It is sometimes difficult to understand political issues, unless we examine the associated facts in order to assess the potential for disfunction or failure. The following information was useful in helping me to form an opinion and an action regarding this important issue. Interesting read to say the least.


FROM THE LA TIMES

1. 40% of all workers in L.A. County (L.A. County has 10 million people) are working for cash and not paying taxes. This was because they are predominantly illegal immigrants, working without a green card.

2. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.

3. 75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens.

4. Over 2/3's of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births were paid for by taxpayers.

5. Nearly 25% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.

6. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages.

7. The FBI reports half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal aliens from south of the border.

8. Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties are illegal.

9. 21 radio stations in L.A. are Spanish speaking.

10. In L.A.County 5.1 million people speak English. 3.9 million speak Spanish (10.2 million people in L.A.County).

(All 10 from the Los Angeles Times)


Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking our crops but 29% are on welfare. http://www.cis.org


Over 70% of the United States annual population growth (and over 90% of California, Florida, and New York) results from immigration.


The cost of immigration to the American taxpayer in 1997 was a NET (after subtracting taxes immigrants pay) $70 BILLION a year, [Professor Donald Huddle, Rice University].


The lifetime fiscal impact (taxes paid minus services used) for the average adult Mexican immigrant is a NEGATIVE

29% of inmates in federal prisons are illegal aliens.

Round 'em up and return them to Senor Fox. After confiscating any valuable property to cover any outstanding bills.

sard-what about if they have children that are legal americans?....do we send the parents back and put the legal american children in orphanages?

im for a policy of zero legal or illegal immigration until we get our house in order. look -the way our government fixes a problem is to call it something else.....they will take the word "illegal-alien" and fix it by making it the word-"legal-alien".....will anything change other than the name??? will it matter at all if the feds bring in a bit of taxes over the name change? HELL NO!!!!!!

Bush co. will not send the mexicans home or fix the problem until the mexicans are done doing the dirty work of the bush admin: breaking the unions and creating a slave labor class of workers in the usa so that manufacturers can better compete in "globalization" and not have to leave the comforts of america in order to start a new sweat shop

how many illegal aliens are running the garbage trucks that pick up garbage in your neighborhoods?????
i bet the answer is ZERO.....why? because they are well paying union jobs! you can stop illegal immigration by supporting unions!!!!
and you will also get famillies whose parents earn a living wage, with health care, and raise children who are healthy and less likely to cause crime or suck up govt. services. it is these famillies that are going to save up money and possibly start a new business which will create jobs!! not the rich........

but bush will destabilize our economy with his union busting and anti-labor stance and use the immigrants and his guest worker programs to do it...he wont do a thing to help protect the living wage of the blue collar american worker and we will pay the price for it with high crime, high taxes high prices and low low wages

Vote whore.

I'm still looking for the candidate who will straiten out the alien mess including making it hard for the poor bastids to find a job without legal citizenship documents.......


It wasn't Bush, and it wasn't Kerry......

It boils down to supply and demand, (like everything else), one of the keys has to be cracking down on the employers...............

That's the ONLY key, but those whores in Congress, both Republicans and those so-called Democrats are getting phat kick-backs from the very same employers who are trying to lower labor costs by undermining American Union Labor.
Kiss your 40 hr work week and your health bennies goodbye, boys, The Pinkertons are running the show these days.

Gosh, here I'd been thinking this was the country where a person is free to hang out their own shingle and have a go at the big time, or at least rise to the top of his chosen profession and again, supply and demand works for the intelligent and ambitious ...

P.S.
I thought it was those Democrats, and those so-called Republicans ........

you will do the most to stop illegal immigration by supporting your unions......

I agree at least in part with AuntyM !!!


I have seen employees protected by unions when the employee was intentionly nonproductive, in fact, that is about the only thing I have seen unions do aside from collecting money and campaigning for liberal democrat polititions.


Why is it so scary for people to accept work and compensation comensurate to their performance ? I don't need union protection to find work, nor do I need a union to tell me what I'm worth. There is one other benefit of unions which I guess I should aknowledge, and that is helping to keep prices up where a small business can make bank just by being efficient.

I know of an electrician who is unemployed about half of the time because nonunion companies get all the local work that isn't government funded, the guy has lived under the union so long, and believed so much of their propaganda, that he is literally affraid to step out on his own and bid on the local non-union work..........and make more money per year, and contribute to the economy. He claims that the union would harass him and try to get the state/county inspectors to harass him, and he would loose his pension...

The union has made him into a pussy !

aunty/oregonian-
i definately know what you are saying and agree. there are definately problems with unions and i am not personally a member of one or ever have been..... but it is starting to seem like they well may be far less of an evil than previousely percieved...
it seems like the present system is leading to millions of jobs that all dont pay anything and no matter where yo work it still wont pay the bills.... like the fast food mentality nowadays where kids just dont give a hoot about their job because there is allway the same job for a different fast food spot right next door....

the garbage trucks just seemed to click with me for some reason because i was noticing that they are well paid, ethnically balanced, have health care and are unionized.... but my garbage has never been forgotton or late and i was doubting that there was ever an illegal immigrant behind the wheel......
ive heard horor stories about the unios too from a career in the building trades and definately horror stories from my mom too, who worked for dshs for years.....she would say that there are ladies who show up drunk every day and there would be nothing you could do to get rid of them other than promoting them

lupo;
IF we could cut wellfare programs down to the point that people have to be litterally unable to support themselves to get any assistance, AND erase the minimum wage, Then we could just let supply and demand do it's thing..........


I know I won't be working for any less than I get right now regardless, and if my cost of living goes up, then my price goes up, if you can find somebody who will do my job for less money then fine. When I can no longer compete in my current ocupation, then I will find another.........

As long as people can work for minimum wage, and still draw wellfare (by whatever name...), then the market is skewed, same goes for illegal aliens mooching off the system, and lazyass Americans too. By cutting the benies to the riff-raff who get a lot of them we save Uncle Sugar a ton of loot, then those former professional couch potatoes are going to be productive to boot, it's a double schwang !

AuntyM, I know the system is practically unchangable, but I think people who are living on the dole are having it too easy, they would have to take a pay cut to get a job ! The benefits aught to provide about what you prescribed...3 hots and a cot, nothing else, heck ya they will be stigmatized.


Start down this topic very far, and we will get to financial aide, what a joke that is, incentive to be a cull.

aunty-like the mom in "million dollar baby" that was pissed that her daughter bought her a house... cuz then she was going to lose her welfare if the state found out about the house....

those people piss me off too...... although there are alot of folks out there that really do need public assistance. i mean like people that you dont see at the stores and such but are partialy retarded or not crazy enough to be committed but not sane enough that you would want them to be fixing your cheeseburgers.

the sense of community is gone in a present day society and the ability for us to help eachother out and be able to expect the same in return is diminishing....and we all need help some time or another for health reasons or money reasons or whatever
so different in rural areas. i remember being out at our wheat/barely farm in palouse and asking where jim was. jim was our farmer that lived there and farmed the land and his dad before him.... jim and all the local farmers were over at a neighbors farm with their own combines and such harvesting thousands of acres for a friend that had come down with cancer and couldnt get the harvest done and would have been done for if it didnt get harvested...... i thought that that was so cool and every one of those farmers knew full well that they could expect the same if it happened to them...... it was their "safety net"
and now that community is dissaapearing and being replaced with society ,where its rare to know your neighbors let alone even speak the same language .....we still need some sort of safety net.....

Lupo, dependance on the government is part of what is loosening those tight nit communities...

The system as is forcibly collects money from all taxpayers to provide for those in need, the trouble is that the distribution is inefficient, and corupt on many levels....

Taxpayers feel less generous to others because they have already been coerced to contribute...

oregonian- i would disagree. i feel that it is dependance on corporate employment and the need to work more and more to pay the bills is loosening those tight nit communities... now it takes most families two parents working just to get by.....and on the welfare you are concentrating on welfare to the poor which is extreemly small compared to welfare tot he rich which accounts to over 1 million dollars for every dollar spent on payments to the poor......i agree on ending dependance and entitlement to other peoples money but what needs the most attention.....stopping the culvert of wasted tax dollars to the allready rich or stopping the driping faucet of money going mainly to famillies that really need it......and 90% of those on welfare to dependant famillies reall really need it......

Can an apple tree drop an orange? It is tough but how can an illegal alien create a legal child? It would be mean to deport the illegal and break up the family, so treat them as a unit and deport them all. Modify the laws to support the process.
We will always have problems that need attention in this country. That doesn't mean we should become isolationists to solve those problems. That will just creat more and bigger problems.
I have belonged to The IAFF, The Aviation Machinists, The Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks and Employees, and the Steelworkers. Mostly they all had their hand in my pocket for very little return. I am not refuting the history of union/management relations, just the fact that the unions no longer represent the worker. The union leadership has much more in common with the management types across the table than they do with the rank and file. They play golf together, they belong to the same clubs, etc.
Unions help kill KACC. They shut down the Ravenswood facility and so many others I cannot list them all. You wonder why so many businesses go off shore? Take a hard look at union operations in the last 50 years. The Unions and the litiginous liability game have destroyed more free enterprise than Stalin could have if given a free hand.

lupo,lupo,lupo...

I guess I will try to learn from the perspective from which you speak, but it is very different than my own, I have been broker than broke before, when I was out on my own with a highschool diploma, and I have hung around with people who will always be broke....

I now support my wife and two children in a dumpy little place on a couple of acres which we own, I have my own business, and have had for the last 10 years, my wife does not work other than 24/7 taking care of us and maybe volunteering at the school once in a while.......

I know people who are activly seeking ways to get "free money", but could not be counted upon to show up for a job more than twice a week, they are lazy bastids, and they should be starving to death, they will NEVER be productive members of society/economy as long as there is an alternative. IF you took away every means of survival other than honest work, they would have to get off their ass and work..........

I think the welfare business is better left to the families of the deadbeats, the churches, and nice people who can afford it and get their jollies from having power over people in exchange for letting them act helpless, and that is what it is most of the time, an act...they have been trained to play the victom for money. The guys handing out the money are "enabling" the losers to be just that.