Let’s save them the trouble and instead bring the US to them.

Don’t give them statehood all at once, instead do it in stages over a period of 30 years. Make learning English, US history, civics, and minimizing corruption a prerequisite to statehood.

Mexico’s underutilized natural resources could be developed to pay for this and give them jobs. These resouces include oil, natural gas, silver and other minerals, and 5000 miles of warm coastline!

Unfortunatly, Bush would probably be against this. He seems to support the current super rich, white ruling class of Mexico, and wants to hold Mexican wages down to $1 an hour.

Well, what do you expect from the governor of a former slave state.

It’s pretty easy for transient illegals to fade into the background, and reappear somewhere else. Wal-Mart, Joe’s discount gardners or whoever, can’t do that. If you hit “real” employers hard for not making a reasonable effort to avoid employing people who aren’t entitled to work, and you significantly reduce the number of jobs available to illegals, and so the incentive for them to come.

Oh, and if your whole local economy relies on illegals living 8 to a room for cheap labour, it’s broken.

This is too good to be true.

Money is the root. They come here for the money. Turn off the money and they will cease to come. When Arizona, Oklahoma, or anyone else, makes it a felony with possible jail time to knowingly employ an illegal alien and starts proactively checking company records for the documentation of their workers, then I will know that they are really serious about the problem.

And I will also have a huge horse laugh about how fast the company lawyers will be all over the courts to have the law overturned.

If you don’t believe that illegals are a drain on the US economy let me invite you to spend some time with me here in the heart of the midwest, Tulsa Oklahoma. First, they are a problem for law enforcement (spoken as a 19 year veteran detective). The illegal immigrant population in Tulsa has exploded since I have been in law enforcement. We have had a pretty bad gang problem (Crips and Bloods type)here since the mid 80’s, but now that we have a large number of illegal Hispanics, the gang problems have shifted to Hispanic gangs and gone through the roof! We devote a lot of manpower to this. The Hispanic population is very uncooperative with us do to language barriers and the fact that they are leery of police due to their illegal status. When we do arrest somebody, they disappear if released on bond (either to another city under another name and SSN, or to Mexico).

I work at a homeless shelter part-time. We have a large number of illegals pass through the shelter using up sparse charity funding. Most have no ID and do not speak English. If I am not there, they have a really hard time communicating (I speak Spanish, a police pre-requisite these days).

I am often at one or the other of our local emergency rooms on business. They are flooded with illegals utilizing emergency services because, being illegal, they have no regular doctor. Most never pay their bills and often receive services under false names.

Illegals who do find work, are often paid cash “off the books”. They will work for less money and the employer does not have to submit any tax, SS, medicare, or workers comp money for them. If they have relatives in Mexico, most send a good portion of their earnings back to Mexico, and it is never spent in the US.

How can these things not ad up to a tremendous drain on our systems when multiplied by 20 or 30 million?