<p>You are right, I have not “walked in the shoes” of a fatherless child. But somehow I feel able to judge that such child will be deprived, through no fault of his/her own, of an extremely important relationship.</p>
<p>There tends to be this belief that any father, or at least, any sufficiently well-healed father is better than no father. Simply not the case. Beyond which, family fortunes can change in the blink of an eye.</p>
<p>How about the mother who finds out when she’s pregnant that she has a terminal illness? Should she have an abortion, since she has “no business” bringing children in this world that she can’t be present to raise?</p>
<p>None of us is guaranteed to live forever on this earth or to have no lean years.</p>
<p>I won’t go into the abortion debate, because it is too far off-topic.</p>
<p>Obviously, responsibility for one’s own children is another area where not all minds on this board will meet.</p>
<p>“Over the years, my dad came home with fewer and fewer men - they just wouldn’t do the work and they pretty much told him that he couldn’t pay them enough to do it.”</p>
<p>The service workers I interact with most frequently are the janitors in my office building, cab drivers, and retail clerks. Most of the retail clerks where I live are native Chicagoans, but close to 100% of the cab drivers and janitors are immigrants. I don’t know why native-born Americans aren’t doing these jobs. It’s possible that employers discriminate against them in favor of immigrants, but I doubt that that’s the whole answer because the immigrant workers represent such an array of backgrounds and races, some of whom (e.g. Muslim Arabs) surely face discrimination too. Not to mention the fact that limited English makes it a lot harder to get any job.</p>
<p>Who can explain what I’m seeing? Why aren’t native-born Americans working these jobs?</p>
<p>I don’t see how it’s off topic. You say a person has no business having children he or she can’t be present to raise. Do you mean it or not? Or just mean it if it’s only about poor people or brown-skinned people?</p>
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<p>That’s a pretty sly dig. Now we’re not being responsible for our “own children” if we disagree with you? Nice.</p>
<p>I bet if you took the posters on this board (the parents of college-aged kids) and could ask THEIR parents, how many of them were more than 60% sure that they’d be around and above the poverty line all through their children’s development years, very few would say yes. </p>
<p>For one thing, we had a draft most years. No male except for the most elite and well-connected could conceive with no expectation of being taken away from his family. </p>
<p>Go back before about 1920 in the US, and the rate of maternal death in pregnancy or childbirth was very high. Should people just have stopped having children? Or is a mother so meaningless by comparison to a father that its not irresponsible to risk having a motherless child?</p>
<p>Okay conyat, this debate could go on forever. I’ll take your bait and give the father in post #91 the benefit of the doubt and assume he was gainfully employed and capable of caring for children nos. 1-5 physically and financially, and then had child #6 and something went wrong and he had to cross the border, take a position as an undocumented horse poop scooper and hasn’t seen his kids in 5 years. In that case, I agree that it is a TRAGEDY.</p>
<p>Very good, that’s progress when we can all agree there is tragedy in the world. Now we can either wall ourselves off from it, or do what we can to help alleviate it.</p>
<p>I found this article to be very interesting. It takes a look at the issue of the VERY conflicting statistics that are given by different groups for incomes earned and taxes paid by illegal immigrants. This particular article focuses on understanding the flaws in the sales tax estimates. </p>
<p>The author, lifelong Democrat Linda Thom, a budget analyst in the office of the country administrator, Santa Barbara, CA, concludes that “Illegal immigrants do not pay their way and all studies agree on this point.”
<a href=“http://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/five-three/thom.pdf[/url]”>http://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/five-three/thom.pdf</a></p>
<p>Using the definition given and the data in the article, only households with incomes over $100,000 “pay their way,” i.e., 4% of households pay 52% of collected income taxes. In other words, 96% of households do not pay their way. This is the nature of progressive taxation. Since sales tax is not paid on food or rent, the poor (legal or illegal) pay little overall in taxes.</p>
<p>This article does not address the cost burden in social services crreated by the illegal immigrant population, it seems merely to conclude that all studies on the cost/benefit analysis are inaccurate. (Back to square one!)</p>
<p>Even if illegal immigrants do pay the same small amount of taxes as US citizens at the same income level, factors that must be considered are the higher birth rate, lack of medical insurance, crime rate, cost of interpreters, increased infrastructure burden etc, caused by an inflated underclass.</p>
<p>I don’t think the assertation here (or certainly by me) was that illegal immigrants pay MORE ‘in taxes’ than they consume in social services. The assertations is the NET ECONOMIC EFFECT (b - you are starting to rub off on me with all the caps and font blingbling). Meaning that though illegal immigrants certainly do ‘cost’ in terms of social services, they also stimulate the economy by being consumers of goods and services as well as providing us a significant low cost workforce. The net effect of what we pay in terms of social services against what we reap in cheap goods and services and business expansion is in our favor. That has been the assertation.</p>
<p>The other assertation here has been that it is a myth that ALL illegal immigrants do not pay taxes. We have seen good data that indicates 2/3 to 3/4 of illegal immigrants do pay FIT and SS taxes as well as sales and property taxes. Though that doesn’t mitigate COMPLETELY the cost of the social services these immigrants consume, it is fallacy to say they don’t pay taxes at all.</p>
<p>Are there studies that anyone trusts on what will happen if the work force “goes legal?” How much are we willing to pay for an apple, a pound of crabmeat and to have horse poop shoveled? Verizon just updated all the cable in my neighborhood and I saw nothing but Hispanic workers digging the holes in the 90 degree weather. The argument is that they are taking jobs from Americans but where are those workers? It seems that the argument is that we first have to get them off welfare and they have to get hungry enough to beg to dig holes in 90 degree weather. I’ll never get Verizon FIOS that way.</p>
<p>cart - You have identified the Catch-22. If we “legalize” all the illegal workers, then prices will indeed go up, as they will be paid a higher wage and attendant benefits, just as if we had filled those jobs with Americans in the first place.</p>
<p>(Altho it is more likely that another wave of illegal immigrants come forth to fill the jobs for a cheaper wage. And so the cycle continues…)</p>
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Yes, and then our country will “need” an entire new influx of illegal immigrants to take the “jobs that Americans won’t do.”</p>
<p>Laws of economics do prevail - if allowed. The cost/price/benefit curve will adjust to demand. But, not with government intervention.</p>
<p>I don’t think I have seen this addressed on this thread, but this topic is of much concern and interest to me. </p>
<p>The U.S. is currently working on a totalization agreement with Mexico which would allow illegal immigrants from Mexico to gain access to the social security benefits. I believe that the implications of this are HUGE and have not been widely discussed publicly (the gov’t refused to release details of this until HIGLY pressured by some key groups). We currently have totalization agreements with various other countries, but those are countries with whom we have much more parity in terms of the trade of workers. I suggest that everyone who is interested in this subject do a little reading on this totaliztion agreement which is being promoted by Bush and others.
<a href=“http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/factsheets/USandMexico-alt.htm[/url]”>http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/factsheets/USandMexico-alt.htm</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/back904.html[/url]”>http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/back904.html</a></p>
<p>“Verizon just updated all the cable in my neighborhood and I saw nothing but Hispanic workers digging the holes in the 90 degree weather.”</p>
<p>Cable company workers came and dug up my front yard, and severed the power cable. I’m so glad nobody died! After the power went out I went out to talk to them. NONE spoke ANY English. That might explain what they hadn’t called the utility locator service… Then, they just got in trucks and disappeared. I called the cable company, no help. I called the power company, and they sent a crew. The cable company had not reported what they did. I was astounded.</p>
<p>Of course, this has no bearing on the discussion - they were probably all Spanish speaking citizens.</p>
<p>Reflectivemom - is that a nicer way of advocating ending welfare and starving people into the jobs? I want the plan - do we end government interference in stages; if so, what goes first? food stamps? minimum wage standards? the FDA?</p>
<p>“Reflectivemom - is that a nicer way of advocating ending welfare and starving people into the jobs? I want the plan - do we end government interference in stages; if so, what goes first? food stamps? minimum wage standards? the FDA?”</p>
<p>Welfare reform has been successful here. First purge the rolls of all fraudulent recipients. Then set guidelines and time limits. For easing former recipients to work, pay them and provide food stamps, childcare, etc. while they’re actually working, during the transition period. It was shocking how many people disappeared when they had to prove eligibility. We found that there were thousands of recipients who actually lived in New Jersey and collected there as well. Common sense isn’t a bad thing.</p>