How do we approach illegal immigration?

According to the LA Times article, citing a recent study from the Pew Hispanic Forum, "...for the last 10 years, arrival of illegal migrants has far outstripped legal immigration."

Although the United States is a country built by immigrants over the past 200+ years, it is unrealistic to continuing unrestricted immigration. As also acknowledged in the article and by other interested parties, the existing "undocumented migrants" are already integrate part of the our community. It is a dedicated situation that needs attention as well as courage to deal with, which is currently lacking from neither political parties.

There are major negative repercussions of this issue were not properly handled. One of them would be the break down of the welfare and health care system currently already in turmoil. Ignoring the illegal immigrant as long as they have work will encourage more illegal boarder crossings from the south, which is very difficult to stop. As found in the Pew Hispanic study, the "mixed families" will also destroy the applicability of the "guest worker" program that will ultimately send them back.

The root of this problem is the imbalance between the US and our southern neighbor. The ultimate solution would be increase financial aid and trade with Mexico and gradually minimize the economic differences. This is easier said than done, yes, but may be the only solution.

Another more "practical" but not so "humane" solution would be to make illegal immigrant finding jobs in the US more difficult. One step would be more Strictly enforced employment laws that punish the EMPLOYERS who hire workers without a valid social security card or work permit. This has been successfully done in large businesses but now we need to push it to small businesses. For those who uses a fake social security card, the communications between servers in the IRS and the social security administration need to be enhanced for enforcement.

An extreme step would be stop automatically recognizing new born with US citizenship when both parents are in the US illegally. We should note that this could be difficult and costly to implement.

At the same time, make legal immigration faster and easy. Rewards those who follows the law and make employers hiring low paid jobs from outside the country more easily. A good example would be the guest workers program in the middle east.

To implement these steps we need to facing the illegal immigrants already in the US. One way to address these is to set up a deadline to register all currently undocumented works and give them priority in the legal guest workers program and later permanent residency.

Congress, federal and local government need to work together on this issue. The local government mush facing the facts that illegal immigration is not only a federal problem.

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