Illegal immigrants
12/1/2005 7:47:12 PM
Daily Journal




Security on the border with Mexico has sizzled to the top of the charts for speeches and politics, with President Bush standing at the apex with a lengthy new plan for reducing the number of illegals slipping across the border stretching from southern California to southern coastal Texas.


Illegal immigration by Mexicans and via Mexico is a major problem, but some of the urgency is spoken with eyes on the 2006 mid-term elections.


Mississippi, whose Hispanic population is growing by leaps and bounds in some counties, has a definite stake in what's decided.


Among other issues, Mississippi's economic interests wonder what should be done about illegal immigrants already living in the United States and working in industries like furniture manufacturing in Northeast Mississippi - and visibly in some lower-wage jobs other workers apparently find unattractive.


Illegal immigration feeds off Mexico's ubiquitous poverty. If Mexico prospered, its citizens would not walk and run by the tens of thousands every year, at significant personal risk, to work largely at the bottom of the economy in the United States.


Illegal Mexican immigration won't cease as a problem - with a fence, without a fence, with a few more guards or a million more guards - until household prosperity becomes the rule and not the exception in Mexico.


U.S. government policies don't seriously address the issue of long-term Mexican development, but they should.


We believe it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to honestly address illegal immigration while policies and practices at least tacitly encourage illegal immigrants to work in the United States.


Cheap labor always is popular with somebody, and if serious sanctions aren't imposed on people who illegally employ illegals that problem will continue feeding the urge to immigrate.


People who seek to become permanent residents should be steered intentionally toward citizenship - assimilated with a required knowledge of English, the prevailing American language in the public sector, commerce and everyday life.


If illegals aren't assimilated into citizenship they will remain marginalized legally, culturally and economically.


Most Americans should be able easily to understand why people risk themselves to gain a foothold in the U.S. The ancestors of the vast American majority immigrated in the 17th through 20th centuries because our nation offered two things above all else: freedom and opportunity to escape whatever economic or ideological circumstance bound them in their former countries.


Immigration policy should be based on bringing to citizenship those who seek the economic and legal benefits of our society. If not citizens, those who reside and work here will neither gain full benefits nor fully bear their fair share of citizen responsibility.


We are a nation of immigrants, but we cannot, must not be a nation of opportunistic aliens.

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