Give us your Tired your poor.....

"Undocumented immigrants have even fewer protections. Recently I heard about a drywall company in Seattle that hired undocumented immigrants and made them scale tall buildings without a safety harness. One of the immigrants fell and cracked his skull. The boss was so scared he would be reported for hiring undocumented workers that he refused to allow the other employees to call 911. He threatened their jobs. Finally one of them did call. The worker who fell lived but had serious brain damage, and a lawsuit was brought against the employer." Pramila Jayapal [We Are One America]

The term "immigrant" is often considered to be rather disparaging; a person from a poorer country settling in a richer one would be called an immigrant, but people from a richer country permanently living in a poorer one might call themselves "settlers", or speak of retiring to, rather than immigrating into, a country with better weather and lower living costs.

Everyone's foreign in America
Everyone's come here from some
foreign shore...before us lies
Glory Land...
Restore us to Glory Land...
[cris williamson from album~Prairie Road] go to the link below and click on song: Grandmother's Land and hear this short clip of the above lyrics.......
http://www.criswilliamson.com/about/music/praire_fire.html

www.weareoneamerica.org
"....the U.S. media broadcast around the globe the idea that America is a luxurious and ideal place to live, a place where you can find opportunities that you can't get anywhere else. If we advertise that America is the best country in the world, then we shouldn't be surprised when people show up...."

Recent surveys by Gallup found roughly 700 million adults would like to migrate to another country permanently if they had the chance. The United States is the top desired destination country. Nearly one-quarter (24%) of these respondents, which translates to more than 165 million adults worldwide, name the United States as their desired future residence. With an additional estimated 45 million saying they would like to move to Canada, Northern America is one of the two most desired regions. The rest of the top desired destination countries (those where an estimated 25 million or more adults would like to go) are predominantly European. Forty-five million adults who would like to move to the United Kingdom or to France as their desired destination, while 35 million would like to go to Spain and 25 million would like to relocate to Germany. Thirty million to Saudi Arabia and 25 million to Australia. [wikipedia]

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..................I often debate anti-immigration pundits on radio and television — like Tucker Carlson on msnbc and John Carlson, who has a conservative radio show here in Seattle. When they say, “Just deport them all!” I ask whether they’ve ever tried to live a day without the services or food provided by an undocumented immigrant. You couldn’t do anything except sit, probably in a very dirty house or hotel room. [Laughs.] I also tell them Social Security would collapse without undocumented immigrants..........

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Part of what OneAmerica does is inform people about the immigration-and-detention system. For example, after 250 detainees got food poisoning at the Tacoma Detention Center, we invited people to come and sample a detainee meal. We wanted to encourage Americans to think about what it might be like to get food poisoning while stuck in a bureaucratic jail system. Most people are horrified to learn that these things happen, but they don’t take action, because they think it’s an isolated occurrence. We’re trying to make people act on their core beliefs about how human beings should be treated. OneAmerica has worked with many clients who have had medical conditions in a detention center and been unable to see a doctor. One of our clients was pregnant and wasn’t allowed her prenatal visits. Finally, in her eighth month of pregnancy, she was released onto the street with no money. Perhaps they were afraid she would deliver her baby in the detention center. The detention industry is enormous and growing. I think that the more the industry is privatized, the way the prison industry is becoming, the more human-rights abuses we’re going to see..........

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The reasons people immigrate are multifaceted. More people are moving around the world today because of political, social, and economic strife than ever before. Many times it is U.S. foreign policy driving this migration. For instance, after the North American Free Trade Agreement [nafta] was passed, more than a million Mexican farmers were driven out of business because they could not compete with subsidized U.S. farmers, and undocumented immigration from Mexico rose by 60 percent. If somebody has to leave his or her home to earn a living, you could describe that as “seeking opportunity,” or you could call it “forced migration.” NAFTA talks about a “borderless world” in which goods are freely traded back and forth, but if people can’t legally travel across the border and access jobs on the other side, these trade agreements benefit only corporations, many of which relocate just across the Mexican border so they can pay lower wages.

[see entire article/interview: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/395/without_a_country

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On the one hand we publicly pronounce the equality of all peoples; on the other hand, in our immigration laws, we embrace in practice these very theories we abhor and verbally condemn. Emanuel Celler

Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens. Thomas Sowell