[cunninglinguist]

Is it that simple? I can't tell if your comment is tongue in cheek. But if you consider the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to locate, process, and deport every illegal, if you consider increased labor costs for local businesses many of whom would go under without a plentiful supply of cheap labor, and if you consider that America has never really been about "deporting people" (quite the opposite) it seems like simply deporting every illegal is a horrible solution.

Equally horrible is to have to provide ever-increasing social and welfare benefits to millions upon millions of undocumented, non-tax-paying workers who are now also unemployed. There is no quick fix here. But if you were to naturalize those workers, give them SSNs and DLs, encourage them to partake of the "American dream" or what's left of it...maybe in ten or twenty years you'd find things had started to improve.

I don't really know. If this were a game of chess, I'd simply resign.

[kingkongrevenge]

It is totally feasible. Ike did it in the 50s, right before he fired the whole border patrol and immigration control apparatus and reformed it.

It would be very cheap right now because there is a lot of idle shipping. You load the illegals on boats and drop them off at a home port. In the case of Mexico you take them to the far south, not just over the border.

This can be done and it would have massive popular support.

Naturalization is a horrible idea. We need to get the illegals out and seal the borders. America needs zero immigrants with less than a high school diploma, especially right now. Nobody making less than $90K should be let in this country to work, period.

[jhancock]

> "You load the illegals on boats and drop them off at a home port"

And the receiving country is just supposed to take our word for it? "Hell, he sure looks Guatemalan!!!"...."Dear China, We are sending you 50,000 'orientals' on the next 3 OOCL container ships, they have no passports but they sure as hell don't speak American." Yeah, this will go over well with all our trading partners.

> "In the case of Mexico you take them to the far south, not just over the border."

I'm pretty sure Mexico won't go for this.

> "get the illegals out and seal the borders"

Have nanotech magic-growth fences been invented and I didn't notice? Precisely how do you plan to do this? Oh I know, hire cheap Mexican labor? Or maybe bring over some Chinese to build the fences like we used them to build our railroads?

> "Nobody making less than $90K should be let in this country to work"

Aren't immigrants making over $90k taking $90k jobs away from people already here? Or do you mean we figure out what our real skill shortage is and manage it much better than we ever have been able to?

[catzaa]

> Have nanotech magic-growth fences been invented and I didn't notice? Precisely how do you plan to do this? Oh I know, hire cheap Mexican labor? Or maybe bring over some Chinese to build the fences like we used them to build our railroads?

I do not have a problem with the rest of your post - but this statement isn't correct. A lot of countries have in the past successfully secured their borders. Even in lower technology times this was successfully done.

[kingkongrevenge]

What would Mexico or China do about it? Nothing. Be realistic. The US still comes from a position of strength (for now).

> Have nanotech magic-growth fences been invented and I didn't notice?

The border was fairly tight for most of US history. Don't pretend this is a technology problem. This is a corruption and lack of will problem. It could be solved in short order given the will. As I alluded to, Ike responded to a growing problem and effectively dealt with it in the space of about three months. It remained solved pretty much until the early 70s.

[jhancock]

I would like to see meaningful data on how both "The border was fairly tight for most of US history" and how "Ike" cleaned things up so efficiently.

You may be able to solve your fence problem by having extremely strict laws punishing U.S. citizens that engage in employing illegals. I doubt any other approach would work.

I also don't know what the economic impact of losing the gray/black market labor would be and how long it would take to recover from it the changes.

[ahlatimer]

You obviously sound like someone who is doing a large amount of armchair posturing. How do I know? looks out window Oh, hey! Mexico. I can even see the border wall from where I sit. I've met a number of illegal immigrants, I even went to school (in America!) with a few of them. The fact of the matter is that you have miles and miles of border that is damn near impossible to secure. Short of militarizing the border with some sort of armed computer-operated sentry, you aren't going to keep people from getting in. Building a wall simply forces people to either go over or under it.

If you can't get keep people from getting in, how do you spot them once they're here? I work with a Mexican national (he's legal, though). Without knowing better, I wouldn't be able to tell that he's an immigrant while some other person is not, and I've lived my entire life, save for one year, on the border. You could, of course, try to document the legal people (with, I don't know, some sort of passport) and force every person that looks like they could be illegal to present identification. I know I for one would love to live in a place that unfairly persecutes anyone that isn't white! </sarcasm>

Get real, the only way to ease the problem with illegal immigration (and with borders the size of the US, you'll never get rid of it) is to make the process of becoming legal a sane experience. It takes something like 18 years just to have the chance to get into this country if they're from a Latin country. It's no wonder people would rather hop a fence.

[kingkongrevenge]

Funny how there wasn't an illegal alien problem up through the 60s. Wonder how they managed that if it's impossible.

People's attempt make this about a physical wall is absurd. It's not about a wall. It's about many measures. Also, it is rather easy to prove that someone is an illegal alien. Hey, Japan makes foreigners carry an alien registration card and if you can't produce one you might find yourself on a flight out of the country. Not that I recommend this approach, but it's quite ridiculous to assert it's impossible.

[philwelch]

The difference is, Japan is openly and honestly racist about the process. You can tell whether or not someone looks Japanese really easily, and there's almost no such thing as a naturalized Japanese. If you see a white dude in Japan, you can be damn sure he's not Japanese.

But a Japanese-looking dude in the United States might be an American citizen, or he might not be. The same is true of Mexican-looking people, black people, and even white people. A white dude with a funny English accent might be an immigrant, or he might be the second coming of William F. Buckley.

[kingkongrevenge]

In the case of Japan we're talking about a lot of Chinese and Koreans who do in fact speak Japanese.

[philwelch]

You should still be able to determine most of those by accent and by subtle differences in physical appearance. I imagine that would be easier if you were Japanese.

[ahlatimer]

There wasn't? There's been an illegal immigration problem in the States since we started clamping down on immigration. There was a large problem with Chinese immigrants in the late 1800's, early 1900's. In fact, El Paso (my hometown) was a focal point of that as well.

For a large part of the history of El Paso, Juarez (our sister city across the border) and El Paso flowed naturally. There wasn't really much of a divide between the two cities, up until the 1920's when a fear of lice caused Mayor Tom Lea to cut back on immigration which eventually spawned the Bath Riots. Even still, it wasn't really difficult to get into El Paso as a Hispanic individual. You simply had to go through a delousing process (designs of which Hitler used to exterminate the Jews) that sprayed you with Zyklon B and steam bathed your clothing. Not exactly the most honoring thing to go through, but you were still permitted access afterwards.

You could say there was even illegal immigration starting during the Mexican revolution when the States became a launching point for some of the revolutionaries. The U.S. still had this idea of neutrality and wanted those people to stay out. They came in anyway.

Flash forward to the WWII era and you have a program (I forget the name) that brought in Mexican citizens to work in the U.S.

So...you saying that there wasn't a problem until the 60's is simply misguided on one hand (there wasn't a problem because a lot of people were largely encouraged, or at least not stopped, from coming in) or horribly wrong on the other (there's been illegal immigration in this country since the quota system was introduced).

Like I said, you sound like someone who doesn't know jack about this subject. You're obviously entitled to your opinions, but your opinions are still wrong.

[kingkongrevenge]

I'm afraid you are trying to mislead. No, a large pool of undocumented mexican labor was not coming to the US to live and work. Not until the late 40s, anyway. Then the problem was solved until the late sixties.

Talking about the ease of crossing the border in El Paso is irrelevant to the question of whether large numbers of people were illegally finding work in the US.

The Chinese you talk about were episodically shipped out en masse. Kind of makes my point more than yours.