Again, you are saying she is not responsible for her criminal status. Would you be responsible for it? Would you be willing to serve her sentence? Of course not, which means only she is responsible for her actions. Also, if she is working, that is another crime. If she holds a Driver license here in VA, that is another crime. Tell me again how she is not a criminal?

Face it NOVA, you support criminals and amnesty, no matter what type of spin you attempt to use.

I suppose I will explain it again in hope that your liberal brain will get the second time around.

You said the illegal you know, was put into her current criminal status due to the actions, or inaction by someone else. I said, I suppose that would make you responsible for the criminal action of someone else. I realize you liberals do not know about personal responsibility, but you seem to want us to believe this illegal is illegal not of her own choosing. So, that is why I asked if you would be responsible if she committed a crime.

You crack me up. You must be an awesome dancer, because you sure are doing some stepping around the questions I ask.

I said I was in favor of deportation, that does not mean I am not also in favor of having illegals serve jail time first.

Illegals make up less than 5% of the work population, I hardly think America would go in the drain without them. In fact, we would most likely do better. It would make companies pay Americans livable wages and benefits without having to legislate it, since the market would dictate the wages, and not the Government. Though, I’m sure you feel Americans do not want to do certain jobs. But then again, I suppose If I, like you, were a liberal elitist, I might think the same.

Oh, I am sure you are not in love with any illegals, but you sure do have a thing for them. So, lets face it, you are in favor of amnesty, in favor of breaking the law and benefiting from it, and the down fall of America.

I don’t care how long you think you have been a conservative, your opinions and posts speak loudly of just the type of person you really are.

I really do not care much for your sob story, you like the COMPOST just ignore reality. She and only she should be responsible for her visa, or are you telling me if she committed a crime you might be held responsible for it?

In the US, as in most other countries that I know of, current law permits deportation, but does not require it. Although there are certainly individual cases where deportation is the best option, and it’s an option that I’d never advocate repudiating, I’m against mass deportation and think it would harm the United States grievously. I’m even against deportation of more serious criminals, unless we are assured that they will be incarcerated in as strict and secure an environment in their home country as would be the case here. Your advocacy of using deportation to address crimes committed here leaves me a little unsettled.

Calling me a “liberal” or any other vile name doesn’t help your cause very much. As a conservative with better than adequate creds dating to 1964 from my own government service and political activity, you’ll just have to take my word for it that this issue doesn’t cut liberal/conservative very neatly. If you want to see some good conservative thinking on this, you might want to visit the Becker/Posner blog, although I fear your circuits would overheat if you tried to keep up there.

You keep referring to my “beloved illegals.” I only know one illegal immigrant and our relations are absolutely platonic, I assure you. (Mrs. Scout would have me skinned if it were otherwise). This lady was sent here as an 8 year old from a Muslim country in Asia to live with an aunt who was married to a US citizen. She went to public schools in Virginia, did well, worked her way through college and cannot even speak her native language. She attends Christian church and could no more survive in her homeland than Salman Rushdie could stroll through the casbah in Mecca. She’s as American as the proverbial apple pie. At some point, her guardian failed to renew her student visa and now she lives pretty much underground, with absolutely no options but to self-deport. What a waste. She can’t even use her degree and has to work menial jobs. This situation is not the typical illegal immigrant situation, but it is one that law and policy should be flexible enough to deal with. And it’s not. Legislation that would have addressed this (kids who came legally but whose status lapsed) was proposed this year, and your crowd shouted it down.

So, my views aren’t based on any love interest that I have with illegals. I’m sure most of them and I would have little in common. I form these views based on my sense of why labor moves cross-border, what my best sense of the economic consequences are of that sort of movement, the future needs of the United States in a world economy, my constitutional views about the role of the federal government in a constitution-based Republic, and my general perception that the current system is woefully inadequate to current needs and conditions.

My guess is that murder in the United States is not generally a function of market forces, but likely reflects acts of rage, stupidity, and personal violence independent of market forces. There are no doubt murders that have economic motivations, but my hunch is that they are statistically not signficant. So I’m not buying into your murder/immigration analogy.

Do we have a border? Do we have laws? How hard is that to follow? I suppose you would be fine with 5.5 billion people immigrating to the Country?

As a sovereign Nation, something you liberals do not like, America has the right to set immigration law as Congress sees fit. As I said, which I just do not understand why your brain cannot handle, is the current laws allow for deportation of illegals, not undocumented, not “uninspected”, but illegal, does that make us not a moral Nation? I thought the fact that millions of folks want to come here, must make America stand out from other Nations. The rule of law, social order etc, are just two of the reasons why people want to come here.

You believe by breaking law, and benefiting from it, is a conservative value.

Why do think existing Federal law is not adequate, yet, you think new laws that would provide amnesty, again it is amnesty, is a good thing. I pointed out the current laws, and what the Senate Bill would do. The only difference is the Senate Bill would grant amnesty to your beloved illegals. Why do you ignore those points?

So, you are trusting of people who broke the law, came here illegally, purchased documents on the black market, or stole them from innocent victims, worked here illegally, drove without licenses or insurance, and expect them to now act like boy scouts and provide their true identity in order to become a non criminal in our society?

Though I suppose the contradiction you posted about how we would not be a moral Nation by enforcing immigration law, and then saying you are in favor of the Senate Bill last year that you claim would be tougher on illegals is something I should over look.

But I do like the fact you think deportation is a good thing, of course that is if you really mean you want to just deport the “criminal” illegals and not those that just broke a few laws.

People murder every day in this Country, so we should just allow that to happen since there seems to be such a demand. Which is exactly like you saying we have a market for illegals so we should not have laws to prevent illegal immigration. And, since you are in favor of getting rid of those laws, you should also be in favor of getting rid of laws against murder, since there is a market for that, and why should people be burden with following those laws?

I didn’t say that Illegal Immigrants had “conservative values,” at least not in an American political sense. In fact, I suspect they don’t. There’s just no reason to believe that there is any predicate in their countries of origin to make them one thing or another politically.

Where we differ starkly is that I tend to think existing local laws are adequate to deal with local immigration impacts (assault, murder, zoning, DUI, disturbing the peace, littering etc), while you think something else is necessary. By contrast, I tend to believe federal laws are inadequate and you seem to think they’re just hunky dory.

Labor migrations like this (whether here or in Europe or anywhere else) are propelled by cross-border economic disparities. The more severe the disparity, the more the higher economic standard country will become a kind of labor vaccuum, sucking in workers from surrounding lower standard areas. The challenge for lawmakers is to manage this dynamic successfully, not to ignore it or stop it (the latter course will wreck the economies of all parties). My opinion is that the federal government has not only not managed this phenomenon successfully, but that several succeeding administrations have not even tried very hard. The current laws are not doing the job. One of the many negative fallouts of this inadequacy is the local impacts about which many here complain.

As mentioned before (you may have missed it), last year’s Senate bill was not a study in elegance, but it had the benefit of marking the end of inaction on this issue. There were no amnesty elements in it, but it did impose increased penalties for uninspected entry and required payment of those penalties (and clean criminal records) as a condition for permission to stay. The “amnesty” myth was a political creation (very effective, in retrospect) in order to attach a charged label to any measures that did not involve mass deportation. If I get caught speeding and pay a penalty to avoid going to jail, that ain’t amnesty.

What do we do with the illegals in the country? The options aren’t very attractive, but when you weigh out all the pros and cons, mass deportation is a non-starter and the worst of all possibilities. It won’t happen and if it does, the United States is finished as an economic or moral force in the world. I favor something along the lines of last year’s legislation: those with clean records pay penalties and given temporary papers that enable them to work and stay until their status is resolved (either new visa categories of temporary worker status). Anyone that doesn’t step up to be processed within a set period (say six months) misses the boat. Clearly, none of this works unless the country gets a grip on the cross-border traffic, but part of that solution is not just a Great Wall of Arizona, but also procedures and methods at the border that take away the incentive to avoid inspection on entry.

RE your claim that the country is experiencing a great outbreak of market-driven murders, that’s news to me. Generally speaking, however, unless you’re aware of something that my normally voracious reading habits have missed, I would think state homicide laws would be adequate to control this except at the margins where the “hit” prices are extremely high. But I really don’t know much about these market murders and, unless they are confined to immigrant communities, don’t understand their link to the matter at hand.

I find it unbelievable that the Canadian government has created such a welfare state, and social services infrastructure (socialized medicine is just the tip of the iceberg), that any “illegal” family moving there “illegally” can live completely for free off the government.

When the population rises to a 12% illegal-40% previously illegal but legalized in less than 5 years level as it has here, the cost to the Canadian government and average tax paying Canadian citizen will be outrageous. They too will be scrambling to enforce and create enforceable illegal immigrant laws.

It will create even more poverty that Canada has to deal with using ever diminishing federal funds, by fewer and fewer taxpayers.

I feel sorry for them and their own self-induced social engineering misery.

Keep trying to spin. I asked very simple questions, and you can’t even answer them. Again, how is cheating the system and benefiting from it a conservative value? Are there current laws that do not allow illegals to work in America? Are there laws that currently allow for the deportation of illegals? If so, exactly why did we need to have “comprehensive” immigration reform? Again, the only thing the Senate Bill would have done is grant amnesty to law breakers, the very ones you support.

What exactly would you do with the illegals currently in the Country? We have murders every day in this Country, should we ditch murder laws since it appears there is a market for them in this Country?

That having been said, my position has been a consistent campaign for legislative measures that address all of the common complaints about the impacts of illegal immigration. You are one of the very few who seems to think that the present federal system is hunky-dory. I consider it highly defective and very much in need of an overhaul. As a licensed conservative since the Goldwater campaign, I can tell you that laws that don’t work are the bane of conservative philosophy. This is especially true when laws do not reflect market forces. Laws out of synch with large movements in the market invite disregard and undermine respect for the law .

The current federal immigration regime does not serve the national interests of the United States in concept or in application. It requires reform right now, if not last summer.

Do you think before posting? You write a bunch of stuff without really saying a thing. You simply swing in the wind, you have a position that changes from day to day, you have zero respect for your beliefs, since you clearly cannot give a simple defense of where you stand on the issue. You say you oppose amnesty, yet, you write this…. “I support getting all these black market workers out of the darkness and out where they can be seen and regulated, whether it be mundane things like drivers’ licenses and tax withholding, or on crime reporting and enforcement” How is that not amnesty? How is that not cheating the system and getting away with it? How is that not a slap in the face of every legal immigrant who played by the rules?

Do you really believe every single illegal is a worker? How about those that do not work? What do you want to do with them?

Did America stop accepting immigrants? If not, why do you talk as if we have?

We have existing laws that would prevent everything you say you are in favor of or not in favor of. Exactly why we needed a new bill is beyond me. The only thing the new bill would have provided is amnesty(read how Blacks law book defines amnesty), which you support given that you did not want to deport illegals already here.

Stop attempting to sell yourself as a conservative. You do not support the rule of law, you think cheating the system and benefiting from it is a morally positive thing to do. Those qualities are not held by Conservatives, but by the left.

You’re quite right: I absolutely supported federal immigration reform legislation last summer. It was long overdue and this whole issue is very much a product of federal neglect. I can’t see that we’re at all better off not having acted this past year. The bill was no beauty contest winner, but it was a tremendous step forward over the existing situation. There were no amnesty provisions in the bill, but it was politically useful for opponents to call it “amnesty”, as that sort of Orwellian terminology made it easier to cow the already timorous bunch that had already ignored immigration reform for years. The bill imposed new penalties for illegal entry, ones that are significantly higher than those on the books. Before illegal immigrants could be granted visa for further stays, they had to pay these penalty amounts.

So, to re-cap: I oppose illegal immigration. I oppose amnesty. I support effective entry control at the border and I support federal action to reform current immigration law. The current problems reflect inexcusable neglect and incompetence at the federal level. I consider immigrant attraction (legal, since you have to ask) to be critical to the national security of the United States and favor programs that make the U.S. (as it used to be) a desirable place for the best and brightest at all levels of economic activity to come here and become citizens. I support getting all these black market workers out of the darkness and out where they can be seen and regulated, whether it be mundane things like drivers’ licenses and tax witholding, or on crime reporting and enforcement. I’d like federal reform legislation to happen sooner, rather than later, and I’ll take less than perfect federal legislation as preferable to maintenance of the status quo. Got it?

I oppose goofy local initiatives that are full of sound and fury, signifying little, if not nothing. I oppose radical leftist fiscal irresponsibility in throwing local governments into an issue whose costs are not understood and about which they have no competence. I oppose local tinpot politicians who either know better or are too ignorant to know better dumpster diving for votes with this issue instead of talking frankly and informatively with the citizens about the complexities of the issues. I oppose loose or fabricated facts about impacts of Illegal immigration that spread, rather than dispel ignorance on this subject. I oppose the ethnic hatred that permeates so many comments one sees on this issue. (I know none of you act from such motives, but, you gotta admit, the aroma is pretty strong around comment threads on sites like these). Got it?

The fact is that our local PD cannot arrest simply because some one is in the country illegally. Crossing the border amounts to an ICE civil deportation order if caught, something that local police in Virginia (according to the Virginia Atty. General) cannot enforce.

Fix your watch.

I sure hope you are not dodging my post. Is the heat a bit too much for you?

I wonder what kind of technical or scientific job someone who doesn’t even know what “homo sapien” means would get?