Technology and robotics are advancing and will reduce the need for workers in the future.
Jan C. Ting
All Americans are either immigrants or descendants of ancestors who came from somewhere else, including Native Americans. We should all respect and admire immigrants.
I respect those who openly advocate for unlimited immigration to the United States. Open borders is an intellectually coherent, defensible position.
The U.S. immigration system is the most generous in the world, providing each year more green cards for legal permanent residence with a clear path to full citizenship than all the rest of the nations of the world combined.
Both my parents were immigrants, as were many of their friends, the parents of the children with whom I grew up. Of course I respect and admire immigrants and their undeniable contributions to America, as we all should.
Border enforcement coupled with employer sanctions and threatening employers who hire immigration law violators is insufficient.
If we're willing to accept unlimited immigration in order to keep wages low and corporate profits high, we should just say so and stop paying for all the immigration enforcement window dressing.
Our immigration system is not broken. We don't need, and Congress shouldn't enact, amnesty.
Learning to distinguish the illegal immigrant from the legal immigrant does not solve the problem of illegal immigration.
If cheap immigrant labor is made unavailable, employers can hire Americans at a higher wage, or replace low-wage immigrant workers with technology and automation, which will create a smaller number of skilled jobs for Americans.
Prolonged unemployment is a tragedy of broken lives, broken families, foreclosed homes, and life without health insurance.
Protecting national security amounts to looking for needles in a haystack. The work becomes more difficult if the haystack is larger. Restricting immigration generally, and illegal immigration in particular, limits growth in the haystack, and supports protection of national security.
Illegal immigrants make a rational choice when they decide to violate our immigration laws. They weigh the costs, including the risks of getting caught, against the benefits of a better life.
If we want to set and enforce a limit on immigration, we have to be willing to say no to would-be immigrants who look a lot like our own ancestors, not because there's anything wrong with them, but simply because admitting them would exceed our legal limit.
Libertarian immigration policy would be an experiment in which I don't think we should participate. We should not bet the republic that the results will be good. I suspect the results would be a disaster and the end of the American experiment.
The goal of immigration policy should be what is in the best interests of the American people as a whole. I would recommend limiting immigration to spouses and minor children of citizens, plus additional immigrants chosen for special skills needed in the U.S.
We should favor young immigrants with many years of work ahead of them. We should favor immigrants who have demonstrated an ability to learn and work using English, which makes their future success more likely.
I reject the idea that any job is too hard or too dirty for American workers to do. American workers just expect and demand to be paid a decent wage.
Besides taking jobs from American workers, illegal immigration creates huge economic burdens on our health care system, our education system, our criminal justice system, our environment, our infrastructure and our public safety.
I personally believe that a democratic society is morally entitled to set and enforce a limit on the number of new immigrants admitted each year.
The DREAM Act was intended to benefit illegal immigrants who were brought here as children, the most sympathetic subset among our large illegal immigrant population.
There is no quick fix for illegal immigration. But only when we achieve better control of our borders and better respect for our immigration laws can we give meaning to the discussion we need to have over reforming the numbers, categories, and procedures for legal immigration into the United States.
