1 If the jobs are there, the Thai government would let them work.  Just like here in the United States.

I have no idea if the Thai government would let them work, but I don't think that's true of the US.   We are still under the quota system installed in the 1920s to make sure all those nasty, unclean, criminally disposed people from Eastern Europe, Italy, China and Japan out of the country.  Oh, you mean they weren't nasty, unclean, criminally disposed....?  Details are tweaked from time to time, but the system remains.

Is a quota system sensible that presumes more Brits want to come here than anyone else?  (It seems less odd nowadays because many, if not most,of the Brits who do come here are actually Commonwealth citizens from India, Pakistan, or the West Indies who have been living in the UK previous to coming here.  But the quota system envisaged only stout Anglo Saxon Protestant type Brits.)

The rabid anti-immigration forces (meaning not you or anyone we personally know on the 'Net) seem to be repeating the same tropes that were used in the first two big anti immigration waves. (The first was agains the Irish, and featured the Know Nothings; the second was against everyone that came in the great waves of 1870-1920 and featured the KKK.)   Which is one reason they get the reaction they get.

2 I was talking more about guest-worker visas (H-1B visas) as opposed to immigration.  I'm all for immigration reform, but anti-illegal-immigration. 

3

I firmly believe there should be no limit on H-1B visas. Poach all the greatest minds from around the world? Yes please! We haven't always had a ceiling on the number we issue, and the max who applied really wasn't all that much higher than the upper limit is now. PhD's from everywhere! That's my idea of diversity.

Anyhow...the problem with history is, we only know what actually happened. We don't know what would have happened if things had turned out differently. What would America be like, for example, with more stout English types and no Mafia? We'll never know.

And I live in Providence, RI. Please not to be blowing smoke up my ass about the ethnic makeup of organized crime. It's still here and it's still very, very Italian.

Just because the America we ended up with is pretty darn good, we can't assume the people who wanted it to be different were wrong.

4 Exactly Weas,

If employers aren't getting the workers they need, they'll have the government issue more H-1B visas.  That's only if hiring illegals is made painful though... there has to be enforcement or it won't work.

5 Actually, they're having a really hard time filling them, because of the cap. The H-1B (you probably know) is the one that's often often called the "highly qualified" visa. I work for an engineering and research company...our labs are having a HELL of a time getting the employees they need, either here or abroad. The only reason we'd need to import labor at the other end of the scale would be to pay them below minimum wage. So, is the minimum wage putting Americans out of work?

6 Can't H-1B's also be used for various specialties that can be defined by updating the guidelines if these jobs don't already apply? If not, I'll have to look if there is another type of worker visa that could be used.

I wouldn't say the minimum wage is putting Americans out of work (but I'll go pick lettuce for $50.00/hour... just sayin'). The open-borders crowd argues that it's "doing the jobs that Americans won't do" (for minimum wage I guess), so let them (the foreign workers) do the job for minimum wage. Employers should be able to hire foreign workers for less than minimum wage. They can afford to pay minimum wage or they shouldn't be hiring.

You either have a working business model that takes expenses into account or you don't. If you don't have a working business model, your business is going to fail. Breaking the employment and immigration laws is not the solution for a flawed model. You either cut profits, cut back operations or expenses, raise prices, or go out of business. If the demand is not there to justify raising prices enough to cover expenses, why are they in that business?

7 Yeah, I don't actually think minimum wage is depressing employment...but I also don't buy that Americans won't do those jobs. Errr...and just to clarify -- because I'm *still* hacked off -- what got me going on this thread was kishnevi's implication that a) it's inherently wrong for a society to say, "Hey, I like things the way they are right now and I'm not eager to makeover my country by importing a lot of people from a different one." Happy people resist change, everywhere and always! And b) that there's something uniquely bigoted about people of Anglo-Saxon descent. Brits are like rednecks -- it's legal to hate them in 2008. Well, screw that. If it seems like Anglos are forever fending off other cultures, mayhap it's because Anglos are especially good at building successful countries that other people want to live in. *I* can't help it if Americans aren't clamoring by the millions to get into Mexico. The fact that the US *has* absorbed people from a bunch of other, un-British cultures and it turned out pretty well doesn't do ANYTHING to discredit a) and b) above. Whew. I feel better. Sorry, Stash.

8 Heh. I forgot about paragraph breaks on mee.nu. The editor doesn't work under Opera.

9 No worries Weas, you always make good points.  That's why I love your stuff.  Glad you feel better.

10 Weasel--Speaking a little blindly here--since I have no idea of your family backround (or Stashiu, for that matter, despite the Romanian sound to his moniker)--but my family background does come into a little play.  All four of my grandparents came over here as part of the great wave from Eastern Europe;  my father's parents got here just before the quotas kicked in.  Good thing, too, because all their relatives who didn't make the journey didn't survive the Nazis (except for one group of cousins who hid in an oven for a while and then trekked overland to Shanghai).  So I know what Anglo Saxon bigotry can do, and I also know that compared to the bigotry that flourished (flourishes?) in Central and Eastern Europe, it's a pretty weak bigotry.  But it did exist and was strong enough to influence the decisions the US government from time to time.

And while I don't blame people for not wanting to import people from Other Cultures, I don't think there's any justification to keeping people out because you happen to not like Where They Are From.
It's one thing to say, "Sorry, no jobs available, go back home" to everyone that comes here.  It's quite another to say, "There are jobs here, but we only want people from Britain, France and Germany to come in.  You people from China, Russia, Italy,  we don't want you here."  And that's what the immigration laws said that were passed in 1927.

I do come to this from a libertarian perspective. Part of my reasoning is that people come here because they can get much better jobs than they can at home.  And they will continue to do so.  The only real solution to the illegal immigration problem is: adjust legally admitted levels to the actual demand for employment;  work to improve conditions in their home country so staying home becomes more attractive; or adjust conditions here in the US so we become like a third world country and people won't want to live here.  Sometimes I think the politicians in the country are working towards the third alternative.

I also happen to come at it from a different perspective because I live in South Florida, which is dominated (and I mean dominated) by thousands of people who came here legally (or at least, claimed asylum and made themselves legal as soon as possible) from all over the Caribbean and Latin America (strangely, the only country which makes almost no contribution to that flow is Mexico), who work and prosper exactly the way they're supposed to do under our system.
It's very different from California or Texas.  I'm not sure who does the organized crime, but it doesn't seem to be the Italians.

I think it is interesting that agricultural laborers are hired out of Mexico, but not out of our inner cities.  You would think that if the farmer offered enough money, people would be interested in taking jobs on the farm.  (Reverse of the great Negro migration to the North that occurred in the first part of the 20th century.)   But the farmers don't seem to recruiting, or the city people don't seemt to be applying.  (And here in Florida, the urban centers are close enough to the farms that someone could easily commute daily to work on the farm from where they live in the city.)  So we do have our share of illegal immigrants, but it's a fraction of the number of legal immigrants.

11 The farmers aren't recruiting because the illegals work for less than minimum wage and without worker benefits. Right now, it's cost effective strategy. My point is that we should make it cost-intensive to hire illegals. Then the farmers and other employers will either recruit citizens, or arrange for legal guest workers with valid visas allowing them to work legally. This will ensure they receive a fair wage, proper employment protections, and a path to citizenship if that's what they want.

Continuing to allow employers to hire illegal workers does an injustice to law-abiding citizens and the illegal workers themselves. When ICE sweeps a business, any illegals they arrest should be jailed right alongside the person who hired them. Once business learns that the laws are going to be enforced, they'll make sure that any non-citizens they hire are legally able to work in the United States. Once illegals learn that the laws are going to be enforced, they will vacate the area... look at Arizona and Oklahoma.

I'm all for legal immigration.  My wife is an immigrant and so were both of my father's parents.  My two daughters are adopted immigrants.  I don't want unlimited immigration... felons, terrorists, radicals need not apply as far as I'm concerned.  Anyone who wants to make a go of it and <b>become an American</b> has my support.  If they ignore the rule of law before they get here, or while they're here, we don't need them.

12

I'm an American of an old American family of mixed Western European ancestry and I'm in the process of emigrating to the UK. I am sick to the teeth of anti-English sentiment in western culture; it's like an auto-immune disease. It goes hand in hand with the idea (generally promoted by the children of 20th Century immigrants) that mass immigration has been nothing but good for the US.

The people who set up the immigration system you deplore were wrong, in that America was able to absorb a great deal of immigration from alien cultures without breaking down. But they weren't entirely wrong. All change isn't good. As I mentioned earlier, we're still struggling with the organized crime established by Italian (and, to a lesser extent, Irish and Jewish) immigrants in the late 19th/early 20th C. The city I live in is eaten alive with it.

Americanism is an idea. A bunch of ideas: broadly, English common law, laissez-faire capitalism and liberalism (in the old, good sense of the word), with a hint of violence and civil disobedience thrown in to keep the bastards in line. It's cultural, not racial. So, for example, it took hold improbably well in Japan -- but only after we all but obliterated the culture they had before.

I think it's great that America has been able to absorb people from all sorts of different countries and make Americans of them. But that's not what America is for. The US doesn't exist for the main purpose of giving the world's refugees a place to go. Self-preservation is the primary job of any nation. If my grandparents thought immigrants from countries with similar cultures were more likely to make good Americans, I won't call it crazy talk.

The idea that we can absorb 20 million surly peasants who don't particularly like us...that's crazy talk. Stash is right: make it more expensive to hire them, the work will dry up and they'll self-deport.

13 Immigration has worked because immigrants wanted and were strongly encouraged to assimilate and become Americans. This is easier for Europeans but the experience of various Oriental immigrants has shown they can do so quite successfully when motivated to do so. I do not think people who come here in defiance of our law have such a record. The problem with organized crime has more to do with the unthinkable wealth  the government gave them with a monopoly on booze. I think that crime organizations were smaller and local before that. As with the RR Barrons the criminals were able to buy law enforcement, judges, and politicians and organize on an unprecedented scale. They then had the money to corrupt or buy into legitimate areas and they are with us still.

The immigration problem now is from multiculturalism. They are being allowed and encouraged NOT to assimilate, to Balkanize our culture and society. The collapse of European and  Scandinavian societies shows where we are headed.

As long as welfare pays better than working, the farmers will not be able to get field workers from the cities. When they can not hire immigrants they will invest what they must in automation. This has already happened to a large degree. When minimum wages are raised, many jobs disappear. They are eliminated or automated. This makes it ever harder for young people to break into the job market. This has always been the bulk of minimum wage workers. When a job is not worth the current minimum wage it is eliminated. Current employees must pick up essential services and non essential services are not offered (when did someone last run out to fill your tank, check your oil, and inflate your tires? How many people got their first training and step into the job market doing that?).   

14 Weasel--stray thoughts about your last comment:
1) Don't think you will escape anti English sentiment by moving to the UK.  In certain ways, it's worse there.
2) Don't blame organized crime on the immigrants.  Organized crime has been around for as long as there have been cities to be organized around, and  18th century London was one of the apices of organized crime.  (Read Fielding's History of Jonathan Wild if you want a good description.) 
3) And of course there is the truism that government is organized crime that's enlisted the police on its side.
4) Nor are most of those 20 million peasants very surly.  If anything, they want to be like us, until the politicians and others tell them otherwise.
5)I agree with Mach's comment about the effects of multiculturalism.
My parents, both children of immigrants, grew up totally ignorant of  my grandparents' native language (Yiddish).   Both sets of grandparents learned English so well that they could speak it as the only language used at home (at least before the kids) without a problem.  My grandfather, in fact, by the end of his life, spoke Yiddish with a Boston accent (where they lived and where I was born).

15 Illegals who come here to send money back home have no desire to assimilate. Legal immigrants often do. My wife is from Mexico. When one of her married sisters came here with her family the school wanted to put the kids in bilingual education. She had a hard fight to avoid that. Both parents were white collar professionals in Mexico but had to work menial jobs here for lack of English. She did not want her kids to get a high school diploma and be bus boys or maids for lack of English. She succeeded and the daughter was an honor roll student and went to UCSD on scholarship. Immigrants always sacrificed to come here but saw their kids become doctors, lawyers, and politicians. This brings hybrid vigor to our culture and society. Multiculturalism  brings ghettos and  conflict. The KKK would be pleased. An immigrant's past should be honored and cherished as heritage, not used to isolate and control them. I can not think of any example in history where this has worked in the long term. This is just what France tried to do, bring in needed workers but keep those dirty Arabs out of their society. They are reaping the fruits of that policy now. 

16 Evil people such as the ACLU are trying to use our very traditions of tolerance of diversity to excise those aspects of American culture, such as Christian values, that they hate. This pits Americans against other Americans and will have tragic results.  

17 Anti-Englishness is immeasurably worse in the UK, kishnevi. That's why I called it an auto-immune disease. The peculiarly robust and stubborn flavor of organized crime brought here by Sicilian immigrants is, indeed, a different sort of thing from the organized crime we had before. Just because all cultures have criminals doesn't mean that all criminality is the same: some flavors are particularly difficult to root out and toxic to the body politic. For example, cultures which accept bribery as an ordinary part of doing business find it extraordinarily hard to break the habit. I'm guessing we're going to find that a real problem in modernizing Iraq. As for our twenty million friends from South of the border, in my experience, the ones that aren't sulky show a terrible, patient passivity that is even less compatible with democracy. I wonder if that isn't at the heart of the mess that is Mexico. Do you know, Mexico has only 5% less arable land than the US? Mexico is stiff with natural resources. So why is it such a basket case? I don't actually think most of the Mexicans who come here really want to stay; the US as seen from the point of view of an illegal can't be a very pleasant place. But if they did want to stay, I'd have some pointed questions about whether we really want to absorb a people who manage to do so little with so much.

18 Ugh. Stupid comments under Opera. That made a lot more sense with paragraph breaks.

19 Hmmm... S.Weasel has commented here half-a-dozen times or so and my cuss-o-meter is still at 0%. 

Sign of the Apocalypse or sockpuppet?  (heh, just kidding Weas)

Seriously, the passivity of the culture is largely related to the weather, yes? (siesta?)  Combine that with your point about traditions of corruption and the consequences of resisting, you have some strong conditioning to overcome.  Most of the Mexicans and South Americans I've known who became Americans found it easy to adjust if they chose and were extremely hard workers and active in the community.

Of course, most of the ones I knew also were ones who chose to enter the Army, so my sample may be skewed. 

Mac, the ACLU isn't evil... it's the large percentage of its members that are really communist/socialist and pursue a different agenda than what the ACLU is supposed to represent.  Little Mouse (our nickname for Mac's wife for those who don't know) is the best kind of immigrant.  Nothing wrong with cherishing the culture you come from and respecting its traditions, as long as you assimilate to America and become an American first.  My wife is another example of someone who came here and worked hard to become a good American citizen, but still cherishes and follows Korean culture that doesn't contradict American values.

20 People who have what's necessary to immigrate to the States legally are above average; it's a damn difficult thing to do. For what it's worth, I think Mexico's failure to thrive derives from an Old World social structure -- very highly stratified and undemocratic. There's only so far a society can go in modern times on an aristocrat/peasant system.

21 They're learning, slowly but surely.  When they realize that Capitalism and Democracy aren't the evil things they've been told their whole lives, their society improves.

22 Weasel--do take a look at 18th century England.  Bribery was a highly developed artform back then.  But the English did get rid of it, but not until the changes we associate with the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian Era. 

And Mexico might technically have enormous amounts of arable land, but the climate (in part dryer, in part tropical, and generally warmer) and the topography (much more mountainous) make a big difference in how it can be used.  To attain US levels, they would need to use irrigation country wide.  Of course, the Aztecs and previous cultures did do that, and if I remember my reading correctly, produced more (per capita, at least) than modern Mexico does.

23 Gentle S.Weasel makes a good point. One of the first big culture shocks for my wife's family came when they broke down on the road in California. A policeman stopped, AND HELPED!! He didn't steal from them or make trouble for them, he just helped. This was a profound shock and really told them America was different. They have a nominal democracy there but the people are used to seeing their elections stolen. The one party ruled for decades. Over 90% of the police budget went to the top officials and the lower ranks lived on graft. The government and their henchmen were your enemy. You worked hard to get by and tried to stay off the radar. If you attracted attention it brought trouble. Saving money was hard because of terrible inflation, and the government would play games with the currency to sweep up people who tried to save money. You had only so long to exchange your paper before it became worthless and of course they tapped it when you did. Many people found their savings had become worthless paper before they learned about it. Any process involving government at any level meant bribes. Being a small fish in such a culture is not fun.

As with the Soviets, the Chinese, and the North Koreans we see that a rich country can live quite poorly when the government exploits the people instead of empowering them. I believe that 95% of new patents go (or went) to Americans. It's not that Americans are smarter but that our patent system is the only one that properly protects and empowers innovators and inventors. An inventor in Japan who spends half his life making a better mouse trap sells it to a big company for what they chose to pay or they steal it and tie him up in court with the millions they make from his work. There is just no reward for being innovative. (I know there are cultural issues in Japan but the patent system has a similar effect all over the world.)

And the Dems wanted to change ours to be like "the world's".

24 "it's the large percentage of its members that are really communist/socialist and pursue a different agenda than what the ACLU is supposed to represent"

I think a case can be made it was started by bad people to undermine freedom. They do not support liberty, they support the rights of those who would suppress freedom of speech and expression. I think THAT is what they were supposed to represent by the founders. Like Al Capone's or Hamas' charities, any good they did was just a cover and was far overshadowed by the harm, and evil.

25 Absolutely true, the ACLU was started as a communist front.  The idea of an organization devoted to civil liberties is a good one though.  It should be volunteer-only and unable to collect money from judgments in court though.  The current ACLU is largely filled with grievance-mongers who are aligned with anti-American subversives, but not totally... there are a few.... couple....  ok, the ACLU is evil... you're right.  Dammit.

Point to you. 

26

27 Is "useful idiots" the description you were looking for?