types. A large inflow of low-skilled people could push down the relative wages of low-skilled natives, assuming that they compete for the same jobs. On the other hand, if the immigrants had complementary skills, natives would be relatively better off. To gauge the full effect of immigration on wages, therefore, you need to know how quickly capital adjusts and how far the newcomers are substitutes for local workers.

City to city

Empirical evidence* is as inconclusive as the theory. One method is to compare wage trends in cities with lots of immigrants, such as Los Angeles, with those in places with only a few, such as Indianapolis. If immigration had a big effect on relative pay, you would expect this to be reflected in differences between cities' wage trends. David Card, of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the leading advocates of this approach. His research suggests that although there are big differences between cities' proportions of immigrants, this has had no significant effect on unskilled workers' pay. Not everyone is convinced by Mr Card's technique. His critics argue that the geographical distribution of immigrants is not random. Perhaps low-skilled natives leave cities with lots of immigrants rather than compete with them for jobs, so that immigration indirectly pushes up the supply of low-skilled workers elsewhere (and pushes down their wages). Mr Card has tested the idea that immigration displaces low-skilled natives and found scant evidence that it does.

An alternative approach, pioneered by George Borjas, of Harvard University, is to tease out the effect of immigration from national wage statistics. Mr Borjas divides people into categories, according to their education and work experience. He assumes that workers of different types are not easily substitutable for each other, but that immigrants and natives within each category are. By comparing wage trends in categories with lots of immigrants against those in groups with only a few, he derives an estimate of immigration's effect. His headline conclusion is that, between 1980 and 2000, immigration caused average wages to be some 3% lower than they would otherwise have been. Wages for high-school drop-outs were dragged down by around 8%.

Immigration's critics therefore count Mr Borjas as an ally. But hold on. These figures take no account of the offsetting impact of extra investment. If the capital stock is assumed to adjust, Mr Borjas reports, overall wages are unaffected and the loss of wages for high-school drop-outs is cut to below 5%.

Gianmarco Ottaviano, of the University of Bologna, and Giovanni Peri, of the University of California, Davis, argue that Mr Borjas's findings should be adjusted further. They think that, even within the same skill category, immigrants and natives need not be perfect substitutes, pointing out that the two groups tend to end up in different jobs. Mexicans are found in gardening, housework and construction, while low-skilled natives dominate other occupations, such as logging. Taking this into account, the authors claim that between 1980 and 2000 immigration pushed down the wages of American high-school drop-outs by at most 0.4%.

None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it.

I really hate political ads. They never promote the candidate, and always trash the opposition.

If they just said hey look, isn't the real issue that our LEGAL method for migrants is too slow, and the EMPLOYERS of illegal migrants is what is driving the run for our border, then it'd be more fair and truthful I think.

We need a new minimum wage for one thing. It's so long overdue it's a disgrace IMHO.

We need a 'fast track' system to put the people who TRULY want to come and live in America AS Americans through the system faster.

But to hear the News people and politicians talk, there are 2 options: Deport 11 million people, or give them a card that says they can work legally for sub par pay for greedy shady employers who BTW, are also breaking the law! lol

Another thing is that from what you see and read, you'd think that ALL Mexicans in america wish they could just come here and work with no hassle. Baloney. The ones who are here legally through the system vote strongly opposed to any "amnesty" type program in the border states.

This whole thing is stupid and getting out of hand. It's not a racial thing, it's an illegal immigrant issue. I don't care if a person is from Ireland, Italy, Spain, Argentidna, Mexico, etc, if you want to go into any country (not just he U.S.) you need to fill out the proper paper work. And if you're allowed into another country then you have to follow the laws in regards to employment and paying taxes.

The USA is FUCKED. :helpme :helpme :helpme