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Javier730 wrote:There is no arguing of any going on that I see and I know I posted my own opinion, but this topic is beginning to violate forum rules.

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flintknapper wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:

flintknapper wrote:Trump's proposal is NOT single tiered. He isn't suggesting that a wall ONLY is required.

Guys.... there most certainly IS a way to secure our borders, send back illegals and enforce current laws. Don't tell me these things are not possible, they are!

All that is needed is for the public to develop a 'stomach' for it.

Even if we don't succeed completely at first, we MUST make a start. Most of Washington and a good portion of the populace need to be taken out to the 'woodshed'! Our Country can not continue down this path!

Some hard decisions need to be made....... and then implemented.

Sure they are possible, but like you pointed it, it requires the stomach for it. However, the nation won't develop the stomach for it because we (the collective "editorial we") are soft, and more than half of the electorate has lost a due reverence for the rule of law.....and it keeps getting worse, not better.

But I confess to being conflicted. I WANT the law followed, but as I pointed out in my previous interminable post, I fully understand what motivates a Mexican parent trying to raise children in poverty on the "wrong" side of the border to take desperate measures to try and better his family....even illegally. I'm not without compassion for that person. I don't want him to break our laws, but in his shoes, I might do the same thing.

Why? Because:

1. under current law, it is TOO hard to get here legally; and
2. gov't is so massively inefficient that it makes a difficult process that much more difficult and drawn out.

If someone has trouble believing (A) or (B), just ask someone who actually DID come here legally from south of the border just how complicated it is, and then ask them how long it took for the process to complete. And meanwhile, gov't is actually encouraging people to come here illegally. So what possible incentive is there left for an immigrant from south of the border to do it legally? You can't blame it entirely on democrats, because even republicans are in on the scam to essentially invalidate American immigration law by repeatedly passing "amnesties", etc., etc. So what is an illegal immigrant from south of the border to think? He sees an essentially desultory effort by the US gov't to pay lip service to border protection. He sees a deeply divided American electorate on the issue of what's to be done about it. He sees a justice system that essentially abdicates any responsibility for punishing and/or deporting illegals. The message is clear as a bell: "COME ON OVER!!!"

If we want control over this thing, I think we need to make it a WHOLE lot easier, less expensive, and less time consuming to enter the country legally. If we can do that, then when a potential immigrant balances the effort, cost, time, and danger of dealing with a coyote and sneaking across the border with a 100 lb pack of weed or coke on his back on the one hand, against the ease, cost benefit, reduced time, and lowered risk of entering legally, on the other hand, they will begin to do just that - enter legally.

And when they enter legally, we can account for them, weed out and reject the criminals, tax the legal ones, and subject them more easily to the same laws the rest of us are subject to. The proportion of legal immigrants who are good decent people will eventually so outnumber criminals who came in illegally, that it will be a safe bet that criminal aliens can be safely deported without arousing the ire of all the bleeding hearts.

I want to be clear.... I am NOT in favor of an open border. But the current system is badly broken, and the way it is currently configured, it requires a political will that this nation no longer has in order to be effective. Therefore, it will never be effective again. We don't have the will to enforce the law, and we don't have the will to grant amnesty (which I don't think would be a good idea either). The path of least resistance is what, realistically, we can get done - and that is to make legal entry easy enough that people will choose doing that over choosing to risk their lives in the desert southwest.

TAM,

We can not be the worlds's savior. We can not continue to allow illegals to pour into the country by the hundreds (sometimes thousands) every single day. The purpose of legal immigration is to control the number of people adding to the populace as well as vetting them so we don't end up with undesirables. That is the right and responsibility of any sovereign Nation. It must take precedent over 'compassion'. As a nation we can (and do) come to the aid of other countries and cultures. I can think of no more benevolent country than the U.S.A.' I also can think of no more gullible nation... than ourselves.

It is NOT the fault of the USA that Mexico is corrupt and continues have a large portion of its people living in poverty. It's not like they don't have natural resources, we support their tourist industry, we buy their exports, we send and operate OUR businesses over there, etc. etc...

It is high time that Mexico fix Mexico's problems, but they won't. So it is time to play hard ball and make them. There will be time for more 'compassion' after we get things straightened out here. Our nation is about to bleed to death, it must stop. It is not our duty or obligation to insure that no one ever lives in poverty, only to do what we can, as we can...with respect to the laws that govern us all.

Immigration reform, OK, but I submit it should NEVER be easy, just reasonably attainable. Of course, at the current influx rate of illegals... it won't be necessary anyway, since Mexico (and South America) will simply have expanded themselves into the U.S.

No one is stopping any person or organization from donating to the impoverished of other countries. But we don't need to allow unfettered (and illegal) access through our borders under the guise that 'compassion' is the answer. It is not sustainable.

1. The current law is not being enforced.
2. This is because of a lack of political will to enforce it.
3. There has not been the political will to enforce the law since about the 1970s or so, when communist farm-worker union organizers began mau-mauing the flack-catchers along with the representatives of other radical groups demanding a restructuring of American society.
4. We currently have a lack of political will to enforce existing law because the political left dominates the nation's political landscape; AND because, even within the (allegedly) conservative Republican Party (which is beginning to crumble), there is dissent over what should be done.
5. The left dominates the nation's political landscape because they control the nation's media, and even (allegedly) conservative politicians want to be popular. Therefore, the message of enforcing the law is unpopular, and only those politicians who don't give a cup of warm spit for their popularity with the leftist media (but I repeat myself) dare to speak the truth about immigration law.
6. The "law and order" Republican Party is crumbling because the national leadership has broken faith with the grass roots.
7. Therefore, nothing gets done - one way or the other. So the status quo of non-enforcement of the law continues. We don't have to like it, but this is pretty much fact. The left sets the narrative, and the right lacks the numbers to effectively resist that narrative. And the vast middle ground doesn't really care one way or the other, as long as they get to buy the latest gadgets, watch the latest episodes of The Batchelor, and suckle at the gov't teat for the state's "benevolence". And they don't mind giving up incremental amounts of personal liberty to have these things. So what does such a feckless population care about illegal immigration? Heck, even if they're kinda sorta against it, many of them don't have a full understanding of how we got to this point. Why? Because they can't be bothered to hold their government accountable for anything. They don't pay attention.
8. Lastly, if WE get nothing done, will Mexico reform itself? No it won't, for the same reason that the chronic welfare recipient won't go get a job until you cut off their welfare. Since we will continue indefinitely to provide a safety valve for Mexico's corrupt gov't, Mexico will continue to be governed corruptly.

1. We lack the political will to enforce existing law.
2. We lack the political will to change the law.
3. We lack the ability to ignore the problem because it really does directly affect individual citizens.
4. Even if we, by some miracle, were to change the law to reflect the realities, we wouldn't enforce THAT law either, just like we have failed to enforce all previous changes to the law, because the left media (but I repeat myself) would follow its masters and criticize the new law as unjust, and DC politicians, in their disconnect from the will of CITIZENS will cave in to the media........like they always do.

flintknapper wrote:Trump's proposal is NOT single tiered. He isn't suggesting that a wall ONLY is required.

Guys.... there most certainly IS a way to secure our borders, send back illegals and enforce current laws. Don't tell me these things are not possible, they are!

All that is needed is for the public to develop a 'stomach' for it.

Even if we don't succeed completely at first, we MUST make a start. Most of Washington and a good portion of the populace need to be taken out to the 'woodshed'! Our Country can not continue down this path!

Some hard decisions need to be made....... and then implemented.

1. under current law, it is TOO hard to get here legally; and
2. gov't is so massively inefficient that it makes a difficult process that much more difficult and drawn out.

The last time I was in Europe was in 2005 when I went to France. Border entry was radically different than it had been the last time I was there in 1971. In 1971, my passport was stamped on entry into France, right at the airport outside of Paris. If you went from France to Germany, you had to stop at a frontier border post, where a german official checked your passport, which was stamped with an entry stamp. On reentering France, you had to stop at the same place, on the french side of the border, where a french official examined your passport, which was then stamped with an entry stamp. Upon reentering the U.S., your passport was stamped by american officials. Then came the EU……

When I traveled to France in 2005, they looked at my passport in the Airport upon arrival at Charles De Gaulle airport, but there was no stamp authorizing entry. I could have traveled anywhere around the EU without ever having my passport examined. And then (and I just now checked this to be sure) my passport was again examined but not stamped upon reentry into the US. I could have flown from France to Cyprus - an EU member nation off the coasts of both SYRIA and TURKEY, had lunch with recruiters for ISIS, flown back to France, spent a day getting to know my ISIS handler in Paris, and then flown home to the US without ever once having my passport given more than a cursory glance, without any entry stamps to track my whereabouts. However, even though I am an American citizen, because my passport says I was born in Morocco in 1952, my southern accent notwithstanding, I got dragged off to the side and given the 3rd degree (by an asian with a Texas accent, no less), while total foreigners wrapped in daishikis and hijabs were passed through the immigration checkpoint with no issues………

………by the same government that won’t enforce our border integrity.

A mainstream Arizona newspaper is decrying the small section of the Arizona-Mexico border that has a 14-foot-high primary fence because it is too high for illegal immigrants to safely cross. The article, “Border Fence Jumpers Breaking Bones,” includes the claim that sections of the border with a 14-foot-high fence are “as tall as a two or three-story house” and tells the stories of several women who broke bones and were treated extensively to healthcare and surgeries at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. The writer never mentions any lives directly lost as a result of there not being a border fence in most sections, such as when Mexican nationals crossed into the U.S. and murdered father and husband Robert Rosas, a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

On the last, cold day of December in the dying year we count as 406, the river Rhine froze solid, providing the natural bridge that hundreds of thousands of hungry men, women, and children had been waiting for. They were the barbari— to the Romans an undistinguished, matted mass of Others, not terrifying, just troublemakers, annoyances, things one would rather not have to deal with— non-Romans. To themselves they were, presumably, something more, but as the illiterate leave few records, we can only surmise their opinion of themselves. Neither the weary, disciplined Roman soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment

Cahill, Thomas (2010-04-20). How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (Kindle Locations 140-146). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[......and a few pages later.......]

Rome fell because of inner weakness, either social or spiritual; or Rome fell because of outer pressure— the barbarian hordes. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Romans for many decades scarcely noticed what was happening. Clues to the character of the Roman blindness are present in the scene along the frozen Rhine. The legionnaires on the Roman bank know that they have the upper hand, and that they always will have. Even though some are only half-civilized recruits recently settled on this side of the river, they are now Romans, inheritors of nearly twelve centuries of civilization,

Cahill, Thomas (2010-04-20). How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (Kindle Locations 195-196). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[......and a few pages later.......]

To the Romans, the German tribes were riffraff; to the Germans, the Roman side of the river was the place to be. The nearest we can come to understanding this divide may be the southern border of the United States. There the spit-and-polish troops are immigration police; the hordes, the Mexicans, Haitians, and other dispossessed peoples seeking illegal entry. The barbarian migration was not perceived as a threat by Romans, simply because it was a migration— a year-in, year-out, raggle-taggle migration— and not an organized, armed assault. It had, in fact, been going on for centuries.

Cahill, Thomas (2010-04-20). How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (Kindle Locations 213-217). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[......and a few pages later.......]

When, at last, the hapless Germans make their charge across the bridge of ice, it is head-on, without forethought or strategy. With preposterous courage they teem across the Rhine in convulsive waves, their principal weapon their own desperation. We get a sense of their numbers, as well as their desperation, in a single casualty count: the Vandals alone are thought to have lost twenty thousand men (not counting women and children) at the crossing. Despite their discipline, the Romans cannot hold back the Germanic sea. From one perspective, at least, the Romans were overwhelmed by numbers— not just in this encounter but during centuries of migrations across the porous borders of the empire. Sometimes the barbarians came in waves, though seldom as big as this one. More often they came in trickles: as craftsmen who sought honest employment, as warriors who enlisted with the Roman legions, as tribal chieftains who paid for land, as marauders who burned and looted and sometimes raped and murdered.

Cahill, Thomas (2010-04-20). How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) (Kindle Locations 220-227). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.