Reply #23: outside of farm labour it isn't corpoarte america who is using

[xchrom]

many of these people -- mo and pop are to clean their homes and mow their lawn.

corporate and ''illegals'' is a canard -- a red cape to enrage the bull.

http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Enc/Immigration.html
The Impact of Immigrants on Native Earnings



There are two opposing views about how immigrants affect the labor market opportunities of American natives. One view is that they have a harmful effect because immigrants and natives tend to have similar skills and compete for the same jobs, thus driving down the native wage. The other view is that the services of immigrants and natives are not interchangeable, but rather complement each other. For instance, some immigrant groups may be unskilled but particularly adept at harvesting crops. Immigration then increases native productivity and wages because natives can specialize in tasks for which they are better suited.

The first view is more likely correct. Economists who have rejected this view on the basis of evidence have looked at somewhat superficial data. These economists speculated that if the services of natives and immigrants are interchangeable, natives should earn less in cities where immigrants are in abundant supply, such as Los Angeles or New York, than in cities with few immigrants, such as Nashville or Pittsburgh. Although natives do earn somewhat less in cities that have large immigrant populations, the correlation between the native wage and the presence of immigrants is weak. If one city has 10 percent more immigrants than another, the native wage in the city with the most immigrants is only 0.2 percent lower.

i'm not a libertarian but this piece does some justice to dispelling the myth of ''illegal immigrants and wages.

http://www.lp.org/issues/immigration.shtml

In 1989, the U.S. Department of Labor reviewed nearly 100 studies on the relationship between immigration and unemployment and concluded that "neither U.S. workers nor most minority workers appear adversely affected by immigration."

very detailed evidence about ''illegal'' immigration, over all wages continue to rise -- with of course complications in specific sectors.

http://are.berkeley.edu/courses/EEP39C/Immigration.htm

http://www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru200603170753.asp

Almost all of the things that cause people to complain about illegal immigration are true of much legal immigration as well. If your worry is that illegal immigrants tend to raise government spending, for example, then you ought to be worried about legal immigrants, too. Half of legal immigrants have not gone past high school. Like illegal immigrants, they cost federal and state governments billions of dollars each year.

Or perhaps you’re concerned that illegal immigrants hurt low-income workers by driving low-end wages down. If so, you should be almost as concerned about legal immigration. Illegal immigrants tend to be paid less than legal immigrants, but the difference is small and largely reflects the fact that on average illegal immigrants have slightly less education than legal immigrants.

http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/2006/01/are_illegal_imm.html

The real shocker in the study is that 49 percent of the day laborers interviewed said they were regularly hired – not by contractors, companies of any kind, and certainly not “big corporations” – but by American homeowners. I’d just heard Bay Buchanan (sister of Pat) on Lou Dobbs’ show fulminating about the “big corporations” that are hiring all the illegal immigrants, but – surprise!—it’s the guy next door who needs his house painted or his lawn mowed.

http://www.newsbatch.com/immigration.htm

facts, figures and links on the immigration issue.


http://www.migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display.cfm?ID=210

the above link and the following paragraphs underscore the need of fairly free movment between the the u.s. and mexico.
and it also underscore what is a very intimate relationship.

Leg One: Accounting for the current immigrant population.
The domestic security agenda established after September 11 has cast the longstanding and growing unauthorized population in the US in a new light—as a potential hiding place for terrorists. Analysts talk about the challenges of finding the "needle in the haystack" and hotly debate the appropriate and constitutionally sound ways to make that haystack significantly smaller. Ideas have included registration, deportation (focusing initially on criminal immigrants), and increased enforcement measures internally and at the border.
Today's "haystack" is composed of nearly 10 million people who are living, working, and sometimes studying in American communities. A quick calculation shows that, even under the most favorable assumptions, a strategy designed to bring the unauthorized population to publicly acceptable levels that utilized only enforcement and deportation would require tens of billions of dollars, decades of time, and significant damage to the nation's concept of civil and other rights. It would also require equally heroic assumptions about the United States' ability to keep new would-be illegal entrants out.  

Many of the assumptions that are now driving the formation of US immigration policy are directly inspired by migration from Mexico
  Another option, a national registration of unauthorized immigrants, has also gained support among members of Congress. Such a registration program would be combined with a meaningful promise for some sort of regularization that would allow unauthorized immigrants to remain in the country. Under the plan described by President Bush, the permission to stay legally would be contingent upon employment and initially last for three years, with the possibility of renewal.
Such strategies pose considerable challenges. The utility of such an effort depends greatly on the level of participation: a regularization effort that leaves millions of people unregistered still leaves a considerable security problem. For this reason, policymakers should consider whether their regularization proposals offer enough incentives so that most immigrants will register. A regularization program that allows only temporary stays is not likely to prove a sufficient inducement for many immigrants, who may intend to stay permanently, or who fear that registration could be used against them in other ways.
The level of participation in the regularization program will also influence the success of broader efforts to control illegal immigration. When Congress enacted IRCA in 1986, it thought of regularization only as an amnesty, and extended its pardon to those who could demonstrate that they had been in the United States "continuously" since before January 1, 1982. When the law was finally implemented in November, 1986, the previous five years of illegal arrivals did not qualify for regularization. At the same time, however, they had little incentive to leave (see related article).

this is from a religious group involved with ''illegals''.


http://www.rtfcam.org/report/volume_21/No_3/article_4.htm

note the following paragraphs:

Many experts say that, given the current climate of economic need and lack of work in Mexico and Central America, no matter how many people die in the effort to migrate, more will attempt the journey. "Unfortunately, people’s lives are so desperate that they won’t stop coming they’ll just keep trying," said Rick Ufford-Chase of BorderLinks, a Tucson based public awareness group. "It’s simply not possible to carry enough water across the desert." Chase further stated: "We’ve made the act of looking for a better job in the United States a crime that carries the death penalty with it." (AP, 5/25/01)

These policies, in addition to causing deaths, also have the unintended impact of keeping many migrants inside of the United States rather than periodically returning to Mexico or Central America to visit or to live. Traditionally, the migrant flow between the US and Mexico has been a circular one, with individuals frequently moving in and out of the country. Deterrence-based policies have made the journey back so expensive and risky that many formerly seasonal workers no longer see the trip back to Mexico as worth the cost.


As Congress debates immigration reforms, some experts say the most extreme proposal — deporting millions of illegal immigrants — would be a huge legal and logistical morass, and ruinously expensive, too.
Officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which would be responsible for deportations, said they have no projections on what it would take to rid the United States of an estimated 12 million people.
But the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, has put the cost at $215 billion over five years.
The study assumed that a crackdown would prompt a quarter of the nation's illegal immigrants to leave voluntarily, leaving 9 million men, women and children to deport.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060407/ap_on_re_us/immigra...



lastly -- with the aging of america -- you may very well need these workers to contribute to the social security system for the future -- like most western cultures -- ours is a society that doesn't entirely reproduce itself.