Oh don't get me wrong...I agree with you 100%

The government needs to start working harder in making things seem less complicated.

Yeah.
Unfortunately, the government will NOT work toward simplifying anything.

I've got a good friend who's a Catholic Priest. GREAT guy!
They have a LOT of Latino's in his parish, so he's very familiar with this problem - and he says that even educated, literate Americans can't make heads nor tails out of the immigration mess. How do we expect immigrants to understand it?

Also, one of the bench-marks of Latino culture is the mentality that "laws aren't really laws unless they're enforced." In other words, in Mexico & other places, there are thousands of laws on the books that are never enforced - so the mentality is that it's not really illegal to break those laws. So... if American immigration laws aren't enforced, it's really not illegal to break them.

It can't be that hard to track a forged SS number. There has to be a database somewhere that can be easily backround checked. Again, what is the bare minimum that needs to be forged? In my experience, I have only needed two forms of ID and certainly the SS number on the application. I can understand how the forged IDs would be difficult and time consuming to track, but the SS number...is it really that hard?

Have you EVER tried to do anything, or get anything done, at a government agency?

By the time the government employees even get around to typing a SS number into their computer, the person carrying it has been gone for hours. Probably days or weeks.

I work/live in a very multi-cultural place. Most of the Hispanic people have multiple identities and multiple IDs. They use one name one place, and another in another place. It is VERY hard to track.

Like I've said before, you'd basically need a Private Investigator to follow EVERY one of these undocumented Hispanics. And we all know that the government just isn't going to do that.

Instead of struggling to find new ways to prevent people from entering the country and instead of finding new ways to punish businesses for providing people with jobs, I'd rather look for new ways to let people come into the country legally. If someone wants to move to America, have his family in America, and work in America, I say we do everything possible to help them.

The problem is not that illegal immigrants do not want to become citizens, and it is not that the process is too difficult. The problem is that they we have an immigration cap: only a certain number of people from each country are allowed to become citizens each year. So while we allow under 100,000 immigrants from Mexico in each year, we have something like 6,000,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico trying to get in. I guess I'd have to look up those numbers again to make them accurate.

So the most simple solution would be to let them become citizens. I mean, they're already working and living here. But problem with this is that a lot of people would immigrate here, then immediately apply for welfare and medicare, begin sending their children to already-overcrowded schools, and draining the economy and state resources in an unmanagable fashion. To avoid this problem, my first thought is that we should have a way for immigrants to work and live in America without having access to those benefits until they are allowed to immigrate legally.

The result of my reasoning is a program similar to Bush's temporary worker program. Immigrants should be allowed to work in the US, even if we can't give them all the benefits of a full system. My system would pretty much allow any immigrant to go through the standard legal background checks, then move to the US and get a job or start a business as he sees fit, even though he is not a full citizen.

The program I am thinking of differs from Bush's plan in several ways. First, Bush's program sort of assigns jobs that Americans don't want to immigrants, and it doesn't let them start up a business. My program would allow immigrants to interview at jobs just like anyone else, and let the business decide who they want to hire. My program would also allow immigrants to start up businesses.

Second, Bush's program would set a time limit on an immigrant's legal status. This time limit would be renewable, but if the time limit expires, the immigrant will return to his home country. If the immigrant returns to his home country, he will be provided money for the time he worked in America. Bush's idea is that he could use that money to start up his own business in his home country, perhaps. My plan would not include a time limit, nor would it include incentive for returning to one's home country.

Bush's plan would only allow people who are working into the country. Mine would allow anyone in, though they would not receive any benefits from the state, and therefore would have a difficult time living in America if they were not working (unless a family member or friend were financing them).

Bush plans to "increase border security". My plan would do nothing of the sort.

My plan would cost very little, since we would not need to monitor expiration dates, paying people for their work here, assigning workers jobs, maintaining a list of workers and jobs, or paying for additional border security.

What do you guys think?

Actually, the current immigration/citizenship laws ARE EXTREMELY COMPLICATED.

I'd challenge ANY of you to try to fill out all the forms correctly and/or even TRY to become an American citizen!

I will take your word that the process is complicated; I did not mean to disagree with that. I meant to say that the complexity of the process is not what is stopping the illegal immigrants from obtaining citizenship: it is that our immigration cap prevents them from even starting the legalization process.

I really don't think it's the immigration "cap".

I think it boils down to the fact that it's costly, complicated, and takes a long time. I think most immigrants simply don't want to bother with it. It's easier to "sneak in", get some documentation of some sort, and get on with life.

On the other hand, that is my opinion - not something I've verified factually.

This was also my initial guess of why illegal immigrants do not become legal. However, this guess is incorrect. Illegal immigrants almost always remain illegal because our immigration cap is too low to allow them in legally.

These links provide additional information:

http://media.pfaw.org/PDF/Immigratio...ntProblems.pdf
https://freeinternetpress.com/module...rder=0&thold=0

I'm speaking specifically of Mexican immigrants. They're the only ones I have direct contact with on a regular basis.