After dark

The results are Sooooooo tight.

D'oh! They can only clean our houses, raise our children, cut our lawns, build our houses, work in substandard turkey processing plants, and other fun jobs like that.

Thanks!

Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Gandhi
Pointing at Naked Emperors

Yet the Marines run their awesome recruitment ads on Spanish Language teevee ... in spanish. Are they recruiting legal foreign students? Legal farm workers? Legal construction workers? Are they targeting the kids they call "anchor babies" (who still don't speak american) that all those illegal immigrant parents ran over here and dropped fifteen, twenty years ago? Recruit the kid, but send illegal mom & dad home? Awesome idea. End snark.

Mr. Terrell, it seems the lines are being blurred more and more every day between this tirade your party is engaged in and all immigration from Mexico and central America. Where are the lines? Do you know any more? Can you tell a legal latino immigrant from an illegal latino immigrant, smart as you are? Of course you can't. You can't even communicate with them to ask any questions if they don't speak English, but the language they speak is no indication of their status as green card or no green card. If you cannot tell one from the other, how is the guy who's frustration and anger YOU are intentionally fueling supposed to figure it out?

The answer is easy. He won't figure it out. He'll treat all latinos the same. You can guess what's going to start happening in the streets.

Here's a few tips: Solve the problem of 1) the minimum wage being well below what any American family needs to live when both adults in the household are working, 2) fix NAFTA to stop the flooding of Mexican and south American commodity markets with cheap American corn and grains, and 3) effectively address companies in the US who recruit and hire illegal immigrants because they know those men and women will never complain about working conditions and never report regulatory violations to the State. (This includes imposing crippling fines on them and/or throwing a few CEOs in jail for a few months.)

If you do those three things, Mr. Terrell, I can assure you, you will be well on your way to solving this "problem" without hiring special state immigration officers or building new holding prisons or providing transportation south to hundreds of thousands of people who will begin looking for another way back to the US before they even get back home.

"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." - Harry Truman

I didn't check the details. Here's the facts from the Arizona Republic:

Hundreds of thousands of undocumented-immigrant youths could become eligible to join the military to offset shortages of qualified recruits under a bill pending in Congress.

Intense public opposition forced the Senate in June to abandon an immigration bill that included a path to citizenship for undocumented youths.

The proposal still has a strong chance of passing if backers in Congress are successful in attaching it to the annual defense-authorization bill this fall.

The Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act would allow undocumented high-school graduates to gain citizenship if they either attend college for two years or serve two years in the military.

And it wasn't always that legal residents could serve. That is new with this President and his grand misadventures in the near and middle east. From the Arizona Republic again,

With the demands in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States began offering legal immigrants a chance to expedite citizenship applications for themselves and relatives if they enlisted.

Roughly 70,000 immigrants serve in the military, and about 40,000 are non-citizens. Immigrants make up about 5 percent of the total 1.4 million men and women on active duty.

A 2005 study by the Center for Naval Analysis reported that non-citizens are less likely to drop out of the military shortly after enlisting than are citizens and that non-citizens are significantly less likely to drop out after three years.

The bill was proposed six years ago as a way for undocumented minors brought to this country by their parents to get an education so they could achieve their full potential as tax-paying members of society.

With the military having trouble meeting recruiting goals and the public wary about any bill resembling amnesty for undocumented immigrants, supporters of the DREAM Act are playing up the bill's military provisions over its educational benefits. Unlike legal immigrants with permanent residency green cards, undocumented immigrants are barred from enlisting in the military.

"The DREAM Act would address a very serious recruitment crisis that faces our military," Sen. Dick Durbin, the bill's author, said on the Senate floor in July while trying to muster support for the DREAM Act to be attached to the annual defense-authorization bill.

Durbin wasn't successful, but Sandra Abrevaya, a Durbin spokeswoman, said that the Illinois Democrat will try again, possibly as early as this month.

The DREAM Act has broad bipartisan support in Congress.

I like it.

"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." - Harry Truman