I have been following with interest some of the discussions about undocumented immigrants. There are more than two sides to this issue. I would like to point out that it's difficult for us to find good information on this because of the breadth of the problem. We honestly have no idea how many undocumented immigrants are in the country, but some hospital administrators are starting to document the costs of health care. Schools in Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico and others have been dealing with the costs of education for undocumented immigrants. They have to provide bilingual teachers, etc. When children aren't doing well in school, we can predict all kinds of problems.
However, on the other hand, some of the undocumented people come here thinking they can get a visa to work, or they are being manipulated by unscrupulous people. Whenever there is a policy that isn't enforced well, we will have problems with people taking advantage of the system. An excellent example of this is the slave trade system and agricultural workers. There are lots of stories about people who were lied to when coming to this country and then are abused, beaten, raped, etc. They can't report their injuries if they are undocumented. So, what to do?
Representative Bill Wright and others are debating these problems on Capitol Hill as we speak. Check out this story if you are interested.
http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=833&sid=14404836
There are hosts of other stories on this topic. It would be interesting to see if we can collect a bunch of them to attempt to understand the many sides of the undocumented immigrants.
Best!
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