Obama today traveled with Mexican First Lady Margarita Zavala to the New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, where a second-grade girl asked her about how immigration reform would impact her family.
“My mom… she says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn’t have papers,” the girl said, sitting cross-legged on the gymnasium floor with her classmates, while Obama sat in a folding chair next to them. A large blue banner hanging behind them, adorned with the American and Mexican flags, read, “Welcome, Mrs. Obama! Bienvenidos, Sra. Zavala!”
“Yeah, well that’s something that we have to work on, right?” Obama said. “To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right? That’s exactly right.”
The little girl continued, “But my mom doesn’t have any papers.”
Obama replied, “Well, we have to work on that. We have to fix that, and everybody’s got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens.”
President Obama today said he agreed with Mexican President Felipe Calderon that the Arizona law, which makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally, could be applied in a discriminatory fashion. He called it a “misdirected expression of frustration over our broken immigration system.”
Uncomfortable!
#29
Many people in the US want to increase the limits for legal immigration and streamline the process. That is completely orthogonal to the issue of dealing with people that subvert the existing immigration law.
What does “remove the quota system” actually mean? Does that mean remove any limit on immigration?
#11, I was against Bush’s plan, and still am, here is why. The American people have been fooled by this “comprehensive” immigration reform talk before. All it ever leads to is amnesty again 30 years later. Lets fix the cause of the problem, then we can talk about what to do about the illegals who are already here.
When you have a hole in the bottom of your boat and its sinking, you don’t stand their talking about a comprehensive plan to take care of the water that’s already in the boat. You find a way to plug the leak. After that, you can begin to take care of the water that is already their.
#32
well said
Yes it means no limits on who and how many immigrate, just like it was before 1850 when the first quota went into existence.
Benjamin Franklin believed that Germans should not be allowed in as they would not integrate. The same was espoused in the 1840s against the Irish and later against Eastern And Southern Europeans.
Isolationism is bad for the growth and prosperity of nations. Civilisation is built on the coming together of different peoples, their cultures and their diversity. Without immigrants being able to easily come to the US we would be more like Canada. A large land mass and a scant 35 million people in it.
Not to mention all the bridges, dams, monuments and the capacity to defend itself and others. No immigration is a good thing and it is inherently nature in humans as we are all descendant of immigrants.
Cursor_
Bob said, on May 21st, 2010 at 6:50 am
>>When you have a hole in the bottom of your boat and its sinking, you don’t stand their talking about a comprehensive plan…
>>After that, you can begin to take care of the water that is already their.
Bob, please learn the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re.” Geez, that post makes my brain hurt.
Then there are those losers who think it’s spelled “looser.” That’s enough to make even Bobbo want to scream.
#34
What you are suggesting is that we should simply dismantle all border apparatus and the INS entirely. If we are not going to set a limit nor impose control, then there is no point in checking people at the gate. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?
1. How are you going to track those that are aliens vs citizens if anyone can enter with no checkpoint (or can bypass any checkpoint)?
2. We have approximately 30x the number of aliens in jail today than in 1980. With no control over immigration, what do you suppose will happen with that population?
3. How do we plan for population growth when we cannot keep track of how many people are coming into the country? Today we have over 10x the population that we did in 1850. In fact, by some estimates the illegal immigration population is on par with the entire 1850 US population. Population solutions that work for 23 million people do not necessarily work when you have 300 million people.
4. What about government services such as schools and welfare and medical care? Who pays for immigrants to get those services (because we both know that no politician will deny them to anyone)?
5. Lastly, there is of course the whole terrorist angle. With no control over who comes into the country, we have even less information than we do now about foreigners that come into this country. That makes it even harder for law enforcement.
If we still had 20 million people, a frontier and people still rode horses, maybe your idea makes sense. Those days are gone. With no borders or border control, the country would be flooded with foreigners from just about everywhere on the planet and we don’t have enough jobs or money to pay for services for all of them.