Kimball_Kinnison posted: You have repeatedly advocated for a guest worker program. Now, unless you are going to tighten the limits on immigration in other areas, the new program would lead to an increase in legal immigration limits, would it not. Seeing as you haven't even mentioned tightening limits in any other areas, that leave one to conclude that you support increasing the amount of immigration allowed.
Kimball_Kinnison posted: So, since you advocate a guest worker program, where do you plan to cut back in immigration to make up for it? If you don't, then don't lie and claim that you haven't called for an increase in legal immigration.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:The more difficult the US makes it, the less money they will be able to send home. As the amount that they can send home easily drops, many of them will decide that it is more costly for them to come to the US illegally than it is for them to find other employment back home. There are already several news reports (including many posted in this thread) showing that sort of action in areas where there have been crackdowns on illegal immigrants.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:The US can't solve Mexico's problems short of a full-blown invasion and turning it into a vassal state. The only people who can solve Mexico's problems are the Mexicans themselves.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:Yes, they should be realistic. Your proposals are not realistic because they don't address any of the incentives for Mexico to ignore their obligations. Until those incentives are addressed (by removing Mexico's ability to benefit from illegal immigration into the US), nothing can change. Kimball Kinnison
Princess_Tina posted:Kimball_Kinnison posted:The US can't solve Mexico's problems short of a full-blown invasion and turning it into a vassal state. The only people who can solve Mexico's problems are the Mexicans themselves. Once again: the objective of immigration reform is not to "solve Mexico's problems". It is to address America's needs.
Kimball_Kinnison posted: There is one key question that you simply haven't answered, and I think that's because you are completely unable to answer it. How would any sort of comprehensive immigration reform remove the incentives for people to immigrate to the US illegally? How does it address the causes of the problem? Kimball Kinnison
Princess_Tina posted:Immigration reform, if carried out unilaterally, can only seek to address domestic factors, because America's laws apply within America. To address the root causes of the problem, the U.S. needs to act externally. The easiest way to seek changes externally is to engage in bilateral negotiations and/or agreements. So the real question is, does the U.S. want to address the problem internally and unilaterally, or does it want to engage in diplomacy to seek a bilateral solution?? Working bilaterally may be more likely to yield the desired results, especially considering that much of the world already regards the U.S. as a big global bully.
Princess_Tina posted:You are proposing -- correct me if I'm wrong -- unilateral, domestic measures with external consequences in mind, but with no way to be absolutely certain that it couldn't lead to unintended consequences.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:Working bilaterally is only possible when both sides uphold their obligations. Mexico has already shown itself to be completely unreliable when it comes to stemming the illegal flow of immigrants into the US, despite their obligations under international law.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:Everything has unintended consequences. You can't refuse to act because you might face unintended consequences, because then you will never get anything done. You deal with unintended consequences when they appear. You don't sit around and fret over them before then.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:But, as you say, the US has no real authority outside of its own borders. Since Mexico has already been shown to be unreliable at fulfilling its obligations, the US really has no viable alternative except to do what it can domestically, and once the effects of that spill over to Mexico, then offer a diplomatic olive branch if Mexico can prove that it will fulfill its obligations.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:The US has a responsibility to its citizens to secure the borders, and the illegal immigrants are a threat to the security of the United States. Mexico isn't going to stop them, because it's benefiting to the tune of billions of dollars a year from their activities. That money is the direct result of illegal activity, and Mexico has no reason to crack down on it. In fact, many parts of the Mexican government have outright encouraged it.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:Last I checked, criminals were not allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. If you make money from selling drugs, they don't let you keep the money you got from it. If you steal someone's property, you don't get to keep it after you are arrested. If you make a lot of money through fraud you don't get to use it to pay for your defense attorney.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:In any of those cases, if you let the criminal keep the ill-gotten gains, you provide absolutely no deterrent to them continuing their activities. You have to make the cost of performing the criminal activity greater than the cost of not performing it.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:If Mexico doesn't want the US to crack down on illegal immigrants, then they need to step up and stop the illegal immigrants from coming here in the first place. Kimball Kinnison
Lowbacca_1977 posted:I suspect KK is talking about remittances from people here illegally in particular, not remittances in general.
Lowbacca_1977 posted:Frankly, we can't make people think that they have a future in Mexico. Mexico is the one that can do that, and its failing at it. However, we do have the ability to make them feel like they don't have a viable future if they were to come to the U.S. illegally.
Princess_Tina posted:Lowbacca_1977 posted:Frankly, we can't make people think that they have a future in Mexico. Mexico is the one that can do that, and its failing at it. However, we do have the ability to make them feel like they don't have a viable future if they were to come to the U.S. illegally. Up to now, dollars have usually spoken louder than words, and the American employers who hire them have been telling them -- for decades -- that there's dollars to be made here. Cross-border demand for Mexican labor goes back to -- at least -- the beginning of the 20th century, and the bracero program made it legal for decades. When the bracero program ended, the U.S. government turned a blind eye and for all effects and purposes allowed employers to continue a bracero program of their own, allowing them to hire seasonal workers from Mexico (and to a lesser extent, elsewhere in Central America) without regards for the law. So basically you have a situation where, for over 100 years, the American employers who hire people they're technically not supposed to have been speaking with their dollars, and have been telling people from south of the border "Come here, we'll hire you and pay you more you could make in your home country!!" I'm gonna paraphrase Barack Obama here and ask, "If the minimum wage in Canada was $100 an hour, and many Canadian employers were willing to hire anyone regardless of immigration status, how many Americans do you think would be looking for work in Canada, without employment authorization?"
Kimball_Kinnison posted:Lowbacca has it exactly right. We need to remove the incentives for people to come here illegally. One of the biggest incentives is the remittances. To attack those, there are several approaches that you would need to make. 1) The actual act of sending a remittance. Often, these are sent via Western Union or other wire transfers. If you require proof of legal residency before sending a wire transfer, you would reduce these outright. Yes, they might shift to sending cash, or other alternate means, but those methods are more risky. If it becomes more likely that your money would be stolen in transit, you will be less likely to wend it in the first place.
Kimball_Kinnison posted: 2) The ability to earn money. We need to crack down on the employers who are hiring illegals. There's not much that you can do for some of the day laborers (as many of them are hired by private citizens and not companies), but you can target the companies that hire them. As part of this, we need to make an easy system for employers to quickly verify a person's legal status. A simple, secure web interface where you enter an individual's information (Name, SSN, etc) and a simple response of valid or invalid would suffice for this. This is all information that the government already has. It's just creating the interface that would be needed.
Kimball_Kinnison posted: But if they are coming here for the jobs, we need to make the jobs dry up for them. Even the argument that "they're jobs Americans won't do" is a load of crap. There are plenty of people who would be willing to do those jobs for a fair wage. Illegal immigrants are more likely to accept lower wages (including below minimum wage), and so they have a depressive effect on the value of those jobs.
Kimball_Kinnison posted: 3) The ability to enter the US. We need to make it more difficult and costly for them to enter the US illegally. If they have to pay a coyote $1000 (random number) today, and he has certain costs with evading border patrols, we do what we can to force his costs to go up. This includes increasing patrols, building obstacles (such as a fence or wall), use of UAVs, and so forth. If they get caught, we need to increase the penalties on them. All of this would increase their costs, and they would pass those costs on to the illegal immigrants. If the cost of hiring a coyote doubled, you would see a drop in the number of people who can afford to use them, and a corresponding drop in the number of people entering the US illegally.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:The root cause of illegal immigration is that the illegal immigrants feel that they can earn more money illegally in the US than they can legally in Mexico. If we want to reduce the flow of people coming illegally, we need to change that perception first. Otherwise, we will continue to face a constant influx of illegal immigrants. Once we reduce the influx, we can start looking at potential labor shortages. That gives the opportunity for employers who currently illegally hire people below minimum wage (because of their legal status) the chance to readjust their business plans. If they can't make their businesses work within the constraints of the law, then they should close up shop. Eventually, the market will rebalance itself. As that happens, we can consider things like a guest worker program and increased immigration. Until then, such programs are simply a bad idea to implement. Kimball Kinnison
Princess_Tina posted:All this would do is create a new business opportunity for paisanos who are legal residents and would take a small fee (maybe 5%) to make the remittances in their own name.
Princess_Tina posted:There's already ways that employers can check. All this would do in the long run is push them further underground, and make them even more susceptible to being exploited by unscrupulous American employers.
Princess_Tina posted:Americans up to now have been speaking pretty loudly with their wallets. The demand for labor doesn't seem to be drying up completely, even though obviously it is affected by the weak economy at the moment.
Princess_Tina posted:Well, the U.S. has been trying to do this for a few decades now...
Princess_Tina posted:It sounds good in theory, but the track record isn't terribly good so far. We'll wait and see what the next administration does. But so far, the federal government really hasn't done much.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:Which increases the costs and reduces the amount of money that the illegals can send home. Also, if those paisanos are doing that as a business, they would fall under the same regulations requiring them to establish legal status of those they transfer money for. If they aren't running it as a business, they would likely face tax fraud problems (as the wire transfer records would show them spending money that wasn't declared for tax purposes). Either way, you are significantly increasing the costs and risks for the people sending remittances.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:So, your entire argument is that because the Federal government hasn't been effective so far, nothing can be done? None of the measures I proposed above has really been implemented by the government in anything more than a token manner, so there's really no basis to say that the theory is disproven. It's all based on sound economic principles, though. Kimball Kinnison
Princess_Tina posted:It doesn't have to be run as a business. People could just go to their best friend or relative who can prove legal residency and ask them to do it for them. The person sending the remittance only has to prove residency, they don't have to prove they're not sending on someone else's behalf.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:If it's more than a small amount, they will run into problems with tax fraud. One of the key ways that people are convicted of tax fraud is when they are spending more money than they make. If Person A gives Person B $5000 to send to Mexico, there will be a record of the wire transfer in the name of Person B. If they do enough of these transfers, without having any documentation for where they got the money in the first place, the IRS will be on them in a heartbeat. They will then have to account for where all of that money came from, and pay taxes on it as income. Alternately, they would face money laundering charges (which is exactly what they would be doing - making illegal money look like legal money).
Kimball_Kinnison posted: In short, it wouldn't work because it add significant risk to the people actually doing the transfers. If you remove the paper trail to prevent being caught, you make it far more likely that money will be stolen in transit, which also adds significant risk. Kimball Kinnison
Princess_Tina posted:Well, they can turn to their friends or relatives, or they can send cash. There's probably a lot of other things they can think of that I haven't even thought of.
Princess_Tina posted:But before we even got to that situation, the federal government would have to make the changes that you are suggesting. Personally, I don't think it's very likely to happen, either in this administration or the next, but, as I said before, let's wait and see. Who knows, maybe our next president will adopt the policies you have suggested.
Kimball_Kinnison posted: Yes, there might be other workarounds that they can use, but the effect will be to either increase the risk to the money sent, increase the hassle to send the money, increase the cost of sending the money, or some or all of the above. All of those results work towards the goal of removing the incentives to come here illegally.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:The exact same thing could be said about everything you've suggested in this thread. If you are going to simply dismiss things like that, why should anyone else give any consideration to your ideas? Kimball Kinnison
