Letters to the Editor

• Editorial #3,978 on *illegal* immigration

  [Read the article: Hitting a wall on immigration]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  and still nothing on the legal immigration that is doing more damage to our country and our middle class than all the Mexican landscapers and Honduran dishwashers combined.

  I understand that it's a lot easier to garner sympathy for a brown-skinned day laborer who "risked everything for a piece of the American dream" - although in reality they risked nothing for a piece of American entitlement programs - than it is for a white computer programmer or electrical engineer who was actually promised the American dream and assumed he'd be able to pay off his college loans and support a family because of it. But lets get real.

  Illegal immigrants make it impossible to properly manage the social programs the left is so in love with. Welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, even public schools are under tremendous strain due in large part to policies that result in a completely uncontrolled entry rate into the system. We can project how many babies will be born to citizens in a given year. We can't project how many babies will be born to women who snuck across the border, thus making their entire immediate families (including grandparents) legal residents entitled to every social program this country has to offer.

  And at the same time this is happening, placing an enormous burden on an already struggling middle class, the policies of the Bush administration on the issuance of visas for skilled workers from Asia and Eastern Europe are attacking us from the other side. When the dot com bubble burst, stopping tech sector growth dead, Bush increased the number of work visas instead of sending people back to India and the Ukraine. And that is the ball that the government and coporate interests are trying to keep our eyes off of with this endless debate over the fates of dishwashers and lettuce packers.

  The difference in cost between a lightly burdened janitor at $10 an hour and an unburdened janitor at $6 an hour is about $8000. The difference in cost between a fully burdened computer programmer at $85,000 per year and a lightly burdened computer programmer at $45,000 per year is over $75,000. That's what we aren't supposed to be thinking about, and we aren't, or at least you aren't. The programmer that loses his job is a lot less likely to find other work that pays what his skills and education would indicate, is much more likely to lose his house, and is much less likely to pay as much in taxes to support all these programs that benefit everyone but him and people like him.

  Corporate interests want the illegals to stay illegal so they won't have to pay unemployment insurance, full health insurance, etc... And they want the legals to stay legal for the same reasons. But lets face the facts. Illegal immigrants are here illegally. We have immigration laws so we can keep some semblance of control over our economy, and those laws are more important than ever when so much of the lives of every lower class person within our borders is funded by our tax dollars. And white collar workers who played by the rules, got the education they were told they needed to be successful, and invested in their future are entitled to some protection from our government.

  This isn't the 1880's or early 1900's when we could allow every Irishman or Pole who could scrape together the cost of passage to come here and work. The programs of the New Deal and the Great Society put an end to that forever. And it isn't the 1990's, when we needed every person who could handle algebra or manage an abstract thought to support an exploding tech industry. The rampant speculation and stock manipulation of the Clinton/Enron era put an end to that forever.

  Citizenship and residency are rights only for those who were born here. For everyone else they are priveleges. We shouldn't be obligated to pay for social programs for people who steal those priveleges, and we shouldn't be obligated to give up our jobs to people from the other side of the world. We need immigration reform, and we need it now. Focusing the debate on the plight of Central American lawbreakers prevents us from getting any closer to that.

  Permalink Tuesday, June 26, 2007 05:09 AM

• Yes, you do

  [Read the article: Do you have to be gay to tell another guy his eyes are pretty?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  In the workplace or any other place.

  The only possible alternative scenario is that he has some secret evil plan, of the type typically only seen in movies, to manipulate you into doing something that will leave you heartbroken and possibly imprisoned while he jets off to Monaco with a beautiful woman and millions of dollars. That's the kind of payoff it would take for a completely straight guy to tell you that you have pretty eyes.

  So he's at least thinking about it.

  Permalink Tuesday, June 26, 2007 05:44 AM