Gaborn said:
The easiest way to limit illegal immigration is to cut off the incentive for businesses to hire them. Fine any business that hires an undocumented worker 500 dollars per undocumented worker, heavily enforce it and run the fines through city courts so the local police have an incentive to do the checks. It won't stop illegal immigration but it'll sure as heck put a dent in it.
At the same time we should obviously make it easier to come here legally. Remove the cap on legal immigration and just require a simple criminal background check to come here to live.
Other than the last part (on which I'm punting because I don't feel confident that I have enough information to say whether an
extremely open immigration policy is better than a
very open immigration policy) I agree completely. Illegal immigration is a business-level problem and should be "solved" on the business end; if you eliminate the incentive for businesses to employ people illegally, and give potential workers good reasons to immigrate legally, the "problem" basically goes away.
Gaborn said:
It's amusing, it's the same logic the crazy far right used to make Obama a "Secret Muslim" in their mind
You're really starting to overuse this meme.
Fundamentally, the idea that a politician is saying one thing and doing another should not be off-limits or considered to be solely the province of people projecting their own desires or fears. People suggested early on that President Bush was a secret fundamentalist neocon corporatist stooge rather than the friendly moderate he presented himself as, and
they were right.
I agree that it's not reasonable to assume that Obama is always doing the "right thing" even when he's doing the wrong thing, but given that (a) it's well-established that Obama likes to play long games in which he chooses his stance in order to manipulate his adversaries and (b) there are many issues in which Democratic politicians
consistently state positions to the right of what they'll actually implement when given the political clearance to do so, it's not unreasonable to assume in some cases that the President is indeed implementing a strategy on a particular issue rather than doing precisely and exactly what he's thus far stated he's doing.
On issues like the photos (where Obama's stated position was reversed in his latest action) there's even evidence to point to that
may not lead to the correct conclusion, but is certainly more legitimate than the entirely scurrilous "seekrit Muslim" thing.
speculawyer said:
meh . . . Ed Schultz serves a good purpose.
To let sensible leftists prove that they're not demagogues who accept anyone who parrots our beliefs by pointing out that Ed Schultz is an obnoxious hack who should be fired from all his jobs?
