ALLOCATION OF RESOURCES

We all have busy lives where we have to make choices about how we spend our time and resources. We would like to have a perfectly clean home and well manicured garden, be able to cook gourmet meals, be up on all the hot movies and books, see our children or grandchildren tons of times.  But we can?t do it all.  The same goes for the government. They have limited resources and if you don?t want to pay more taxes than you already do, that will always be true. 

What this means is that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and ICE must allocate their resources in the best way possible by determining priorities.  They go after the criminals first and deport them.  Would you rather have officers busting criminals or deporting your cleaning ladies and gardeners?  It would take a ton of money to root out and arrest 12 million illegally present noncitizens who are not criminals for the purpose of giving them a hearing and then deporting them all.  INS prioritizes by putting their officers outside jails and prisons and moving criminals directly from having served their sentences under State criminal laws, into federal detention centers and then deporting them (usually after they have a hearing).  More than that, the agencies can?t afford.  The customer service part of INS, which is absolutely necessary for processing legal immigration, uses up some of their budget.

All of you have personal knowledge of just how many vehicles are driving well over the speed limit on freeways and streets in your area and do not get stopped and ticketed by the police.  That percentage that don?t get stopped are about the same percentage of illegal aliens who will ever get deported at the rate we are going.  Can you imagine the size of the detention centers needed that would hold millions while they are waiting to be removed? Unless we as a society are willing to throw just a ton of money at the fact that over 12 million illegal aliens are living here in the US, they will continue to live here.  This is why some politicians refer to the current situation as ?de facto amnesty.?   Which means that despite them being here in violation of immigration laws, they will continue to be here permanently, without a penalty.  They are given jobs by employers who may or may not know their status, real estate brokers are happy to sell them homes even when they do know, the Supreme Court mandates that they be allowed to attend public schools, and receive emergency medical aid.  So unless you are willing to round them all up, opponents should quit bitching about "amnesty" because that is what they already have. 

We need our government resources to do more important things:

-                      Replace crumbling infrastructure such as bridges, dams, freeways, that haven't been updated since they were built

-                      Public transportation

-                      Fix social security so it doesn?t run out of money

-                      Keep Medicare solvent

-                      Security measures at the ports

-                      Healthcare

Enforcement efforts are necessary, but removing 12 million is not realistic because as such, it is low on the list of necessary government programs vying for limited resources.  We already borrow how many $billions from China?

Accordingly, the only logical conclusion is that these folks should be allowed to live inside our legal system by changing the law.  Contrary to assertions from Lou Dobbs and other racist commentators 40 percent of those here illegally are not from Mexico, but are from all the other countries, including Canada, and are "visa overstays" that entered the US legally but failed to depart.