The tax issue is a double edged sword though, because their employers are also not paying the taxes they should and in many cases its on purpose.
Absolutely. And I've stated that people who employ illegal immigrants should be punished as well. No argument there.
In addition many of the migrants dont have access to the benefits of those taxes so the point is mostly moot.
Au contrair. They do have access. Why else would they bother to leave Mexico or wherever else they come from if it wasn't better here than there?
Sorry, I tend to side with the person being screwed out of their benefits rather than the person benefiting from them.
No need to be sorry. We agree. Where we differ is in who we think is being screwed. You can't be screwed out of benefits you never earned or had any right to, which defines illegal immigrants. They are not being screwed out of anything because they were never entitled to anything. You and I, however, citizens of the country the illegal immigrants are leeching off of, ARE being screwed out of benefits. (Read the article I linke earlier for one example of what I'm talking about)
Plus some illegal migrants get the velvet glove treatment from our government, while others dont. If a cuban touches american soil now, they cannot be sent back to cuba. The reason they can stay has nothing to do with communism (If you get em at sea almost none of them are allowed in) and everything to do with political organization.
I certainly wasn't arguing that the legal immigration system was perfect as it stands, exactly the opposite actually.
Did you know that the bulk of all illegal migrants arent actually mexican or central american ? They are college students and previously legal greencard holders from all of the world who stay past their visa date?
Yup. I refrain from listing all categories of illegal immigrants for the sake of brevity.
I dont disagree that we should do something about migration, but there seems to be an awful lot of blaming the migrants and very little blame being meted out to the people who willingly hire them to make a quick buck.
Actually, legislation to punish those who "hire them to make a quick buck" is a primary goal of the anti-illegal-immigration movement and something I fully support. The press spins it to equate with discrimination and mean-spiritedness, but it's always been there.
I also feel that we should be doing more diplomatically and commercially to improve working conditions and wages in countries that the rampant illegal migration
comes from. Doing anything else is treating the symptom and not the problem.
Yup. The root problem is the conditions extant in the countries the illegal immigrants are coming from. No doubt about it. And we're already doing a lot to fix those conditions diplomatically and commercially. Some say too much and point to the instability caused by paying workers who happen to work for American companies wages that amount to 100 times the average salary elsewhere in those countries but that's another discussion. I accept that you think we ought to be doing more. My question is, at what point does it stop being our responsibility to improve peoples lives in other countries and start being their own responsibility?