Immigration Debate

The big news today is the President's speech last night on immigration and his proposal to send <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IMMIGRATION?SITE=MTBIL&SECTION=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT"> National guard</a> troops to help shore up our Southern border. I've watched all this Immigration debate going on for the past couple of months and wondered, why has this become such a hot issue all of a sudden. The problems been there for generations but all of a sudden the whole political system has ground to a halt while dealing with the Illegal Immigration issue. What's changed?<br />n<br />nI'll leave aside that question for now, I have yet to come across anybody that can answer that one, and move on to a couple of thoughts on last nights proposals. Truthfully, I wasn't even aware Bush was speaking last night so I never saw it, I am just going on the news reports.<br />n<br />nWith the military and National Guard spread so thin the way it is, where do we have the strength to deploy additional troops to the border? Is the President going to pull some troops out of Iraq to do this or further stretch our resources at home for this deployment? I think we all know that the President will just stretch the troops further than look for a solution to the problems the military is having with continual long deployments.<br />n<br />nI don't know what the answer to the problem with our Southern border is, but stretching our troops even further is not going to help the US in the long run. If we didn't have so many troops deployed in other places around the world, or a bigger military force, the problem wouldn't be so acute. I vividly remember when I was in the Navy and my Sub spent over 300 days a year at sea how devastating that was on moral and how many sailors that normally would have stayed in got out at the end of their enlistment because of the long, continual deployments. The Armed Forces are having the same problem now and deploying more to our Southern border won't help.<br />n<br />nAs for the other proposals, guest worker program and so forth, I will wait and see how things play out. We all want a strong economy in the country, but with that there is a demand for workers that brings the Illegal immigrants in to fill jobs. That's a fact of life, look at the unemployment rate across the country and you can see why the Illegal immigrants come in. There are jobs to be had here. How to have a strong economy that provides jobs and keep illegal immigrants out of the country is a problem that is going to be really tough to find a solutions for.<br />n<br />n<b>There's great discontent about immigration, even among legislators. It took a lot of lying and manipulation for the immigration enthusiasts to defeat Smith-Simpson bill, quite a reasonable reduction proposal, in 1996. Peter Brimelow</b>