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Immigration Position
It is the position of the Democrats at UCF that our national immigration system is indeed broken, and that it important to reform it in a humane and sensible way. A key part of this humane reform includes establishing a path to citizenship for those illegal immigrants already living in the country, along with a guest worker program that allows for families to stay intact and a path to citizenship. You will hear lots of rhetoric from some about the depressed wages immigrant labor brings and the fact that they “take jobs from Americans”, this simply isn’t true. The unemployment rate at the moment is approximately 4.7% (as of early March 2006). This is the lowest unemployment rate economists consider sustainable without risking inflation. On a macro economic scale legal, or illegal, immigrants are NOT taking jobs from Americans. There overall effect on the economy is not negative, as some would claim, but rather either a wash or a small net benefit, according to George Borias who is a Harvard economist. If you think college professors are liberal, the same conclusion was reached by Tim Smith, a senior economist from the Rand Corp., which for all intents and purposes is a right wing think tank. This net balancing comes from the fact that between 55 and 65% of illegal immigrants have social security and income taxes withheld from their paychecks, this tax gain is offset by the cost of providing social services and educating non English speaking students.
There is a very small, on the order of a tenth of a percent, wage depression in certain industries caused by immigrants; however the Americans workers affected by this wage depression are predominately those without a high school diploma. The answer to this small wage depression or wage stagnation is NOT to ship out the immigrants; it is rather to encourage unionization among laborers and to reform our education system so that our workforce is better educated.
Our current immigration system simply does not allow for enough low skilled workers to enter the country legally to fill the demand for jobs. There is also over a decade long backlog of paperwork to come here legally. We need to expand the cap on the number of workers allowed to legally enter and fix the backlog immediately. We also need to provide those currently here, and those who come under a guest worker program, with a path to citizenship. This is because if we don’t, we will be effectively creating a legal underclass of workers who are ripe for abuse and exploitation because they don’t, and won’t ever be able to, vote. No politician will be held accountable for corporate exploitation; these people won’t have a voice. The current path to citizenship takes at least 5 years, if someone is willing to come here and work hard without breaking the law for at least 5 years they have as much right to be a citizen as you and I. As for the 10-12 million illegal immigrants already here, providing an 11 year path to citizenship, a 6 year window where they must work without having any encounters with the law and then the 5 year citizenship application process is the only sensible thing to do.
Concerning “Border Security”, the Democratic Party is NOT opposed to stricter border security and stopping the flow of “illegal” immigrants, but this must be done in conjunction with a massive expansion of the legal immigration system along with providing hard working people a path to becoming citizens. The guest worker program that we establish must also be one that keeps families intact, as a major source of illegal immigration is women and children coming, even if the provider of the family is here legally.
Here are some links to more information
Tom Tancredo: Leader of the Anti-Immigrant Populist Revolt
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/3005
Immigration Advocates Face Challenges
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/387
Politics of Class and Corporations
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/224
Immigration Debate: Politics, Ideologies of Anti-Immigration Forces
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/652
The Immigration Debate: Whose Side Are You On?
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/784
Pushing Our Borders Out
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/804
Restrictionism Resurgent in Post-9/11 Politics: Protect America Now
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/710
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