Just a thought that struck me a while back. Someone said "...they take jobs away from Americans, they drain our social services, and by moving routinely across our borders they endanger homeland security." that person laid out the basic issues being used to justify the immigration hullabaloo. Jobs, Social Services and security. But aren't they all related to the fact that by not having any way to bring the immigrants into some form of legal status they remain a hidden and illegal community?
They aren't illegal because of their nature, they are illegal because they need jobs to support their families. They for the most part live in Mexico and the Jobs are here in the U.S. Many employers actively recruit illegal Mexicam workers. Then we as a nation give them no route to live and work here legally.
The fact that they are illegal means that employers can (and frequently do) cheat them out of their wages. There are numerous stories of illegals being hired, working for three or four weeks without getting paid, and when they demand their pay the employer calls ICE and has them deported. This has several effects. First, the employer gets free labor, so that Americans cannot compete (how would the employer stiff the American workers out of their pay? They'd go to the Wage and Hour Board.) Second, the illegals are given no route out of their illegal status, so they remain doing the really low-level jobs and get quite good at them. Again, legal workers look for promotion and training to better jobs. The illegals frequently do a better job than the legals because they have more experience. Third, since the immigrants are already in an illegal status and have little access to social services and have a justified fear of contact with authorities, they are more likely to steal. (My surprise is how few really do this.)
As for social services, they can get emergency medicine and not much else. Frequently they can't get driver's licenses so they can't legally drive. Also, no truck-driving jobs. They can't get bank accounts. They get paid by check and then get charged 5% or more of the face value of the check to cash it. If they do get a good job, they can't easily move to another one for better pay and benefits. It's hard to buy a home or set up a business. This is all because of their illegal status which they are forced to accept in order to obtain work that allows them to support a family.
Finally, the security issue. The problem isn't that they cross the international border regularly, it is that they do so illegally. But this is because of their status as illegal immigrants. I can cross that same border anytime I wish in either direction.
The whole set of problems appear to stem from the need for family-supporting jobs (which are available in the U.S rather than in Mexico) and the related need for workers to fill jobs in the U.S., without a way of giving those workers any legal status. If the workers were not forced into the illegal sub-class by the lack of a way out of it, the rest of the problems would mostly disappear. The one remaining problem would be the fact that they speak Spanish rather then English, and that is curable.
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