…the kingdom was lost.
In this case, for want of a dollar, the culture was lost. Once great, now swirling down the toilet like so much waste.
For Want of a Nail…
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Can someone explain WHY we have laws? Is it so we can waste paper? Must be
I liked this part of the Business Week article:
————
Hate e-mail
But corporations’ willingness to overlook the status of this lucrative demographic target could further inflame opposition to illegal immigration. Consider the case of New South Federal Savings Bank. In May, the Birmingham (Ala.) company launched a mortgage product called Casa Mia, aimed principally at local Hispanic immigrants, a disproportionately undocumented group whose ranks quadrupled in the state, to 96,000, between 1990 and 2004. The program offers 20-year fixed-rate mortgages to applicants with two years of residency, stable employment, and an ITIN. But within days of the announcement, New South received hostile phone calls and e-mails, some saying they were from Minutemen, the group patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona and Texas. “I can think of no more traitorous act than you offering illegal immigrants, who are overunning this country, Casa Mia loans,” [boy that's hostile] said an e-mail that a bank official showed BusinessWeek.
Bank officials were even more troubled by a letter from a Washington group called Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement (FILE), which opposes illegal immigration. It threatened to sue the bank under a federal law that prohibits the harboring of illegal aliens and racketeering. [boy that's hateful] By providing mortgage loans that help illegals buy houses, says FILE Executive Director Craig Nelsen, New South is aiding their ability to remain illegally. In June, the bank delayed a broad rollout of Casa Mia pending a legal opinion on potential liability.
Renee #1, I had to write that
We have laws so that lawmakers can write them.
LOL
Most everybody believes that the immigration and border policy is driven by politics, i.e., who is going to be the beneficiary of the Hispanic voting bloc, the Ds or the Rs. There’s some truth to that, but that is not the main driving force behind the border policy. Some people also argue that the Bush administration ’s lax border policy is being driven by the Republican corporate/business constituency, who want all that cheap labor. There may be a little truth to that
too, and it is more on the right track, but it doesn’t really nail it either. The truth of the matter is that it’s the dynamics of population demographics that’s driving it. After the 1960s babyboomers began moving through adulthood, and the overall median age in the US began to inch upward. And then starting in about 1990, it wasn’t just merely climbing upward, it was exploding upward. To state it bluntly, our population is aging fast, and the children and grandchildren of boomers can’t carry the economic load. There just aren’t enough of them. We direly need a young and frisky able-bodied blue-collar class, or the wheels are going to come off. And that’s the role immigrants across the southern border are here to play.
Numbers tell the whole story. The US median age in 2000 for non-Hispanic white population was 37.7, for non-Hispanic blacks 30.2, for Native Americans 28.0, for Asian and Pacific Islanders 27.5. What about Hispanics? Where do they fit in? This is the key. For Hispanics the median age was 24.6. And they have more kids too.
Seems to me that the tip-off is that illegal immigration is a hot-button issue. It’s something that people out here care about, and care about passionately. But the politicians won’t hear of it, when under normal circumstances it’s precisely the kind of thing that a red-blooded politico would be move into position to demagogue and exploit so fast that you’d get a whiplash trying to keep up. So what’s going on here? Both parties don’t just naturally get on the same page and go out of their way to not attack each other on an issue, and not even at least try to out-maneuver each other on an issue, and instead just go completely silent about it, all by accident.
I’m convinced that 10 or 15 years ago, maybe even longer, one or more super-secret think tank studies began floating around amongst the political class in Washington spelling it all out, in the starkest and bleakest of terms, and that’s why the Rs and the Ds got so uncharacteristically quietly on the same page on this issue, and why both parties are so willing to encourage a free flow across the border. Other than Tom Tancredo of Colorado, both parties are content to just look the other way, and no one will discuss it either. Their think tank studies also tell them that the folks out here don’t want massive immigration from Latin America, legal or illegal, something the people are opposed to that in big numbers. So what they are doing is just passively allowing immigration to happen pretending like there’s nothing they can do and that they are powerless to stop it. That way nobody is at “fault.”
“To state it bluntly, our population is aging fast, and the children and grandchildren of boomers can’t carry the economic load.”
Could it be because we have either aborted or “planned” ourselves out of a future?
Hmmmm
Let’s get real folks. These immigrants are not our future – they are a future nightmare. They are mainly unskilled, uneducated people, that can never rise above the level of kitchen staff. We have our own supply of this type, we don’t need to add to it. The advantage immigrants have is that they will work for less and put up appaling living standards. This is the past people, not the future. Then we must consider how these people integrate – they don’t. We have an ever growing Spanish speaking population that has no wish to learn or use English, and we make it easier for them by providing translation services…press one for English.
La Shawn, your post so reminded me of the Newsboys song, “It’s All Who You Know”:
http://www.vlyrics.com/n/newsboys10703/itsallwhoyouknow548332.html
Sample lyrics:
“For the want of a compass
we’d be shuffling charts
For the want of good radar
we’d be glacier parts
For the want of a lighthouse
can’t you see
we’d be lost at sea
lost at sea”
Sorry for being slightly off-topic. I’ll duck out now!
#4 Jaybird, I understand your point on the demographic issua, it is very real. It is a big part of the reason that Europe is caving into Islamicists. However, can we not solve our demographic issue by allowing legal immigrants in?
The problem is that illegals, cost the system more money in terms of health care, education & many other social services. There are many schools that have had to cut art & music programs to fund bilingual education programs.
They also tax the security system by making it more difficult for local & nation law enforcement to know who criminals & terrorists are & conduct investigations. They also lead to the slummification of areas, which drive down the propperty values of middle class neighborhoods, thus driving the price of real estate up.
All of these things make life more expensive, in terms of tax burden, as well as personal expenditure for ordinary Americans-citizens & legal aliens alike.
This means life in America becomes more difficult & less attractive to qualified legal immigrants who can make a wonderufl contribution to our society with their skills.
Illegal immigrants hinder our efforts at attracting good legal immigrants & encouraging Americans to have families.
Jaybird, that’s the pragmatic truth. Problem is this has been percolating for several decades and there is no simple overnight solution.
A while back — a good several months I tossed out 7 or 8 steps here on LBC that we probably would have to take to get this under control.
I don’t think Bush is oblivious to the problem. What good is it if Bush throws down and locks up the border only to have SCOTUS come back and pull a Roe v Wade on us?
What good is it if they decide BP has no inland authority and upholds the right of municipalities to order their law enforcement agencies to don’t-ask, don’t-arrest?
Simply put, SCOTUS is a wildcard that could set us back in a serious “permanent” way — as in ’settled law’ and therefore immune from revisit/overturning.
Imagine if Bush tried last year to force the issue and lost, we could reasonably expect judicial candidates to add immigration to their litmus test.
To me, it makes sense to get other priority items under control, then with full support of congress & SCOTUS, proceed to clean up the immigration issue.
I believe that’s called setting the stage.
#10 Andy, I never considered the SCTOUS angle. I probably reading your comment
Would you care to summerize?
Oops, that second sentence should be ‘I probebly missed reading you comment.
I’m not arguing for it. I’m not arguing against it either, for that matter. I’m saying that it’s the reality of it. We didn’t get overrun with Spanish-speaking illegals by accident, or because the feds don’t have the firepower to stop it, if they wanted to. They’re not stopping it because they don’t want to stop it.
And for those who think that the economic necessity argument is overstated, think about it this way. Remember the 1960s? I do. I was a teenager, and I remember what life was like back then. In those days the resources of the government seemed limitless and inexhaustable. The government fought all manner of “wars,” and fought them all with relative economic ease. Wars, and the metaphor of war, were big back then. Of course there was a real war, the infamous war in Vietnam, a war that just went on and on. The dollar value of the ordnance, supplies, hardware and other miscellaneous assets that the US dumped there is astounding. I was there, and it still boggles my mind. Hundreds of billions there. And that was just one war. There was also the Cold War. That just went on and on too. The arms race with the Soviets. A-bombs to H-bombs to missiles to MIRVs. Nuclear submarines. Nuclear aircraft carriers. Troops strategically placed all over the globe, By the tens of thousands. Korea, Europe, the Berlin Brigade. Wherever needed. A 600 ship Navy? No sweat. And then there was also the War on Poverty. Billions for federal revenue sharing with local governments and school districts, urban renewal, welfare, medicare, Social Security. You name it. And there was no funding problem for any of it. No medicare crisis, no prescription drug crisis, no Social Security crisis. The Peace Corp and Public Broadcasting were created and fully funded. We are talking about a full-tilt Great Society, fully federally funded. And not a one was in funding jeopardy. And none of that is even getting to the full-blown space race culminating in the moon landing. The US’s resources were unlimited indeed. Yeah, there were budget deficits, but, they were nothing compared to today’s deficits. And speaking of today, …
…fast forward 40 years, to now. That stuff we used to do in the 60s? We can’t afford to do any of that stuff anymore, not any one of them alone, let alone all of them simultaneously like we did back then. The cost of the war on terror is decried. The troops in Iraq are supposedly under-equipped. The Navy ran out of Tomahawk cruise missiles. A 300 ship Navy is all we can afford. The military hasn’t the resources to engage in a two-theater conflict simutaneously. Social Security is in crisis. Likewise medicare. The feds now give local governments “unfunded mandates.” A space program? Forget that, my friend. Toss up a few shuttles now and then, but even that costs too much. We can’t do any of the stuff we used to do, and even still we have the hugest deficits in history. So it’s clear that the federal government nowadays is a government with shrinking and extremely finite resources.
So what changed? How did we get from there, where we were in the 60s, to here, where we are now? How does that happen?
The population changed. In the 60s the baby-boomers were just coming of age. The population was young, and there were plenty of young and frisky workers to support the aged, the infirm, the chronic underclass, everything, and with forty years of workplace contributions to look forward to. There were so many such young workers that the sky was the limit. Anything and everything was possible. But the boomers barely replaced themselves. Oh, in the early 80s there was a “little baby boom,” as the boomers were all having kids. But they didn’t have as many kids as their parents had. And the kids of baby boomers, who have reached child bearing age, are having even far fewer. The ratio of workers to retirees in the work force is dropping fast. In 1950 there were 16 workers paying taxes into the system for every retiree who was taking benefits out of it. Today, there are a little more than three workers for every retiree. In a few years when all the baby boomers have retired, there will be just two workers who will have to pay all the taxes to support every one retiree.
And right or wrong, good or bad, the decision has already been made and implemented to have illegals come her en masse and to reverse those numbers.
NYgirl, just look at the rationalizations that some in SCOTUS have used to justify the majority decision.
1) International treaties,
2) Laws in other countries,
3) and of course, feeling, nothing more but a feeling.
With these decision, SCOTUS has turned the constitution upside down and taken governance from the people on up to mean goverance from the bench down.
With O’Conner the iconolastic swing-voter, what’s to say she wouldn’t feel that actions against illegals are unconstitutional, not to mention may fail the UN & Global Test?
After all look how she did the U of M affirmaive action case. What if she punted and said that we need another 25 years of illegals before we could consider closing the border?
One thing we know is that Bush doesn’t always telegraph his thinking processes. But you can be sure, that prior to the oncoming shift in SCOTUS, we/he had no guarantees whatsoever that SCOTUS would act to support, strike or otherwise refuse to hear the inevitable cases.
Jaybird,
NY Girl asked the question I wanted to ask, “#4 Jaybird, I understand your point on the demographic issua, it is very real. It is a big part of the reason that Europe is caving into Islamicists. However, can we not solve our demographic issue by allowing legal immigrants in?”
We allow more legal immigrants into this country than all other countries combined. So why then must we allow illegal immigrants as well. Especially in light of the national security issue that we all care about after 9/11?
Jaybird #14 wrote, “I’m saying that it’s the reality of it.”
Right. We’ve identified that a problem exists. We are now clamoring for a solution yet the politicians aren’t listening.
Interesting idea Andy.
What a disgusting state of affairs. I keep hearing that our biggest threats are Syria, Iran and North Korea and that we should consider invading one or more of those countries. Perhaps it should be Mexico instead.
Or maybe get GE and Bank of America to buy Mexico. At least that way all the $$ flowing south would still be in the US.
Good idea James…
Seriously…
What’s going to happen when the US starts looking like the wastelands that everyone is migrating from (especially since we have no standards for language, morality, living, …etc., etc)… it’s only a matter of time before we have courts that adopt the laws from the native lands of immigrants 9if they haven’t already started) to make everyone feel at home.
Renee in VA. I wish you and all here could have seen an episode of the adult animated series “Tripping the Rift” last night.
In the episode, the main characters (space aliens and robots) inadvertantly kill God! Yes, they run into him by some mistake made in the time-space continuum and kill Him.
While they are debating going back in time to undo the damage, they begin to realize unparalleled freedoms brought on by His death. They are now able to lie, cheat, steal, and have perverted sex. They are enjoying it all until it apparently gets out of hand and there is no longer any order. The last straw making the aliens go back to restore the life of god is when a normally mild-mannered, young sounding robot comes jumping out of the elevator shaft screaming “I have learned something new (now that God is dead)!!!!….. and then bends over and toots her behind in the air yelling SODOMY!!!
It was believe it or not a pretty educational and useful episode coming from all places, the television.
LaShawn – What does illegal immigration have to do with the culture? Or the lack of a dollar? Am I totally missing something from the article?
Illegal immigration is a problem because of the lack of a filter. The majority of illegals want to be productive, hard-working Americans, just like my ancestors. I agree that we need to crack down on illegal immigration, but at the same time we need to open the door wider to legal immigration so that the good people can get in, but we can keep criminals, terrorists, et al, out.
Immigrants, in my experience, are the best Americans.
Chops: WRONG!
The door is open wide enough my friend. Mexico needs to fix it corruption problems so that its people will want to stay home. The United States is a free country, but we are not a 24 hour Walmart. We have locks on our doors and for good reason. We are a sovereign nation of laws and rules and we have a distinct culture which defines, nutures and binds us. When we let anyone in unfiltered, we become dirty and adulterated and our culture becomes weaker.
Some in Mexico even believe they are taking back what was theirs. To that and to the indians and the native Hawaiians who want their land back? TOUGH! Survival of the fittest. We conquered you in “fair and square” application of force. If you want you land back, take it back. Otherwise hush and understand and accept the new order.
This is our country. It does not belong to Mexico or any other nation. If we just let Mexicans run across the border all willy nilly, we will end up being a giant garbage bin for the world’s unskilled good for nothings. At some point, these people will even use our electoral and political processes against us inserting their own governors. See California. The Mexicans actually installed a Mexican operative as the mayor of one of America’s largest and most storied cities, yet the alarm has only gone off with me. Many do not see the dangers. Mexico is executing one of the most brilliant bloodless invasion land grabs in US history and we are just watching it.
There are effective solutions, but tis is not the correct forum for discussing them. They are however taking root and at some point the camel’s bacl will break and the “alternative invasion stopping solutions” will be implemented.
Listen. Lawmakers are not going to crack down on illegal immigration toward the 11 million matrÃcula holders as long as they are paying legal taxes. Take for instance the issue in Oregon with hybrid cars. Oregon is trying to implement a tax-by-the-mile law since many people are buying hybrid cars. Hybrid cars have better gas mileage, so those auto owners don’t have to buy more gas; therefore, less gas tax money. This way, the government still gets their tax money. The government will not do less tax money.
Dewaine: They will if voters make them sign binding cotracts for their service. I am working on a contract for candidates to sign prior to taking office that demands certain behavior. The most important tenet on the contract will be that they fully understand that they represent and workf for us and not the other way around.
So if we tell them to stop illegal immigration, they had better dadgum well do it if they want to keep there jobs. There will be some legal challenges to my contract I am sure, BUT any challenge will mean that you are telling the voters up fron that you have no intention of doing what we say which disqualifies you off top.
Chops, you’re right about the filter. Right now our filter is supposed to be employers and local LE instead of where it belongs on the federal govt and we all can see how well it’s working — NOT.
As for how to go about filtering? See an old comment I wrote by clicking on my name below
I’ve got a great filter that would keep them out. A hepa couldn’t do it as good as my idea.
Raymond #22
Tripping the Rift…
I have to check that out. It sounds like it made my point pretty clearly (an like you said, from TV no less…what a surprise)
Renee. It is normally a pretty raunchy show, but it seems to hide often valuable moral messages behind the edge. This episode clearly hit home in that it illustrated what a world without Order and Love would be like. Makes me wonder how far God will actually let people think He is dead or not paying attention.
Only one word comes to mind
WO!………
Raymond, your alternaive perimeter security is pointless and guaranteed to cost American lives and more money in the long run. And so shall it remain until you address my 3 specific points that need to be mitigated.
Andy. Chill my friend. We are not even going there here. This is not the forum anymore for that discussion. Some people don’t know how to behave. I throw that out cryptically just to rattle a couple of cages. They know who they are.
Let’s not start that debate again. OK? I’m still licking my wounds from LaShawn’s beat down.
It’s all good.
Raymond, fair enough. I’ve got some neosporin, want some?
Plain and Simple:
1. Enforce the laws already on the books-prosecute employers who hire illegals to the fullest extent of the law.
2. Enact an Arizona type Proposition 200 (this time without the whining of the minority who voted against it)deny services such as free education to illegals. Do not take away emergency care though.
3. Close the borders, institute a Minuteman Project like organization staffed with volunteers if need be to watch both North and South borders (Yes, I said Northern border too)
4. Arrest ILLEGALS!!(Make sure one knows the difference between the words Legal and Illegal) and promptly escort them back to thier country of origin. Not tied up in Imigration hearings for years.
5. Have representatives in the local, state and national level who actually listen to the folks who elected them for a change.
5. Have an administrator with the cajones to enforce such laws.
Ahh forget it…no one with cajones because of the voters they will offend.
I guess it aint that simple after all eh?
Oh well one can dream can’t they?
Dean, I could not agree more! Well said. As far as dreams are concernded, Langston Hughs said it very well; “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”
Raymond wrote, “It’s all good.”
It’s all good (minus the alternative border security solution)
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