(Prepare for another personal experience please)

GOD, the Universe, or whatever creates coincidence smiled on me yesterday.  Part of my job at the lake is too sit on my duff and wait for calls for emergency repairs.  I was sitting by the lake late yesterday afternoon finishing reports at a picnic table.  Beautiful day.  Boats and people every where.  A Woman and two men, Hispanic, decided to set up fishing in front of me.  We exchanged greetings.  Not long later, the younger male hauled in a  large Smallmouth Bass.  He wanted to release it, and I helped him revive the fish.  We settled into long conversation.  It was they who brought up the subject of assimilation.  I said nothing about my being part of 1bc.  They came to the cove I was in, to get away from there own.  They were Puerto Rican Americans.  She owned a large grocery store in Reading, Pa, near where I live.  Her husband drives truck back and forth across America.  The son is starting college next fall.  These are Americans.  These are hard working people respectful of the country they chose to live in and the laws.  I'm sure there are several million currently in the US just like them.  Including most of the population of the USA.  All part of a huge melting pot.  This isn't a smelting pot.  How fare is it to good folks like these that "Illegals" do better than they?  That is my major beef with those who refuse assimilation, yet use the US.

Jerm, I respect you a bunch, but if a man can't speak from personal experience, then he's just repeating others experiences.  I will continue to do so, while asking you to allow that it is just as valid, and probably more so than any statistic.  Since I will NOT stoop to falsely relating personal experience just to make a point.  I think that might be what you meant.  And I do agree in that case that it is unhelpful.  But give me a little more credit for honesty.

And you are right.  My personal experience is only a small part of the whole picture.  I only ever offer it as that.  I never offer it as gospel.  I think we all add pieces to the puzzle.  I should however post a small disclaimer in my sig.  Just thought it was a foregone conclusion.

I agree with that wholeheartedly. Assimilate or leave I say. Don't come here to stay something else besides American; come here to become American or come here for a visit. Don't come here to stay interminably to use the system and be used by the system. Become part of it, or leave.

Now, the questions this raises are: (a) WHY do people come here to "use the system" and "be used by the system?" We need to phrase it that way to really accurately talk about what happens. The _using_ is a two-directional process. Illegals use the system, and "the system" uses the illegals.

(b) How can this reciprocal exploitation of northern employers in the "NAFTA area system" and illegal Latin American workers be deconstructed so that they stop coming here to use the system, and instead come here to become part of the place, else don't come at all? Decrease the demand for the reciprocal exploitative arrangement at both ends of the pipeline.

In the north, if there was little or no system for them to use, or little or no system that used them, they wouldn't come. In short, penalize the employers, the customers, and the other users of the illegals and you would decrease "demand" for the labor on the north side of the pipeline. In the south, get Mexico stabilized politically, economically, and boost its continued ascendance into the "middle income countries" status." Right now Mexico is undergoing a massive boom, but that wealth is not distributed. There are lots of rural people, semi-literate people or just hard-luck people who feel they could do better by undergoing the struggle of illegally migrating to another country to work hard long hours for wages that are relatively low compared to those for which the average American will work. Help Mexico (Honduras, etc.) to be a place(s) where these folks feel they are better off to stay and work and you decrease the "demand" for the work on the south end of the pipeline.

Putting up "walls," or simply policing borders is time-consuming, expensive, inefficient, and ineffective. The same critique can be made on the "Drug on War." If you really want to change the problem address the demand not the supply. Most of the solutions proposed by those who want to "solve" the illegal immigration problem are akin to suggesting a bandaid as a solution to a malignant bone cancer. The real solution is to take on the hard, and frightening task of fighting the social and economic illness that pervades the entire NAFTA area, akin to undergoing aggressive chemo-therapy and bone marrow transplant. Not a pretty prospect, and it might not even "save the patient." But sometimes when you are sick enough, an unpleasant long-shot is about the best you can hope for. Walls/band-aids/policing ain't gonna make a big difference: it is spooning the ocean. Even if every cop in the U.S. was assigned to strictly illegal immigration enforcement, it still would only represent a partial solution, and what would happen to all the other myriad dimensions of crime and punishment in our society if our police totally focused on the illegal immigrants.

I totally disrespect people who come here illegally, stay here illegally, work here illegally, make use of the social systems here illegally, refuse to learn the national language (English) and refuse to assimilate, and even worse: harbor ill-will to the U.S. I also disrespect the employers who give these people work. F*$% them! Both of them!

But disliking them and their BS is a different thing that actually "fixing" it. Disliking them, and proposing steps that amount to increased punitiveness against "them" simply is not going to solve it, although it does play to the sympathy of those of us who dislike them.

A person acts on his survival instincts. If those instincts tell him to hop the fence, that is what he will do. Each individual is far more nimble than burocracy, so he will find loopholes in any system given enough incentive. The biggest incentive that foreigners have is the fact that Americans are overpaid to the relative cost of living. It is so because the Dollar is the currency of World Trade. To be sure Americans are among the most creative, most innovative people on earth. That comes with wealth and is not a justification for being overpaid. When you are getting paid $6 an hour to flip burgers, & someone else has to break his back elsewhere in the world for $5 for a 12 hour work day, that someone has all the incentives to change his situation. Illigal immigration is not just the Mexicans. There are plenty Chinese, Russians, Philipino, etc. No fence is stoping these people.

Restrictive immigration laws are Protectionism. Protectionism can be the right answer in select times of great strain, but it never is a permanent solution. It is the system that is the problem & not the other way around.

Not so much wealth as diversity attracted by wealth.  America used too, and still does (with all her problems) attract the brightest minds from all over the world.  Enriching the pot.  But these minds were not connected for the most part, to bodies jumping fences.  They went through the seemingly light rigors(compared to some countries) of becoming American citizens, duel citizenship, visa's, etc.  They chose the legal route.  Even those attending Universities and higher education, chose the legal route, knowing that one day they would return to their native land much enriched by the American Education System. 

I have no problem what so ever with that.  It generally makes the whole world a better place.  I'm speaking of those ousted by their own for being antisocial, malcontents, that find the "open" System that Scipio describes, an easy target.  If it were only one or two, yea, so what.  But hundreds of thousands begins to strain what was created for the better of all.  A couple million bad apples amongst several million good apples really begins to spoil the basket.  Causing bright "Legal" minds to look elsewhere.  We are seeing that I believe.  And America becomes the loser in the long run. 

I agree with you and Scipio that a stronger higher fence stops the bleeding only temporarily.  But it is a knee jerk reaction to some very real social problems here.  Including drugs.  It is a "must do" for now.  The SYSTEM must be stronger and higher, not the fence in the long haul.  Stop rewarding succesful "Illegal" invasion, with promises of amnesty, and this forgive and forget mentality.  Provide amnesty to the twenty million or so "Illegal" by first making them follow the rules of American law.  They must be known.  They must register and begin the Assimilation process or as Scipio states, be gone.  An by this restore respect not only for US law, but to the folks who take the time to do it honestly. 

So I guess we did learn?