What follows is an entirely personal take and does not necessarily represent the views of my employers, associates or anyone else.
Rick asks, ” I wonder how comment such sentiments are among legal immigrants and their children.”
Extraordinarily common, in my experience as an immigrant.
Take for example, my neighbors, Ecuadorian by birth but the children of US citizens there. They have been here on legal Visas trying to get the BCIS to recognize their status. They have now have been told to return to Ecuador while things are finalized and have therefore had to sell their house, at a loss of many thousands of dollars. How much easier it would be to go illegal and then claim amnesty. But they are not that type. Instead, they’re the type we should love to have in the country. So BCIS is hounding them out even as preparations are made to accomodate those with little respect for the rule of law.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine emails:
My brief two cents on this, as an immigrant and indeed an immigrant attorney, is that the bill presently in the senate is the worst piece of proposed legislation I have ever seen and was clearly drafted by people who have no idea what the current law is or the reality of immigration procedure.I do a lot of work for Gulf Coast shipyards. They need to employ qualified and experienced welders, pipefitters and so on. There are not many Americans who are qualified and live locally. In any event, many of them can get paid more doing post Katrina / Rita construction work. So, my clients want to employ skilled Filippinos, Mexicans etc. on H-2B visas. Even if the shipyards were prepared to employ illegals (which they are not), these people would most probably not have the skills required. Furthermore, when you’re building ships and oil rigs, you have a lot more government involvment, so you do everything by the book. Getting the H-2B visas is absurd. There is a cap of 140,000 per annum. These are mostly bought up by labor supply companys or massive corporations. I am told anecdotally that Disney gets 10,000 just for Disneyland in California. The new bill was going to raise this to 400,000 but then lowered to 200,000. America needs more of these people, who are hard working and do mostly intend to return home, once they have made a wad of cash. They then take time off and go off to other construction jobs in, say Saudi Arabia, Russia or Korea, where they also are well paid. However, under the new bill if they do want to stay, they are penalized for being legal nonimmigrants in contrast would be z visa holders, who can seemingly stay indefinitely. It’s madness. Higher up to food chain is just as much of a problem. I have a Flippino client who has invested $100,000 in a business here in which he owns 25% of the shares and has an E2 (non immigrant investor visa). He earns a base salary of $90,000. His US tax returns, pay slip and share certificate have all been provided. His wife should qualify for a spousal visa but has now been denied twice because the imbeciles at the embassy in Manila have concluded she is “likely to become a burden on the state”. Anyhoo, my basic beef is that the present law sucks and is appallingly incompetenly administered but the new bill will only make the existing problems much, much worse. I may even have to start referring to GWB as ChimpyMcHitlerBush.
The current legal immigration system is broken. The proposed reforms merely crush the remains.