Reply #108: You bet your ass.

[RaleighNCDUer]

Why do you think 20% return home after a few years? They are here for the money, the work, the opportunities that are not available to them at home.

If you lived in a tropical paradise, would you move to Milwaukee if you didn't have to?

If our employers didn't hire them, and if our economic policies didn't gut their economy, they wouldn't come here.

It's all about the jobs.

Yes, a great many wind up staying, because they have nothing to go back to. Hell, we can't keep our own kids on the farms in Iowa and Kansas for lesser reasons -- do you think the immigrants really want to go back to some dirt-street village where there are no jobs? You ever consider that they are able to be exploited because the outrageous conditions they have to put up with are a vast improvement to living in the slums of Mexico City? If it wasn't an improvement, why would they come here?

I believe that a guest worker program, that falls within the bounds of the US labor laws - no special provisions because of them being guest workers - would increase the number of people who would return home. Their earnings, and therefore their savings, would be bigger and they would have better capacity to start their own businesses at home, where everybody speaks their own language, their own dialect, where all their relatives live and where their ancestors are buried.

They would rather stay at home! The protest is not about them wanting to become US citizens. It's about the injustice of making criminals of millions of honest, hard-working people as a matter of public policy. It is a fight against corporate fascism running the government.

They can only be exploited if they are illegal.