Jose Luis Vazquez and Elia Garcia know what they're talking about when they predict that new immigrants crossing the border under the U.S. Senate's temporary guest worker program won't go home.
They each came over illegally more than a decade ago. They have children, jobs and houses - a life that would be difficult to dismantle because of a date on the calendar.
...But some immigration experts say temporary worker programs have never worked in free market societies, because as workers become used to higher wages and start to assimilate, they don't want to go back. It's even harder to return once children are born here, making them automatic Americans, and the Senate bill allows for spouses of workers also to obtain visas.
"I think the general conclusion of everybody who has studied guest or temporary worker programs is that they are never as advertised," said Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York. "They are never temporary programs, nor are the workers temporary."
Fewer than half the "Bracero" workers brought in to work the farms in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War went home, said Vernon Briggs, a labor economist at Cornell University.
"These things are a disaster," he said. "They don't stop illegal immigration. What they basically do is encourage people to keep coming."
...Fourteen years later, [another illegal alien] has two children who are U.S. citizens and a life she says is rooted in America. She hasn't been the few miles back to Mexico, and says it would be wrong to send people back who have contributed years of their life to the U.S. culture and economy.
"We have had to fight, we have children who are accustomed to life here," she said. "It is too much to ask that it all be just temporary."
Immigration · Wed, 06/14/2006 - 10:52 · · Importance: 1
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Comments
"It is too much to ask that it all be just temporary."
In contract, apparently it is not too much to ask that Americans sit back and watch as mass immigration demographically dismantles their country.
Posted by: eh at Jun 15, 2006 3:39 AM
WHAT DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND ABOUT PEOPLE WHO WANT YOU DEAD? the people of mexico and others really only want one thing, you dead and what you have.
the third world people are a tool being used by the enemies of freedom and its working, anyway no one in this non nation has the will to do what must be done so just stand by for the next move, "but let's face facts", "you have it comeing and you really are fools for not seeing what was and now is coming. so have fun before the end comes. and lets also say bush is not the bad guy he only wants what is best for his slaves and you will be a slave my little sheeple is castro also helping in the dismantling of this non nation? of no laws and soon no freedom under the flag of the NAU!
Posted by: Fred Dawes at Jun 14, 2006 8:18 PM