If illegal aliens wore helmets and carried weapons, it would constitute the largest foreign army that had ever invaded another sovereign nation in the history of the world.

100 years ago, they came across the border, did their labor and went home after the season was over.

Now they don't.

What changed?

The Welfare State was created, and they didn't need to go home. They brought home with them!

Eric The(Bienvenidos)Hun[>]:)]

Background: I'm a "mixed-breed" whose largest percentage is Mexican, and has one side of my family being predominantly Mexican.  I live in the PRK.

Now, you're absolutely right in that a sizable percentage of illegal Latin immigrants do indeed want the American Dream and are willing to work for it.  But a great many are not, and take every advantage of our social welfare system, coached on how to do so before they even arrive by friends and relatives already here.

There's also another serious problem, and that is lack of assimilation.  Because of the overwhelming numbers of immigrants, many of them actively work to set up the same exact lifestyle and practices that they lived before.  They insulate themselves from American society, and continue the practices that kept them low on the ladder in the first place.  Many of these people have no desire to be *Americans*; they want to be [insert country]'s who live in America and use it to their advantage.  Over time, this starts to make dramatic and unwanted changes to our country's way of life.

As we know well from history, the root cause of this problem is too much immigration too fast for far too long.  If we had kept illegal immigration to a trickle, we could have increased the number of LEGAL immigrants and still kept the numbers low enough to allow new arrivals time to integrate and assimilate American values.

Allowing virtually unchecked and massive illegal immigration is not only enormously expensive and ruinous of our society, but it's also a slap in the face to all of the people who LEGALLY immigrated here because they WANT to be Americans.

Were I to be making the decision, I would put a 5-year moritorium on (permanent/green card) immigration from Latin America, deport all illegal immigrants, and increase the size of Immigration to allow the processing of a lot more Work Visas to accomidate needed workers.  In other words, I'd enforce the laws on the books.  After 5 years, I'd reexamine the state of the problem and look at opening up green cards to Latin America again at a slower pace, building up to current levels (and possibly beyond) over a decade.  I would also work to make the legal immigration process, which is currently a mess, a lot easier to navigate.

As a Libertarian, I would ultimately support free immigration, but only AFTER the other planks of the platform were implemented.  Just as a reminder, these include the repeal of all laws restricting self-defense or gun ownership, the elimination of all government welfare (individual and corporate), and generally promoting self-responsibility.  Since I don't see any of this actually occuring in the near future, I would use our military to protect our borders until such time as it did.

-Troy