craigr wrote:
dragoncar wrote:It may not make you a "bad guy," but it makes you kinda a jerk to want to punish, say, me (a lawful US citizen) because I happen to live in a state that issues driver licenses to "illegals" (widely considered a derogatory term). Automotive licenses do not confer lawful immigration status so, when presented at an airport as identification, they won't keep anyone from being deported. I'm not sure what "consequences" you are referring to.
So who's the bigger jerk, me for bringing these issues up or the people letting in illegals while making taxpayers foot the bill and giving them government IDs which undermines confidence in state issued drivers licenses?
A valid ID is like printing money. Think about what it would mean for instance to allow all Americans to basically get another ID with an unconnected alias on it whenever they wanted. Don't you think that could cause problems? Now what is the difference between that and allowing an illegal with no birth records to just state who they are and get that same ID that you and I had to present all manner of proof to get? It's the keys to the kingdom in many ways. One step below having a passport.
Lastly, why should I care what an illegal thinks of what I call them anyway? I don't care what they think any more than they care about coming in uninvited.
I wonder if in Mexico they are turning themselves inside out to ensure Central Americans coming through their country have housing, food, living assistance, healthcare, and driver's licenses? I bet not.
It seems to me that in the same way that there is a state residency requirement to get a state-issued drivers license, there should also be a requirement that you be a legal resident of the U.S. to get a state-issued drivers license. That's not unreasonable, is it?
To clarify my earlier comments about Mexican immigrants, I was only speaking about legal immigrants. It seems to me that if a person is willing to enter the country illegally, what will make them want to start following the laws once they get here, especially since they know that one wrong move might get them deported? In other words, an illegal immigrant basically lives an outlaw life the entire time he is in the U.S., which IMHO doesn't make for a strong citizenship foundation.
It's true that the illegal immigrant who sneaks into the country and has a child here who is therefore a citizen often sees that child grow into a thoroughly American person, but the question is whether immigration policy should be based on anecdotal Gonzalez and Martinez-flavored Horatio Alger stories.
It just seems to me that the U.S. already provides countless ways to enter the country legally, whether you are a person with certain skills and a supporting U.S. employer, a political refugee seeking asylum, an interpreter in a combat zone who assists U.S. troops, a wealthy person from almost anywhere in the world, or maybe just a lucky winner of the 100,000 or so visas given every year in the international visa lottery deigned to promote diversity in the immigrant population (sounds stupid I know, but all of those State Department employees have to have something to do I guess).
The ultimate question is whether a person wishing to enter the United States has enough respect for the laws of the U.S. that he will put in the work necessary to enter and remain in the country legally. If he believes his own economic situation precludes him from obeying the law, how is that different from someone who steals because he thinks that his own needs supersede the rights of the property owner he steal from?
As far as border walls, fences and barriers go, I am not optimistic about that type of U.S.-Mexico border enforcement.
As far as Israel and its wall goes, the U.S.-Mexico border is five times longer than the border that the Israel wall protects, and trying to follow a natural waterway for the Texas portion of the border is a nightmare because you can't erect the barrier in flood plain areas, which means you end up building the wall in some cases far from the actual border, which leaves areas of U.S. soil on the Mexico side of the border. This problem springs up in the news from time to time in Texas when some Texas rancher complains that he has been walled off on the Mexico side of the border, even though he's still in the U.S.
The fact that the U.S.-Mexico border has the most LEGAL crossings of any border in the world also makes erecting and managing an effective border barrier that much harder because simply managing 300 million legal border crossings a year consumes an enormous amount of Border Patrol resources. Adding a project equal in scale to almost half the Great Wall of China seems like an enormous undertaking. The Border Patrol currently employs about 21,000 agents to secure an overall U.S. border of about 19,000 miles. It seems to me that it would require another 80,000 or so agents to provide the kind of border security that Trump seems to want. It could certainly be done, but hiring an additional 80,000 government employees along with a gaggle of outside contractors to work on one of the largest engineering projects in the history of the world sounds like the way we talk about what went into building the pyramids in Egypt. In other words, it would be one of the biggest government programs ever conceived, and it's coming from people who call themselves Republicans. That's kind of weird to me.
Simply decriminalizing marijuana would reduce a lot of the problems associated with the U.S.-Mexico border because an enormous stream of illegal revenue would suddenly dry up and all of that drug money that is currently going into the pockets of Mexican drug lords would instead start going into the pockets of U.S. entrepreneurs and U.S. taxing authorities that currently take a portion of every sale of products like cigarettes and alcohol. It would be a huge loss for the prison-industrial complex, but it would be a huge gain for farmers, wholesale/retail pot distributors, and excise tax collectors. All of the unemployed prison guards, probation officers and drug court judges could just go to work for the pot farmers, upscale smoke shops and state tax collection agencies. It would be a redistribution of wealth with probably a net overall gain for society because we would see an immediate reduction in crime and associated violence, as well as a huge new domestic industry that would create a lot more new wealth than a bunch of government employees conspiring with prison construction and maintenance companies to round up citizens to make sure that the prisons remain at maximum capacity at all times.
To give you a sense of what a stunning success the prison-industrial complex has been, take a look at this:
Here is what it looks like on a per capita basis:
The U.S. has about 4.5% of the world's population, but has 22% of the world's prisoners. The U.S. prison population of around 2,300,000 people basically living like animals (or worse) to me is sort of sad and embarrassing. The U.S. prison population is about 500,000 larger than the prison population in China, even though China has over three times the overall population of the U.S.
The U.S. prison and jail population today is about five times higher than it was in 1980. Are the streets five times safer today than they were in 1980? Of course not, though the streets are a little safer than they used to be:
It seems like we are well past the point of diminishing marginal returns on locking up more people for non-violent crimes, but the prison contractors still have bills to pay so they should be expected to do everything in their power to see that more new prisons get built. They've been VERY successful thus far, and like any prudent industry, they have plowed some of their profits back into making sure they get the best political representation money can buy:
A prison-industrial complex investment has been a good one in recent years. Note how these two companies provided investors with a four bagger and a five bagger in the 2002-2012 period, even though this period covered a secular bear market for stocks overall.
For anyone who is familiar with that psycho Steve Ballmer's "Developers" speech at an internal Microsoft event, I'm imagining some Judge Dredd-looking CEO of a prison construction and maintenance firm giving a similar speech to his people, except the mantra would be "Incarcerate, Incarcerate, Incarcerate, Incarcerate!!!"
If you haven't seen the original speech and the various remixes of it and you like to smile, please check it out.
This is my favorite remix here:
(I suggests using headphones and turning it up for maximum effect.)
https://youtu.be/KMU0tzLwhbE?list=RDe8M6S8EKbnU
I have no idea how they talked Bill Gates into doing this "Night at the Roxbury" bit with Ballmer:
https://youtu.be/IY2j_GPIqRA?list=RDe8M6S8EKbnU
Ballmer scoffs at new Apple device called the "iPhone":
https://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U?list=RDe8M6S8EKbnU
The Ballmer Zune ad that never ran:
https://youtu.be/ZIk4qTKmKzE?list=RDe8M6S8EKbnU
Wall Street was about as impressed with Ballmer as people were with Microsoft products under his leadership:
