immigrants and the immigration issues

As early as 1895 at the Atlanta International Exposition, the great African-American educator, Booker T. Washington delivered his famous "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are" speech, which he pleaded with the racist titans of industry to hire African Americans rather than import cheap foreign labor. His pleas were ignored.
Then, in 1969, Cesar Chavez, who understood the law of labor supply and demand, took up Washington's long ignored challenge to big business, and led a march to the Mexican border to protest illegal immigration, which he knew reduced the wages of hard working legal Hispanic immigrants, particularly the wages of farm workers, to poverty levels. Those pleas, too, were ignored.
Typical of the economic catastrophe thus unleashed in the 1970's was the plight of African Americans working as janitors in buildings in Los Angeles who earned high wages and substantial benefits until greedy businessmen began to hire independent contractors who in turn hired illegal immigrants. Within a year, wages were cut by two-thirds, and benefits eliminated.
Then in 1986 an amiable but naïve President Ronald Reagan ushered in the great Amnesty Bill, offering amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants in return for assurances that border security would be tightened, and employers of illegal immigrants vigorously prosecuted. Democrats protested that, while such an amnesty might cater to the greed of big business' thirst for profits, it would inevitably lure even more cheap labor to the U.S. at the expense of African Americans and legal immigrants desperate to feed their families.
In the 1980s, at a time when African American teenage unemployment approached 80 percent, big business even petitioned the INS for visas for more cheap foreign labor on grounds that there was an "unskilled labor shortage." Amnesty apologists claimed that Americans wouldn't do the "dirty work" that illegal immigrants would perform, deliberately ignoring the fact that Americans gratefully collect garbage or risk their lives in the coal mines if decent wages are paid - wages which are reduced to poverty levels by the influx of cheap foreign labor.
Again, the cries of protest and reason were ignored, and the results are being played out at the U.S. border today. Not satisfied with luring cheap foreign labor to the U.S., the pro-illegal immigration lobby persists in touting amnesty even as its promises of future amnesty lure little children to risk their lives in the desert. In the words of the tort lawyer, the U.S. has now become the world's "attractive nuisance".
In the teeth of a survey conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center that showed that only 7 percent of Hispanics thought there were "too few" Hispanic immigrants, much of the media continues to promulgate the myth that politicians need to lure even more illegal immigrants with promises or amnesty - presumably on the premise that, unlike Cesar Chavez, African Americans and poverty-stricken Hispanics are ignorant of the effect of cheap foreign labor on wages. They are not, and politicians such as President George W. Bush won precious few votes by claiming to believe it.
When a National Academy of Sciences study showed that illegal immigrants without a high school degree cost Americans $100,000.00 more in social services and education than they contributed in labor, the study was ignored by the amnesty lobby.
The Reagan/Bush amnesty agenda has failed and caused untold misery amidst economic catastrophe for minorities and the poor. It turned the most basic human notions of fairness and decency on its head - rewarding those who commit illegal entry, felony forgery of government issued documents such as social security cards, and failure to pay taxes, while punishing those who patiently wait years for legal entry, endure extensive background checks, health examinations, and high fees. The health aspect of illegal immigration has by itself alarmed public health officials who are seeing the dramatic rise of diseases such as drug-resistant tuberculosis among immigrants who enter without health inspections.
Those who advocate streamlined procedures for legal immigration rather than spending billions to accommodate illegal entrants are marginalized and denigrated, while those who resist e-verify and border security, and deliberately confuse legal immigration issues with illegal immigration issues, are rewarded with media accolades for their "humanity".
Meanwhile, countries whose governments are faced with an expanding population that their economies are unable to support find it is the course of least resistance to encourage its excess population to migrate north rather than take on internal reforms or to provide women with basic rights and access to contraception. (If human-exporting countries were at least asked to reimburse the U.S. for the social costs of such a policy, they might be less enthusiastic about exporting the people they can't support in their own country).
In short, the amnesty lobby that continues to lure little children to risk their lives in the desert with false promises and hope, has lost the moral high ground, and are unlikely to regain it if they persist in following the failed Reagan/Bush agenda.