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Dick Lamm on Immigration. A surprising opinion from the left.
Read the whole article. But here are excerpts pertinent to homeland security:
We are also a nation of laws, with our own unemployed and underemployed, and our nation needs to come to some enforceable consensus on what our policy should be on people entering the country illegally.

Consider:
1. We are a nation built on law. It almost sounds old-fashioned in contemporary America to ask that people obey the law. Illegal immigrants "jump the line."

2. As every house needs a door, every country needs a border. By turning a blind eye toward illegal immigration, we are encouraging countless numbers of these people to attempt to sneak into America. I spent a night with the Border Patrol in California, and was amazed to find people from India, Bangladesh, Iran, Egypt, Africa and China among the people detained.

3. Illegal immigration hurts America’s poor. Illegal immigrants compete for the jobs our own poor need to start to move up the economic ladder. "Mexican immigration is overwhelmingly unskilled, and it is hard to find an economic argument for unskilled immigration, because it tends to reduce wages for (U.S.) workers."

4. We are told that illegal immigration is "cheap labor," but it is not "cheap labor," it is subsidized labor. The National Academy of Sciences has found that there is a significant fiscal drain on U.S. taxpayers for each adult immigrant without a high school education. Illegal immigration is something that benefits a few employers, but the rest of us subsidize that labor through the school system, the health-care system, the courts and in other ways that this form of labor imposes. With school spending of more than $7,000 per student per year, even a small family costs far more than a low-wage family pays in taxes.

5. America is increasingly becoming, day by day, a bilingual country, yet there is not a bilingual country in the world that lives in peace with itself. No nation should blindly allow itself to become a bilingual-bicultural country. Today, when over 40 percent of today’s massive wave of immigrants is from Spanish-speaking nations, people can move to America and keep their language, their culture and their old loyalties. If the melting pot doesn’t melt, immigrants become "foreigners" living in America rather than assimilated Americans.

6. Our social fabric risks becoming undone. It is important to America’s future that we look at how Mexican immigrants are doing. Too many of our Hispanic immigrants live in ethnic ghettos. Too many are unskilled laborers, too many are uneducated, too many live in poverty, too many are exploited, too many haven’t finished ninth grade, too many drop out of school.
Former Reform Party presidential candidate and former Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm is co-director of the Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues at the University of Denver.
Posted by: ColoradoConservative 2003-10-06
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=19531