Living in the South of the US, I have met plenty of immigrants. While I mostly agree with your post about hard work and such, let go back to the root cause of the problem for those "dreamers". What was the main cause of their predicament? Did those dreamers' parents follow the immigration law to get/stay here?
The last time I check, the US is still a nation of rules and laws and as citizens/residents, like it or not, you do not get to pick which rule/law to follow and which one to blow off.
One more thing. Why is it ok for those "dreamers" to break the law to get here and then demand to stay here while million and million of LEGAL immigrants are waiting in vain for years and years to get here the LEGAL way?
I'm glad you brought that up, I'll respond to that one and not that awful Jesus quote. It's important to remember that the current system is broken, the root cause of the parents of the dreamers being here illegally comes down to a few crucial issues. The first being financial inability to afford the fees associated with "fast tracking" your residency and visa application. While there are a lot of great people out there doing pro bono work as immigration lawyers on the side, the amount of people that need help is orders of magnitude more than they can handle. In my earlier post, I mentioned that my family and the church I attended when I was young used to sponsor illegal immigrants to help them. The reason I use the word sponsor is because it is just that, we fund raised for them, and received donations from the congregation to help with legal fees and processing fees. In order to extend your initial work visa or school visa into a residency, you need to find a gainful employer willing to essentially vouch for you and cover the extremely high fees associated with getting a good immigration lawyer. A friend of mine that has been living here from South Korea recently graduated from university and was given the usual 6 month window to find employment that all people with expiring student visa's receive. You think "Yeah, six months is plenty of time to find a job," but then comes the problem with this, you have to find a company willing to sponsor you, in return for sponsorship you are usually asked to take a wage or salary lower than market to offset the cost of sponsorship. In this particular case, my friends sponsorship was going to cost a company roughly $10,000. Think about that for just a second, you have a young college graduate entering the workforce, already with a crippling amount of student loan debt, that is going to be forced to accept pay lower than what the job would normally pay anyone else. A regular US citizen could probably take another loan to cover the 10k being asked, but what bank do you think will lend money to someone with an expiring visa? What company is willingly going to shell out 10 grand for a fresh out of college grad, when they could find any other eager graduate without having to pay for them. Usually as a part of this exchange, said employer asks you to sign a contract or a non-compete that states that since they're doing you this solid favor, you'll work your shitty salary without receiving a raise for lets say 5 years (this is what my friend was asked to do) In this particular case, the company he got hired by is actually
saving money long term by paying 10k upfront and locking him into 5 years of low pay. This happens a lot, especially in IT where it's common for companies to sponsor graduating immigrants with expiring visa's and locking them into low salary jobs (here in San Antonio USAA does this
a lot at their main campus).
Now that story follows what happens when you
legally pursue citizenship. Imagine that you're a 45 year old woman living in Mexico, the cartels control your city, your husband and oldest son have been murdered by these criminals. You fear that your younger children will suffer the same fate, so you leave your life behind and make a dangerous choice, stay and eventually be killed and watch your children also be killed, or put the lives of your family in a strangers hands to try to sneak across the border. If the small chance that you trusted the right person, i.e. they don't rape you and sell you into sex trafficking or leave you to die, pays off you're now in a foreign country. You don't speak the native language here, you have no friends or family to count on, and you desperately need money to survive. You could attempt to find an embassy and declare yourself a refugee from violence, but that's going to result in you being sent back, and if you do get sent back, the local authorities will know you tried to flee the city, the cops are bought and paid for by the very people you were running from, what do you think happens at the end of that scenario? So like most undocumented immigrants, you suck it up, and find a place that will pay you cash under the table. The job is probably cleaning shit off toilets, or picking crops in over 100 degree weather for 14 hours a day and if you're lucky you'll make $5 an hour. This employer is underpaying immigrants, and also not paying any benefits or contributing to social security, they are saving a ton of money if the workforce is 100 undocumented immigrants. Do you think for a second this cheap ass boss would shell out
any money to help you get your visa or green card? Hell no, they would tell you to call the cops, but oh wait, you'd just get deported and like I said before that is not an option for you. With cost of living in today's world, how long do you think it takes to save up ten grand making $5 an hour? (Full disclaimer this is a true story of a woman who my family helped sponsor and is now a resident and has children who were protected by DACA)
In both of these scenarios, there is only one person benefiting from the system. It's the employer exploiting immigrants to get cheap labor without any consequences. The system will remain broken, and immigrants will continue to hide themselves as long as the cost associated with becoming a citizen is unreasonably high for people trying to be here legally. Let's be real, not everyone can be an engineer or a doctor to make the kind of money to afford this, or to find a company willing to eat the cost for you because your knowledge is worth it to them. There has been multiple efforts for the last 30 years to revise this system, and for 30 years legislators have continued to prove their utter incompetence at coming up with a solution that is humane and actually punishes those who would try to take someones despair as a means of profit. As long as the fear exists for these people, they will never report themselves, they will be continuously exploited, and companies will continue to profit from their inability to defend themselves from it. It's a vicious cycle with no end in sight and our brave leader just hot potatoed that shit onto the most incompetent congress that I've seen since I've been alive.
You stated that you simply cannot choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, but I beg to differ. Each of us possesses a moral compass and a brain, we have the ability to decide what laws are just, and which are unjust. It has long been the American way to fight for justice, and our founders exercised civil disobedience on multiple occasions to get us to where we are now. It's about time we put the heat on the lawmakers in Washington to actually do their job, I've been getting people all day to call congressmen and senators to express how they feel about immigration reform. If they just allow the DACA protections to fall off and try to deport almost 1 million people and their families due to their incompetence, I sincerely hope police and local ICE agents refuse to execute the order to remove them. San Antonio PD has already stated that if the word comes down they will not enforce immigration policy, regardless of federal mandate or state order. All this talk of job stealing is complete bullshit, no one wants to do most of the things Mexicans are doing in this country, especially at the wage they get paid to do those jobs. If your concern is with immigrants on I9 visa's taking positions from Americans, call your congressmen and tell them you're for immigration reform that punishes employers who try to profit off the vulnerability of those who have no choice but to accept a lower salary to stay in this country. If you worry about the safety of this country, tell them you support immigration reform that has no tolerance for violent criminals that should be deported and black listed from returning. If you are upset because these people haven't been contributing to social security or paying taxes, tell your congressmen you support reform that grants work visa's to every undocumented immigrant in this country that can prove they are gainfully employed and have been living in this country for years.
There are a lot of solutions to this problem, but let me clear, mass deportation is
not one of them. It's high time that we as a society stop trying to claim moral superiority while we defend the rights of neo-nazi's, klansmen, and Wall Street executives who bankrupt our nation while shunning those who embody the real American spirit of hard work, entrepreneurship, and unity in their community. This isn't a partisan issue, it's an issue of basic human decency. These kids didn't choose to come here, they didn't choose to break the law, and they definitely couldn't stop their parents from breaking the law. They have spent their entire lives here, a lot of them don't even speak Spanish, how can you expect them to "go home" and not have their lives destroyed. America is their home, these are the finest examples of immigrants we have in this country, hard working and working towards higher education, exactly what this country needs more of, but because of a stupid broken law that hasn't been reformed to function in modern society you want to destroy over 1 million lives to defend some ridiculous notion that laws are above moral scrutiny. I'm ending my rant here, but if you want those kids to be here legally, write your worthless representatives and tell them to make it happen or you'll be voting them out next election.
Edit: spelling is hard.