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Saturday, June 29, 2013

Is Immigration Reform Good for Undocumented Workers And The Rest Of Us?

In response:  http://www.nationofchange.org/truth-about-immigration-and-economy-1372515249

I respect Mr. Reich and yet this discussion about immigration reform does not change my mind.  Maybe he should accompany me when I witness my wife's parents have to stand in line for four hours at an overcrowded Sacramento CA hospital emergency room filled with 40 or 50 undocumented people. My assumption that these people are "undocumented" is an educated guess: I worked as a US Border Patrol/INSICE Agent for 26 years.

Another point: my brother still lives in our hometown of San Jacinto, CA. San Jacinto was flooded with undocumented people after Clinton's NAFTA of 1994. Check out this article about how NAFTA simultaneously stabbed the Mexican and American people in their backs. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

San Jacinto today is unrecognizable compared to the town I knew when I lived there. In fact, if I did not know differently, I would swear that I was now visiting a border town. Longtime residents of San Jacinto did not ask for this unfair demographic change to their town. That change also contributed to a decline in their property values and losses of jobs.

Mr. Reich these are the types of consequences that average Americans have suffered from having had to deal with Washington's previous government immigration/economic reform programs. Washington was wrong about "the end of illegal immigration" propaganda during Reagan's 1986 Amnesty, Clinton's 1994 NAFTA, and Bush's creation of DHS in 2003. They were also wrong about how all programs would economically benefit American taxpayers. They were in many cases dead wrong how these programs would benefit the Mexican poor.

I also don't see where the allocations of billions of more taxpayers' dollars for "border security" and the doubling in size of the US Border Patrol fits into this reform being economically good for Americans or immigrants.

Coming from a law enforcement background, this whole immigration reform scenario smells too much like our institutionalized 40 year long, failed drug war. Both illegal immigration and illegal drug enforcement programs have turned into never ending profit makers for US privatized corporations and banks.

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