Originally posted by Lokrian

Not at all. I am saying that it is not exactly doing someone a favor to let them have a choice between working for next to nothing at textiles at home, or else coming here and working for a little more than next to nothing on your cotton farm or plumbing company.
But that is not the choice they have available to them. The choice they are actually faced with is no job at all in Mexico (or one that pays 1/100th or less) or a job in the US. The US job is enormously superior. It is not "next to nothing" versus "a little more than next to nothing". It is nothing (or almost nothing) compared to an enormous bounty that is equivalent to a fortune for them. As an added bonus, they aren't getting murdered by drug lords or a brutally corrupt police force when they work here in the US. As a SUPER added bonus, if their kids are born here, they are citizens.

It is sort of like when some American gets a bug up their ass to go raid some Nike factory in Thailand or something. The activist flies into a frenzy over people making $1 a day to make shoes. Then some more level headed person interviews the actual workers and finds out they LOVE their job because before the Nike factory they either made 0 dollars or the equivalent of 1 cent per hour.


Originally posted by Lokrian

How you are going to go about discerning who is and is not living up to their obligations as an immigrant regarding not going on welfare? What differences if any there should be legally between citizens and immigrants still on work visas trying to become citizens? Should work visas be offered in any large number to people who flatly admit to not wanting to live here permanently? Things like that...
Frankly, this kind of minutiae is not important since we haven't even solved the first problem. The first problem is getting our country to accept and REMEMBER the fact that immigrants make us strong and we should encourage them to come here.

It is a slick debaters tactic to try and get mired in irrelevant details that are 10 steps down the road in order to distract from the far more important Step 1.

On the welfare issue, it is pretty simple: if you are here on a work visa, you get zero government benefits. No food stamps. No WIC. No DFACS. You get to work and you get to pay taxes.

Other than that, there are no "obligations" on an immigrant. If they come here and do nothing, they are just going to starve or die. The fact that they came here for a job makes it pretty unlikely that is going to be a serious concern.

As for whether they intend to stay here long term or not, I could care less. It is up to US to make our country attractive enough that they will choose to stay here. Trying to hold them hostage by requiring them to live here if we let them work here for a few years is not the way to go about it.

Honestly, all of those little questions are extremely trivial. Those are things best resolved by experts in the field. Normal people, even people who have studied the issue, can really only hope to understand the larger, big picture issues. The big picture here is that far too many Americans think their citizenship is some kind of special divine right like old medieval kings who claimed it was God who annoited them regent. That's malarkey. Immigrants are what made us strong. Immigrants are what made us great. The sooner we remember that and embrace it, the sooner we can get back on track. Otherwise, we'll be the next France 50 years from now, looking back on our days of gradeur with bitterness and looking at India and China with envy.