Reply #39: It sounds like you've bought their line, hook and sinker.

[RaleighNCDUer]

Workers don't come here to be taken care of. They come here to work. Most collect NO social services because that exposes them to the chance of being deported. If they are using fake SSNs, they are paying SS taxes that they will never collect on. They pay the same state and local taxes that everyone pays, with the exception of property taxes because buying property exposes them to the risk of being deported and losing everything they've worked for. They are, for the government, the perfect citizen because they work hard, pay taxes, don't draw on government support and dare not complain.

The huge rallies we've seen recently? Numbering in the hundreds of thousands? Half those people, at a minimum, were legal US citizens standing in support of a desperately exploited people, so what you saw were maybe, at the max 200,000 undocumented workers across the entire country, out of a population of 10-12 million. The vast majority are too intimidated to make waves, and couldn't afford to take time off work -- that's why so much of the focus was on the HS kids. The kids were the only ones who could afford to join in.

The problems with the schools, with SS, with Medicare are all due to the republican administration undercutting the funding, not due to the immigrants. In fact, immigrants, mostly in their 20s and 30s, with most their productive years ahead of them are keeping SS and Medicare afloat by their taxes -- it's the babyboom Americans that will be drawing them down over the next two decades. Legalize the immigrants, and pay them a living wage, and the shortfalls will disappear.

Step back and take a look -- if the repubs had not shoved through the No Child Left Behind as a means to unfund the public schools, would the schools be in crisis today? If immigration was not set up in such a restrictive fashion, making it extremely difficult for people to integrate into American society, would people risk their lives to enter illegally and take sub-standard jobs at sub-par wages, thus increasing the corporate profits. If immigrants are flooding the emergency rooms, isn't it because they are forced into jobs with low pay and no insurance, situations that would not exist if they were legal? And finally, to paraphrase Carlos Mencia, if you lost your job to some barefoot villager from Guatemala who doesn't even speak the language, how bad was YOUR job interview?