RateItAll: The Opinion Network

While I believe that Foreigners should have the opportunity to become productive citizens here,I think our policies are too lax in todays complex world.We need to make sure that those who become citizens here have something to offer or contribute and that they are not dangerous,criminal or just looking for handouts.We have more than enough problem people born here already!

Our immigration policy currently appears to be to let everyone come in and, once in, to let them staty and to treat them as full-fledged US citizens when it comes to rights and protection, but nnot to worry about any obligations or duties they may have. I don't want to sound rabid about this, so at the outset I'll state that many (I won't say most, because I just don't know) of the immigrants are prepared to come here to work hard for a living. There are, however, an awful lot of negatives with this whole equation (and some of the fault rests on our own shoulders, i.e., paying American citizens welfare money instead of figuring out how to get them to work, which would leave that many less jobs for illegals to hope for in this country). If the commonly quoted figure of 8,000 illegals a day entering the country from Mexico is anywhere near accurate, and assuming that most of the illegals are in fact Mexicans, then in about 25 years somehting like half of the current Mexican population will have come to the US, and eventually there will be no one left in Mexico - sure, that's a stretch, but the numbers are staggering. I'm not convinced that putting US troops (regular military) on the border is the solution, and I sure don't buy the facile argument made by some (like Bill O'Reilly) that we can fix the problem by calling up the National Guard to stem the immigration tide - calling up the National Guard means calling up citizens from their normal business, and it means putting yet another burden on the state taxpayers to pay for the activation of the Guardsmen. I don't know why no one ever addresses that aspect of it. That leaves, among other solutions, putting pressure on Mexico to do something on their side of the border, rather than having them aid and abet the border crossers. I have to say that I am pretty disgusted at this administration's total lack of effective (or even ineffective) action with respect to the problem. They sure are carrying the liberals' water for them on this one. Then there's the other aspect of the problem, namely, that the lack of effective border control lets in not only Mexicans, but potential (or actual) Middle Eastern terrorists as well. It's a mess. I get particularly annoyed when I think back to the way we used to control immigration - my grandparents and my father had to come in under immigration quotas, get a medical check to make sure they were healthy, had to show that they had someone to take care of them financially when they were here, had to give an address they were going to, etc. Sounds like things may have been better back in the old days before we started getting overly sensitive and understanding. Well, hopefully you can catch my gneral feelings and attitudes towards this problem. We need to make it some kind of real priority so that it doesn't bankrupt this country, or at least the border states like California and Arizona, not to mention New York and New Jersey which are right up there in terms of having to provide services to illegals.