DU immigration experts, please help! Need good answer to

the people here in my state who say "My grandparents came to this country from Italy and they did it legally. So illegal immigrants here now should do it the right way" to paraphrase what I hear.

In CT we have one of the highest percentage of Italian-Americans in the country. So I hear this line a lot. Their stories are riveting: they talk about how their grandparents and great-grandparents were starving in Italy/Sicily and came to the U.S. in desperation. I can see the parallels to today. They can't.

Was it easier at the turn of the 20th century to come here legally? I can make the moral argument but need some facts about the difference between immigration then and immigration now.

came here for the very same reasons that today's central, south americans and southern North Americans come here.

And I'll bet my Welsh side came here for the same reason. Not my Scottish side, I don't think. They came over in 1790 for reasons that are lost to me. But they were Campbell's, a major Scottish clan, so I don't know what the deal was. They came to Georgia.

My Grandparents were from Ireland and they came here legally. So I understand how your Italian friends feel. If we did it the right way why can't they? I wonder if the laws were different then, or is it all spin.

I also know two recent immigrants, one from the Philippines and one from Mexico who did it the legal way. They seem to think the current immigration laws are fair but require a long wait. They also say why can't these illegals do it the right way.

there was an OUTSTANDING piece by Robert Reich on the real immigration problem - failure to enforce existing labor laws (enforcement against the employers, in case that isn't clear).

There's probably an audio file up on their website now, or soon...it was on Morning Edition. In case you're interested. (It really was excellent. Reich generally is.)

That chances of a smart indie guy being selected are about as good as my winning the lottery.


Only a few times have I heard anyone rationally consider the logistical impact of removing 12,000,000 individuals and sending them back to 130 separate countries.

Just consider 5,000,000 mexicans, houdurans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Haitians, Cubans. Because most property rights and state laws state that even an illegal alien may take his/her property with, and may make arrangements to sell/continue to own/trade or use their real property, even after they are evicted from the country, let's assume that the average bus holds 45 adults. OK, a plane can hold 150, assuming all luggage is factored in, but let's stick with buses. Cheap. Plentiful, use readily available diesel fuel, can travel long distances.

we will need 111,111 bus trips just to take the mexicans and other central americans out of here, assuming the countries let them in, or give us permission to even transport over their territory.

If you use airplanes, you will need more than 33,000 separate flights - you are approaching flight levels and logistics of World War II. Even if you rented 100 airplanes, found 250 qualified pilots, 1200 maintenance workers, dedicated a huge airport for this one task, and worked out the flight plans, air rights, ticketing, security, housing, food water, IDs, turn around issues, NOT TO MENTION finding, moving, and storing at one central location these people before their flights, it will still take 3 years to move less than half of the illegal immigrants.

And what of staffing? considering that prisons have anywhere between 10-1 ratios to 6-1 ratios of prisoners to workers, staffers, guards, MDs, etc, even at the most optimistic numbers, we will need 500,000 people to guard, service, move, organize, collate, search, treat, feed and transport 5,000,000 people going back to the closest 6 countries. It gets even worse when you cross to the other side of the globe. Where will we find 500,000 workers capable and trained to do this kind of work? While we are stuck in IRaq and ready to invade Iran?


Best yet is what happens to the 6-7 million we can't catch. The other half go into hiding, and at the same time, the US will be like a vacuum, sucking in replacement immigrants like a major league Hoover.


Of course, those on the right ignore the problems of illegals who have had children here. And guess who gets to stay because they are citizens. Just from the Mexican, Honduran, Salvadorean and Carib populations, we are talking about 3-5 MILLION orphaned US citizens, from ages of 0 to 17. Where will they live? How will they live? Who will care for them?

The sheer logistical job that people face to remove 12,000,000 illegals is simply impossible. Creating peace in Baghdad would be far easier.

THEY don't want the spending and government oversight that would be necessary to simply keep track of who is here and where they live and where they work and how much they make...etc.

THEY will use their list of dangers and threats to avoid this. Not that it really is about "big government" it is about not wanting the information to be collected or available to interested parties.

but before the 20s there were virtually no restrictions on immigrants. I think it was something like, you had to be healthy (not a carrier of TB or venereal disease) and have two dollars cash money upon arrival. There were no quotas, except for Asians enacted in the 1880s, on anyone coming from anywhere. In the 20s they started going by a quota system for legal immigration, allowing for (I'm making these numbers up as an example only) 40,000/yr from Italy; 55,000/yr from Germany; 15,000/yr from Africa; etc. The purpose was to restrict immigration to primarily white, northern-European Christians so as to prevent the "change in the very nature of our nation" -- something you hear a lot from anti-immigrant pundits today.

The supposed reasoning was that America had no frontier anymore, and could no longer afford unrestrained immigration. But the true motives were blatantly racist -- these restrictions were passed at a time when the KKK marched a million strong in Washington DC and when politicians openly courted the KKK.

As a result, the largely immigrant labor movement threw its support to the Democrats and wound up with Roosevelt and the New Deal.

That's the shorthand version.

immigration, so it's like comparing apples and oranges.

Alot of them ostensibly came here legally, but they had to lie to do it. My Irish family lore indicates that some people had to "hide" for a while, and they always lived in terror of being sent back. A few of them came here under shady circumstances, i.e. running from the British authorities.

Another difference is that at that time, it was common for employers to sponsor immigrants, which is a good idea, and I think we should go back in that direction.

he wants cheap labor conservatives to be able to go into Mexico and recruit people who will live in squalor we wouldn't keep a dog in for two years and be paid $5.15/hour. That's what sponsoring an immigrant means.

Do you really think you want that?

Those jobs "American's won't do" are going vacant because the bosses won't pay a wage that will support a person who intends to live here beyond two or three years and won't be exchanging his savings for a depressed curency.

The enemy is the cheap ass employer who wants a free ride on the back of an exploited worker. Knowing who the enemy really is will start you on the road to fighting the problem.

and the government is turning a blind eye. I didn't mean to imply that I agree with the "guest worker"
concept. I don't at all. I was referring to the practices at the turn of the century. The idea was not to send those people home after two years. The idea was to make them citizens of this country. Granted, most of them were doing crap jobs at crap wages, so it was not a perfect solution perhaps, but better than the one we have now in my opinion.

Employers are already hiring illegal aliens at will. I want government oversight of the hiring of immigrants. I want employers to have to pay fair and prevailing wages, even to immigrants. I want them to have to cover them under workers' compensation. I want the workers to be able to join labor unions if they so choose. I want them to become full-fledged citizens, not "guest workers" who make piss-pot wages, who send all their wages back home anyway, and contribute nothing to our communities.

and that enemy is the exploiter, the cheap bastard who wants a free ride on the backs of underpaid immigrants, legal or illegal.

Take care of HIM and you solve the problem right then and there.

Check out this entry at Wikipedia as a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphenated_American

Immigrants, illegal or legal, were a big issue in this country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Of course, most immigration then were from Europe, Japan or China ... coming across an ocean then made it much harder to sneak in illegally --- that's why we have those famous photos of thousands of legal immigrants passing through Ellis Island.

But the specific problem today is with Mexico, and that is quite different it seems to me. The transnational corporations are using Mexicans like an exploitable resource to drive down wages and benefits here in this country so that they can expand their profits even more. Meanwhile, with NAFTA, the transnational corporations make the poverty in Mexico worse, by driving already slave wages in Mexico even lower.

As I research and think about this topic, I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that the real solution is repealing NAFTA --- and encouraging Mexican immigrants to return to their country and stage a revolution to throw the quasi-dictatorship government out in Mexico and to reform the economic oligrachy that keeps people in poverty there.

Doesn't Mexico have a fairly good educational system? They have natural resources, crops, tourist atractions, so why can't they provide for their people? The immigrants from Mexico that I have come in contact with are hard workers and they seem to progress from the cheapest of jobs to the more skilled labor jobs. That is where I believe the problem lies. Those are the jobs that keep many of middle America afloat. Construction type jobs.

by successive generations of robber barons to hold wages down and bust the unions. Unions were behind getting immigration quotas to protect American jobs and keep wages up to a living level.

Yes, it was easier up until the middle of the Depression, which was the real wakeup call for that generation of robber barons, that if wages got depressed too far, they'd lose their customer base and the money would simply stop rolling in. The will was finally there to accede to the now powerful unions and get some restrictions on immigration beyond health restrictions.

So tell your Italian friend that his granparents got a huge break when they came in from Palermo or Rome or Naples that the Mexicans aren't getting. Yet.

Oppression and a better life. My Great Grandparents were Gypsies (no not circus performers) and no one cared here so they came. I still have their steamer trunk.

immigration laws.

Before about 1890, immigration was relatively unregulated - except for the unwanted immigrant group of the day. Zenophobia inspired regulations/quotas targeted at particular groups - Chinese, Irish, Germans, etc. Quite often it was still harder to leave the country of origin (red tape and all) than to become a citizen of the US. My 4th great-grandparents who immigrated in 1832 from the Grand Duchy of Wurttemberg had to seek permission from the Grand Duke to leave and then only part of the family was given permission to immigrate as several of the young men still had to fulfill their required 5 year military service to the Duke.

Early on in the 1800s, immigrants could reside here as non-citizens all their life without doing anything. They could own property, have access to the courts and do all the things everyone else could do but vote. To become a citizen, you had to file a document called a Declaration of Intention, in which you, as an immigrant, swore before the clerk of courts that it is your "bona fide intention to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to (your country of origin)" of which you had been a subject. My great-great grandfather's declaration, sworn in 1919, after he had lived in Wisconsin for 12 years, also demanded that he swear "I am not an anarchist; I am not a polygamist nor a believer in the practice of polygamy; and it is my intention to become a citizen of the United States of America and to permanently reside therin..."

For more than a century, the Declaration of Intent was good enough. In fact, before about 1919, no one was required to even go so far. Even at that, I suspect he swore intent as he likely still had a heavy Germanic accent and it was era of WWI. Of all my immigrant ancestors, less than a handful filed Declaration of Intent and only one - my great-great grandfather mentioned above became a citizen and received a certificate of naturalization and then not until nine years later in 1928. But early in the 20th century, immigration laws grew tighter until we have the prohibitive set of regulations and hoop jumping that marks the path for today's legal immigrant.

In 1993, my husband's employer hired an immigrant from Belgium. We befriended them and helped them understand all the documents, filing fees and the hoops themselves - information they couldn't afford to get from their expensive immigration lawyer. I became intimately familiar with the INS website.

Immigration regulations today are based upon country of origin. Immigrants from impoverished countries, from war torn countries, from communist countries and from 1st world countries all face different regulations.

My friend from Belgium could only immigrate here with his family and receive permanent residency if he could prove his job skills were needed. It was a process that began with him arriving here with a temporary work visa through a Belgian company. To convert from a temporary visa to permanent residency required a sponsoring employer, an expensive immigration lawyer, the filling of numerous forms, the payment of thousands of dollars in fees to INS, expensive trips back to Belgium to receive special documents and visas they could only get from the US embassy, and several "vacations" to Canada by which they could renew their visas and maintain their legal status.

It was a process that, in their case took more than 10 years, due in part to an incompetent immigration lawyer who claimed he had filed documents when he had not and in part to changing jobs, meaning the process had to begin anew. Still, had everything proceeded perfectly, it would have taken no less than 6-7 years because all this time the immigration laws were changing and they were creating new and different hoops to jump through, causing delay upon delay as well. During the whole process, no one else in the family could work, only the member of the household who made the application. That meant in this economy his income alone had to provide for a family of 8. And, during the application process, he was essentially indentured labor - unable to leave his current "sponsoring" employer, unable to complain against violations of labor laws for fear he would lose his job and be deported before the process was complete.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound anything like what my great-grandparents had to go through.

Truthfully, the way the Mexicans immigrate here sounds much more like the process my immigrant ancestors went though.

edited for clarity - and to add that my Belgian friend and his family are still not citizens. Once they are granted permanent residency, they cannot begin filing for citizenship for 4 years - but at least his wife and children can work and go to college as residents.

I'm British so I must warn you I know nothing about US history.

I remember something about an unlimited immigratojn policy with a time limit on it, that was when industry was desparate for workers and let anyone in providing they didn't have a communicable disease, was mentally fit and had a trade.