Maggie's Farm

Immigration

Polipundit, a recent legal immigrant, wonders why Congress is considering guest-worker programs, when no-one is asking for them:

Even leaving aside issues of homeland security and respect for the rule of law, mass immigration on the scale the president is proposing is terrible policy. When white-collar workers get hurt because of a few hundred thousand temporary visas issued to high-tech workers, it gets a lot of attention. But what about low-income American workers who will face severely depressed wages because of the millions of low-skilled immigrants who will now be able to compete for their jobs? You can�t �outsource� a job at McDonalds to India or China. But now you�ll be able to hire an immigrant to do it at a low wage.

And isn�t there such a thing as an American culture that deserves to be protected by keeping immigration at reasonable-enough levels that immigrants will want to, be forced to, assimilate into the melting pot? Large �guest worker� programs have been miserable failures everywhere they�ve been tried, creating resentful racial underclasses and culturally-alienated urban ghettoes.

Read the whole post, here.