[Finnster]

NP guys.

@TX: I'll admit I'm painting in some pretty broad strokes, but part is a responce to the broad strokes painting all the Mexicans who come here as lazy illegal leeches mooching tax dollars & contributing nothing. I know this is not true, well it may be true for some, esp closer to the border towns, but there are a good number of people who come here to work their asses off and ask very little. I also don't like that the system is so out of control that any latino is likely regarded as an illegal to be suspicious of when there is a large number that are legal immigrants or US citizens themselves.

There are mooches across the system and across nationalities and races. We've all seen some of them all.

I will not endorse the sprirt of this law, guilt by suspicion until proven innocent, and I don't think its a good platform for any sort of national reform for a whole host of reasons I won't bother to go into now. I can read the law just fine, and I see what it says and what's possible. For this I'm going to defer to Old Ben and say "Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither." If that's "socialist" (whatever that completely nebulous and arbitrary political pejoritve is chosen to mean at the time) then that's fine with me.

I'm not even all that convinced about the tax issues, as illegals still pay local sales taxes and property taxes (at least their rent money goes towards prop taxes.) Thier wages are so low I doubt they'd owe any Federal taxes anyway, and may actually recieve money back if they properly filed. They won't ever collect SS, so if they don't pay payroll taxes its no loss. As mentioned, a good number of illegals work using fake, stolen or expired tax IDs anyway.

I agree there are terrible problems at the border with criminality, smuggling, etc that are long overdue for Federal action. However these are seperate issues from some of the economic migration issues and each need thier own solution. I'm not joining anti-latino/immigrant punching bag some people seem to be spoiling for. I'm going to save my populist outrage for the real bandits who crashed the economy and looted the treasury to the tune of hundreds of billions and have completely got away with it.