Flushing out ideas on how to deal with the problem. My solution is to simply remove all benefit to those that are here illegally or otherwise undocumented as the libs like to say.

You want to come here or maybe you're here already that's fine. Check in every X months, let us know where you are and absolutely no bene's. You must remain in good standing - felonies get you kicked out immediately, most misdemeanors too.

When you work you get taxed like everyone else plus a foreign citizen tax. That money is then used to pay for the administration of the program. Some of the money is also paid into a health savings account for basic, emergency medical service. This kind of dove-tails into hospital reform but without getting too deep there, for the current system hospitals would only be required to provide trauma care and stabilize. If they happen to have insurance or enough in their HSA then fine, they can be treated for what they can pay for.

No school bene's for the little ones and no anchor baby status. School age children would be expected to learn at an equivalent level and that includes a basic understanding of english. Children's behavior reflects back onto the parents. Jr decides to **** up? You're all gone.

No real extra penalties for employing illegals without withholding and submitting the tax other than the normal penalties for the labor/tax laws broken. Although I would periodically run some sting operations and publicly slam the businesses that use illegals without withholding taxes.

No voting rights.

The only thing I would add is an automatic citizenship or at least fast track program. If you're here 10, 15, 20 years, good work history, no criminal record and you can pass the test you should be allowed in.

What do you think? Workable?

Cobra wrote..

The only thing I would add is an automatic citizenship or at least fast track program. If you're here 10, 15, 20 years, good work history, no criminal record and you can pass the test you should be allowed in.

Formalizing this would make the legal immigration process a cruel travesty. Bottom line, once you provide any rewards/benefits for law violations, the system of laws becomes even more of a joke than it is today.

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once you provide any rewards/benefits for law violations

That's not what I'm talking about.

It used to be that you could come to this country and not be a citizen and stay here, work, live, etc regardless. My great grandparents did this. My great grandfather came here in 1902 and my great grandmother in 1899. He got his citizenship in 1926 and she didn't until 1939. It's been a while since I looked at the stuff so the dates may be a little off but close enough.

The difference back then was that they didn't have a social welfare benefits class. Hell, they basically didn't even have income tax. Yeah, feral income tax started in 1913 but it started only with the richest people. It took a few years to filter down.

I'm just proposing a return to that system. So foreigners would no longer be here illegally. I'm fine with that as long as their not a sponge on resources. Tax them like everyone else so there is no benefit to hiring foreigners over similarly qualified americans, other than maybe work ethic. That would also remove the fear that's used by some employers to control them - ie. work for $5 a day or I'll report you to INS and they'll deport you.

Remove all other benefits they may get like healthcare, schooling, etc. I would like to see them check in periodically so we can keep tabs on the amount of foreign citizens in the country, but it should be somewhat informal. Maybe at the state level, maybe at the county level, don't know. Just some form of tracking in the most general sense.

The reward will be that if you are here, have made a positive contribution to this country in some way, adhered to the laws, etc then you can easily get citizenship.

There is no law violation. I know I made it sound that way by using the term illegal aliens, but really what I'm talking about is foreign citizens. Remove the blocks for them to come here but also remove all the benefits they enjoy right now. The only benefit they will have is a right to life, liberty and the pursuit (but not guarantee) of happiness.

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The difference back then was that they didn't have a social welfare benefits class.

Exactly...and until you COMPLETELY ELIMINATE that today...you're only working on symptoms of the main disease. I fear, if you take it away from the illegals, you're going to have a HUGE increase in identity theft...which is the next problem the gov. will be tasked with 'fixing'.

So long as we're redistributing other people's money and calling it 'entitlements', I don't see a 'fix' for the immigration problem worth attempting.

Your idea of going back to the way things were many decades ago ignores two hard facts that immediately come to mind (there are probably others, as well).

First, back in the old days, the "readily exploitable resources" to population ratio was much larger than today. Specifically, a large fraction of the population made a living off farming and there were still large tracts of land available that were relatively easy to make productive. Nowadays, nearly all of the "unused" land is impossible to be made productive without extremely costly and difficult expenditure of resources (deserts, mountains). Also, because of the territorial expansion/development going on at the time, there was a large capacity to absorb even relatively unskilled labor into the economy. Not so much today.

Second, I believe that it is virtually impossible to turn back the "social freebies" back to where they were a century or more ago. For example, educating kids in public schools sucks on the order of 10k per year per kid out of taxpayers (whether taxpayers get their money's worth is outside the scope of this discussion). If you make their kids ineligible for public schooling, you are ensuring a permanent and continually increasing underclass which taxpayers will eventually be forced to pay for in many other ways (e.g., law enforcement, incarceration). If you allow them public schooling, there are very few jobs that new immigrants with the skill/education levels of the typical Mexican illegal border crosser can perform that result in their paying enough in local (to say nothing of federal) taxes to cover the educational costs for even one of their kids (and they tend to have more kids than the current US average). Thus, they can't help but be net drains on the taxpayers for many, many years. Then there are the incremental tax-funded infrastructure costs, e.g., roads, public transportation, etc., etc. - if they can't even cover the costs of public schooling, they sure as hell can't contribute their share of those costs. Some countries have essentially unrestricted immigration only for those who demonstrate that they can cover all of their costs to the rest of society, but that does not appear to be what you are proposing.

There's another issue that's somewhat less amenable to objective analysis. That's the issue of population saturation which I believe should be debated on a national level. Some believe we are already overpopulated. For example, have you tried to get into some of our national parks? The fact that we have to limit visitors is an indication that we have either too few parks, charge too little for access, or have too many people. Adding more parks imposes even more societal costs. Charging more for access is a de facto reduction in quality of life for many people. How long would we allow unrestricted immigration - until our cities start looking like Calcutta? Obviously, at some point, population growth will have to stop, and falling birth rates will eventually take care of that. However, if immigration is unrestricted, then people will continue to come from all over the world so long as the US is a better place than their place of origin. That is, we will keep increasing our population until the US reaches parity with every other place on earth in terms of quality of life - I believe that, unfortunately, parity would be achieved by reducing our quality of life rather than by the rise of the standard of living of the rest of the world.

Ok, so my original idea is looking more and more promising as far as effectiveness...

Round them up, toss them into a C130 and drop them over the middle of their country of origin. First parachute is complimentary. If you come back you better bring your own or have enough money to afford your second one...

Peter...that's an interesting justification for the current stealfare state we have. Regardless, as long as we have it...THEY WILL COME regardless of how you seal the borders unless you have a cop checking IDs every block of every street.

How do you interpret what I wrote as a justification of the welfare/"stealfare" state?

I merely pointed out what is, and stated my opinion that there was no way that it would be rolled back to what existed (or, more correctly, did not exist) nearly a century or more ago.

By saying...'we can't get rid of it, because bad things would happen', you're justifying keeping it around even though it's wrong...and I think you know it.

And stealfare has only been around since the 1930's...we've survived a VERY long time without it...with many people living in large cities without the family farm, etc.

"We know extinctions occur with invasions," said John Chapman, assistant professor of fisheries and invasive species specialist at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20120609....

The US government's policy is for white people to become a minority by 2030. I think it will be sooner. The treasury is all ready wide open and being looted for the sake of floating and funding liberalism a bit longer and it will only stop when the coffers are empty.

Mpilar -

What I intended to demonstrate is that if we keep allowing immigration (primarily illegal) to continue as it has been happening, we will screw ourselves even more by not educating, etc. them than if we do.

It was NOT intended to justify the "stealfare", it was intended to justify cutting off the immigration of unskilled people unable to pay for their own societal costs.

Liberals love the ideal of multi-culturalism, until they find out they actually despise other cultures when directly confronted with them, then they try to "educate" them. Hilarious set of contradictions actually.