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You're undoubtedly right, a path to citizenship is what immigrants really want and, personally, I think there's an argument to be made that they should be as entitled to that path as our ancestors, every last one of whom were also immigrants. But, you know as well as I do that there's a lot of resistance to anything that smacks of an amnesty, the guest worker proposal is an attempt at a compromise solution. And, to be honest, there is some merit to the observation that, the last time we conducted a legalization program back in 1986, there was a very large increase in the immigrant population produced a) by the initial pool of eligible participants, and, actually more significantly, b) when the IRCA beneficiaries naturalized five years later and suddenly became eligible to file family-based petitions on behalf of all of their family members still outside the US. Their ability to petition on behalf of relatives dramatically increased the number of immigrants who ultimately wound up here. Is that a bad thing? I don't know, I kind of go back and forth. Most days, I'd argue it's not that big a deal, the US still has a very low population density relative to most parts of the world, we have a huge economy, and despite what restrictionists say, the impact of immigrant labor on US wages and employment can only be detected using extremely skewed statistical methodologies produced, coincidentally enough, by restrictionist lobbyists. At the same time, I do kind of get the impression from the tone of Mexican government officials that they're starting to take for granted that emigration to the US is something to which they are entitled and may rely upon as a form of relief for their own poor domestic policies, and that I think is an attitude which needs to be curbed. Migration as a natural phenomenon is one thing; migration as an officially condoned solution to a country's bad management of its internal problems is not okay.
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