The US House of Representatives passed a bill (
H.R. 4437) last December that, if also passed by the Senate and signed into law by George II, would make it a felony to be in the US illegally and would also prohibit anyone from giving aid to illegal immigrants. While this may seem reasonable, if perhaps mean-spirited, the devil is in the details.
( The details... )Some say that illegal aliens are stealing our jobs. For the most part this is not borne out by the facts, as illegal aliens tend to be exploited in labor-intensive jobs under conditions that are actually illegal (not to mention entirely immoral) to subject anyone to.
Legal aliens are the ones who tend to fill positions that might otherwise go to middle-class Americans, and abuse of these provisions of law is not nearly as widespread as one would think -- tech firms do, after all, have lots of people working for them with brains (by definition) and at least a modicum of moral compunction about how they use them.
I think the dearth of good jobs over the last few years stems not from immigration so much as from the unwillingness of corporations to invest in their rank-and-file worker in order to maximize benefits for the CEO. That is a set of misplaced priorities which is reinforced by the Republicans at every turn, and frankly I wonder how much longer the country can stand it. Immigration reform, whatever form it takes, is ultimately a red herring that distracts people from the evil that is done in the name of corporate excess and government beholden to it -- including propping up the civil war we started in Iraq in the name of those same goals.