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Illegal Immigration Hits Home Almost
MrsCheese (Miss Daisy) asked if I would drive her to the drugstore. Since I had cleared my calendar years earlier I agreed. We made our way the eight or so miles to a bridge that crosses 26 and we noticed that the road was backed up for miles going west. After crossing the bridge there was traffic everywhere trying to detour the backup. We were going to make a left turn several hundred yards ahead into a turning lane; on our right was a feeder road with a stop sign. As we approached, a bobtail tractor ignored the stop sign and bullied its way into the intersection just as I got into the turning lane, forcing me to slam on my brakes as it went in front of me illegally.
I looked in my mirror to make sure I wasn’t about to be rear-ended. There was a white truck van in the lane to the right. I stopped because traffic was coming towards me. As the tractor without a trailer pulled through the intersection, it was followed by a dark family van. It was t-boned by the white van, which had the right of way. We were just far enough away that the flying parts missed us, as did the van’s.
Seeing as though MrsCheese was a nurse, we felt compelled to stop and help. The man in the white van was shocked but all right. I helped him while MrsCheese went to the other van. It was driven by a twenty-something Latina woman. She was trapped but not severely injured. She was on her phone; I can’t say she was on it when she pulled out, but I would bet on it. She asked us to call 912 in Spanish, which we did. The police arrived very fast. The fellow in the white van asked for our phone number, which we gave him and the police interviewed me.
Four hours later the white van driver called me to thank us. It turns out the woman was illegally here, had no license and no car or health insurance and wanted to sue him. He thinks the police set her straight on that. The fellow lost his work truck and has no idea at this point if he is covered by his insurance. What a mess and getting worse.
Build that Wall.
Published in General
You’re making that up.
It’s like a lock on your front door, it only keeps out honest people. If you have enough treasure sitting on tables in your home and you only use a basic lock on your front door, you should expect to have only the worst type of visitors coming by; and you’ll have a lot of them. To protect your property requires more than just a passive lock or a passive wall. To keep people out requires guards with guns, and a lot of them. Actually, a better analogy is if you pay $1000 to anyone who burgles your home, you can expect to have a lot of burglars.
If you remove the incentive to breach the border, then you wouldn’t even need a wall.
I agree. One of the problems with making it illegal to come here and a high incentive to be here is that too many criminals will be the actual gatekeepers, and not us. People will put themselves at the mercy of people they don’t realize are slavers or worse.
Remove the freebies. Make it easier to come here legally. If you charge a $10,000 fee or something like that to come here, they will still come because of the opportunities. No criminal background, pay the fee, and no free stuff while you’re here. You’d have to pay an appropriate fee for your kids to go to school. No Social Security until you’re naturalized, and no medicare. Any criminal conviction and you go back where you came from, after paying for your own jail time.
People will still come, but no one will be bothered by them.
That’s a pipe dream.
Do you realize that with the proper incentive, and our free stuff is more than enough, it’s not hard at all to bring portable stairs to any wall. Or bring a saws-all and a jack hammer to cut a hole in it. Or spend a few bucks on some dynamite to undermine it. No wall is effective unless it is manned, and there is no way to man a 2,000 mile long wall. They will learn where there is no guard for a particular night and they will breach the wall.
Come on. There are a million business’s that have fences around their properties. Do they use machine-guns and landmines? Yet it stops the vast majority of people from entering their property. Walls have been used for thousands of years to control borders. They by and large work. It’s just silly to argue otherwise.
@skyler,@philturmel,@concretevol,@kozak I think you are all correct. I think we should do all those great things that all of you suggested. I’ll add just one more, referring to @phcheese OP and his comment on labor. Our immigration policies need to acknowledge that there will be times when certain industries need extra labor. They should be allowed to apply for extra industry wide visas to accommodate those needs. The problem with all our ideas is, of course, the political will and honest discussion to achieve them. We haven’t had that in 50 years.
As for working both ways, citizens leaving the country use the doors . . .
Wow! And that is such a clear-cut legal violation that no one should be able to object to automatic deportation.
Democrats’ efforts to make the US a comparable economic [Violation]-hole would go a long way toward making border crossing less appealing.
Your ideas are worthy ones. But as you mention, political forces usually defeat such. So actually it is that hard. These ideas have been batted around in California, circa 1980’s, before the state went all socialist.
What people do not realize is how there is oodles of money that are involved in the mule system of smuggling people in. Most of the public thinks that it is some degenerate groups of independent people that have found a simple way to line their pockets and have the ability to steal from and rape a group of people they are escorting into our nation.
But the larger picture is that the mules are inter-connected with business people. Perhaps even “outstanding citizens” in your community who are party to the underhandness of all this.
For several years in the 1990’s, when I lived in Marin County, all newspapers reported on the humanitarian efforts of one Ms Lum. The woman ran a franchise of restaurants but despite their success, she was un-stoppaple in her efforts to be charitable to immigrant organizations. One thousand dollar checks given to Marin County schools that needed equipment for arts or sports. Turkeys at Christmas handed out to poor people. Every organization out there awarded Ms Lum awards.
Then it came out that she was involved with the mules who snuck Chinese immigrants into our nation. The immigrants would be handed over to her for employment, and then she would deduct the mules’ fees from their paychecks with a hefty cut for herself as well. On the minimum wages the immigrants were being paid to be cooks, busboys and waiters, it would have taken some of them 30 years before they ever got an entire paycheck for themselves. Of course, they couldn’t leave, as the mules knew where their families in this nation and back in China were living.
I have no doubt that much of the immigration system is a racket. If a restaurant owner can make so much money from it, I can only imagine what a top official inside Customs or ice has been able to pocket.
Strict immigration is a breeding ground for slavery.
Could you explain please?
Not having a high enough labor pool, we would be forced to innovate and find ways to automate all activities. It happened in Australia with harvesting grapes for wine. They didn’t have cheap (illegal) labor, so they found ways to automate it. Thus, we shall create our robotic slaves to fill the labor gaps.
Our nation encourages people to take great risks to come here because of our standard of living and because we give out free money and free educations and (mostly) free medical care. By making it illegal while making it very attractive, people take great risk and put themselves at the mercy of smugglers who often steal their money and then sell them to slave and prostitution gangs.
That ‘splains it!
I would be interested in your solution.
People only take those risks because they have fair confidence the risk is worth the reward. Because lax enforcement makes it worth it. Strict enforcement, publicized, would change that behavior. Consider the case of the Asian boat people flooding the coast of Australia a few years ago. Australia imposed strict confinement rules for illegals, on non-Australian territory, and poof, the flood ceased. Here at home, simple speculation on what Trump would do caused illegal border crossings to drop sharply after his election. Italy recently blocked its shores to illegal immigrants, and lo, the number of attempts has plummeted.
Activists and other bleeding hearts are simply hiding their eyes from the facts.
Agreed. And ending the incentives works too. Walls are pointless.
Those robots were in the pipeline over a decade ago. In fact, CBS had a story probably way back in 2009, on how hard hit migrant families were after traveling up north to Idaho to harvest beets and potatoes. That season, beets were being harvested by robots.
And many other robotic workers are being developed as a response to the thought of a $ 15 an hour pay rate being foisted on fast food franchises. Last year, a robotic fry cook debuted at one restaurant in So California. That is just the beginning of the AI that will be leaving a billion or more workers globally unemployed.
People frequently assume symbols are pointless, yet we rally around flags.