Power Femme
How Do You Identify?: Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
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Join Date: Oct 2009
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Linus:
You bring up a really good point--the *real* problems America are facing aren't really related to immigration. Compared to the effects of letting our education system falter and turning our backs on science, they are trivial. Compared to allowing American corporations to move their headquarters off-shore to avoid paying corporate taxes or moving jobs overseas, immigration just fades into the background. Compared to a trillion dollar defense budget all the social services *combined* do not even begin to compete for the amount of weight they have on the economy.
But improving the education system is a long-term project and will require more money with the payoff being intangible, so we don't want to do that. Passing laws that reward good business behavior and punish bad business behavior are difficult so we don't want to do that heavy lifting either. Cutting back our defense spending by, say, half gores way too many sacred cows. Immigrants are easy. They are nice slow-moving target and have the added virtue of large numbers of immigrants looking substantially different than the majority so blaming them is the path we've chosen in this country. Why do the hard thing that will require courage, sacrifice and will when there's a ready-made scapegoat right at hand?
Yes, it's cynical but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
Cheers
Aj
Quote:
Originally Posted by Linus
As I thought about this new event and was reading this, I couldn't help but be struck by the irony of today. My company's lawyers filed for my H1-B petition, the precursor towards a green card and potential citizenship. To me, I feel like I'm do not deserve this compared to all those families, kids, friends, etc., who came here truly in search of freedom. Freedom from fear of being attacked by cartels, of potential no hope, and a variety of other things that depress the hopes of individuals.
As I read the Huffington Post article I linked I found the following comment:
To me, this will do nothing more than strangle the growth of the US. The vast diversity that exists in this country (although the honking of NYC could abate a little) is what makes it great in many ways. The ability to take on challenges and forge through them are what makes Americans unique in many ways.
It is, to me, short-sighted to blame the ills of a city, state or nation on a single factor. There is too much intertwining going on in the world today. Children born in the US should be, by all rights, American citizens (as per Amendment 14, clause #1).
(italics mine)
If one denies these children their rights, then how far can the state/gov't go to deny other individual rights?
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Proud member of the reality-based community.
"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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