Here, let me burn the exceptionally modest amount of karma I have on HN.<p>I am married to an immigrant. Immigrants have been huge contributors to the country. We should keep 'em coming. I'm pretty sure virtually all "anti-immigrants" agree.<p>But what many call "anti-immigrant" is propaganda, due to deliberate and willful devaluation of the term "immigrant". It has come to supplant the more accurate terms "illegal alien" or the more modern "illegal immigrant".<p>We spent years navigating the hideous INS bureaucracy to obtain her citizenship. Amnesty bills are a slap in the face to those of us who played by the rules. The fact that existing immigration laws go largely unenforced have resulted in depressed wages and large swathes of the Texas and Arizona borders becoming killing grounds and defacto "no go zones". Farmers' lands on the border are becoming unusable and dangerous. Illegal immigrants place enormous burdens on hospitals in border states.<p>Like many on the right, I am strongly for legal immigration on pretty generous terms. I am strongly anti-illegal immigrant, and not the least bit "anti-immigrant". I do want to see existing laws enforced.
Possibly half of the world's population would love to live and work in America. Most of the people that now live here have ancestors that followed the rules as my ancestors did. It is profoundly unfair to allow others to "skip the queue" over those who have followed our American laws, have been honest, and "waited their turn."<p>This article even mentions those that have broken American laws getting subsidized college education costs such as in-state tuition and other monies. In other words, you have people who are not American citizens getting in-state tuition rates that are not available to American citizens who grew up in other states.<p>H1B visas displace American workers who are looking for a job as well as lower wage rates. One NYTimes pick commenter suggests that he wanted an H1B visa to because he couldn't find anyone to work a Chicago job where someone knew both SAS and SQL. People want to use Open Source software such as R and Python instead of using SAS. In the NYC area there are many Meetups for stats, big data, machine learning, and so on and almost all of them are in R and Python and none to my knowledge in SAS. See <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328677" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7328677</a><p>The problem for many firms is that they want software people to work on buggies (SAS) when they want to work on cars (open source). Many of these firms also want software people to come to undesirable locations instead of the ones where people want to live. For example, Google owns one of the largest office building in NYC, taking an entire city block. So, if firms use modern open source software and they locate in areas where people want to live then they will get the employees they need without having to resort to H1B visas.
Maybe I'm confused, but how does a so called "illegal immigrant" child go through 18 years of education only to get thrown under the bus later. Either give them complete amnesty or check their passport when they enter grade school.