YES! It's a great start at fixing our broken immigration system.
16%
NO! The border security measures are way too extreme.
84%
Comments
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Images of Thom
At Mondragon - both the mountain and the cooperative city - in Spain (written about in "Threshold" book)
Thom & Louise at a "private audience" with His Holiness Pope John Paul II at his summer palace, Castle Gandolfo, Italy
From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
"Right through the worst of the Bush years and into the present, Thom Hartmann has been one of the very few voices constantly willing to tell the truth. Rank him up there with Jon Stewart, Bill Moyers, and Paul Krugman for having the sheer persistent courage of his convictions."
From Screwed:
"Thom Hartmann’s book explains in simple language and with concrete research the details of the Neo-con’s war against the American middle class. It proves what many have intuited and serves to remind us that without a healthy, employed, and vital middle class, America is no more than the richest Third World country on the planet."
From Unequal Protection, 2nd Edition:
"Beneath the success and rise of American enterprise is an untold history that is antithetical to every value Americans hold dear. This is a seminal work, a godsend really, a clear message to every citizen about the need to reform our country, laws, and companies."
We don't need another fence, we need to get those EMPLOYERS who hire illegal immigrants! They need to be punished and if their repeat offenders, jailed/imprisoned.
We need a national ID card that can't be forged to get a job, housing, aid, education or any taxpayer supported aid. If illegal immigrants can't find work, housing, education or any other taxpayer help, they will leave on their own and they will stop sneaking in illegaly.
We do not need to import more people, we are too overpopulated, we need to END ALL IMMIGRATION NOW. Automation, free trade and outsourcing has removed millions of jobs but the number of people needing a job keeps growing and adding more people to a country with high unemployment, high homelessness and poverty will only make things worse. We are at the END OF GROWTH, we can no longer grow our way into prosparity, instead we are going to decline and the decline has already happening. Things will continue to get worse in spite of the lies of the government, corporations and investment businesses because resources are declining while the excessive populaton continues to grow.
I am against the surge. I do not see that adding another 20,000 border guards is going to solve immigration problems. When I looked for a house on the border, one of the houses was owned by a grizzled border guard who said the problem wasn't with the wetbacks, it was with the druggies. I am also against The Fence and what will become of the animals who migrate across the border -- jaguars, deer, pronghorns? I have seen deer trapped when a new subdivision sprung up across their migration route. The deer wouldn't seek a way around the subdivision but simply milled about against the wall that surrounded the subdivision. After a week of watching this herd or about 15 deer, I called the Fish & Wildlife Dept to rescue their deer. I know jaguars winter in Mexico but summer and raise their young in the U.S. What will become of them?
As for the Dreamers, we should give them amnesty. Not all undocumenteds are Hispanics. We have Koreans, Vietnamese, Russians, Thais, etc., who were brought here as children but did not apply for citizenship when they turned 16 because they didn't know they had to or they wound up in this country under different circumstances. I view the way we treat these people to be deplorable....reminds me of how we treated the Chinese and Japanese who we brought to this country to work in the goldfields and then, when the mines died, we denied them citizenship and we forbade them employment. They opened Chinese laundries, restaurants, flower shops, tea houses; many became fishermen, flower growers, herbalists because we denied them employment. I can't help equate the way we are treating the Hispanics to the way we treated the Japanese-Americans in WWII. What we forget is that many of these Hispanics were escaping civil wars and oppressive regimes in their own countries -- such as Guatamala, Honduras, Panama -- and were seeking a life in a peaceful place no different from the thousands of Syrians today who seek refuge in Jordan and Turkey or the Sudanese seeking refuge in neighboring countries. Maybe the time is near when Canada will erect a border fence to keep the Americans out.
No one talks about the billions of dollars the undocumented pour into our treasury in the form of FICA taxes for which they will never collect. According to an article in the NY Times published in 2005, some $50Bn in the previous decade were poured into the treasury by the undocumented. Most of these wages were generated in businesses such as restaurants (17%), construction (10%), and farming (7%). I was raised on a farm. We could not get locals to pick our fields so we contracted with an agency who imported farm workers to pick our fields. Picking is a back-breaking job where a person toils from sun-up to sun-down under a hot sun for piecework pay. Yes, they are fast and can make a decent wage and, when multiplied by many family members, can make a decent living.
Yes! I am for giving these people who have lived amongst us for decades a path to citizenship.
The private prisons get their fodder and corporations will surely continue to get their slave labor. I'd say Obama did his job.