It seems like these days all we have are problems that seem to evade a solution. Immigration is probably near the top of the list when it comes to such an issue. I certainly recognize that there are two sides to the debate and that both sides do have some very valid points.
On the one hand there are many problems associated with illegal immigration, not the least of which is the impact it has on state and federal budgets. Obviously there are a number of factors to account for the current crisis in California ranging from the slow economy reducing revenues to the inability to control spending for political reasons.
On the left you have powerful unions that force the government to accept very costly contracts while on the right you have efforts to increase criminal penalties so much that the jails become overcrowded and end up costing society far more than the incarcerations benefit society.
But the fact remains that as a general rule illegals (or if you prefer undocumenteds) tend to cost society a great deal when they utilize government services. They are more likely to go to public facilities for medical aid, they send their children to public schools and so on. While they do contribute to society they often do not contribute to the tax coffers because they are paid under the table.
So obviously this is a problem that needs to be solved.
At the same time, there is no clear or easy way to solve the problem. While I do not think things are quite as serious as some activists would suggest, it is true that this segment of society does do jobs that many people would not want to perform and for wages many people are not willing to accept.
If we eliminate them from the underground job market and bring them into the regular workplace it is likely labor costs would increase, thus increasing the cost of the products (often food). Herein lies one of the broader problems of society, the need to balance paying people a good wage with the true value of their work, but that is a subject for another post.
Even if you move past the issue of the jobs these people perform, then the question becomes just what you would do next. In theory you would want to send them back, but how do you go about finding them all ? And what happens when they have children who are citizens, where do they go ?
Looking at the situation my personal inclination is to adopt a balanced solution. Probably the first step is for all sides to accept that it is a problem that needs to be solved and that doing so is not evil, racist, etc but rather a need to work out a problem that must be resolved. I am not sure that this is possible, and it may well be that this will prevent us from ever finding a real solution, but one can hope that the right ideas would help this step
The next step would be to develop a balanced solution to satisfy both sides. The hard liners who want all illegals sent out of the country are simply going to have to accept that this is not going to happen. People are here and in many cases have been here for decades. They have children, homes, jobs, etc and we just can’t toss them all out.
On the other hand the hard core activists who basically want an open border policy are not going to get all they want either. We cannot simply let everyone stay or allow anybody who wants to come to do so. Immigrants did build this nation and they will continue to be an important part of our nation, but we just can’t afford to let everyone from everywhere come in. So this is something they need to accept.
Assuming we manage to get both sides to agree to these principles then we need to develop a way for deciding who gets to stay and who does not. This is probably the hardest part because no matter how careful you are to try and make it fair, there are always going to be some cases where things are unfair.
Clearly there is no simple solution to the problem, but we are a pretty decent cross section of society here at TMV so perhaps we can have a discussion of the options.
What do you all say ?