Raising the Price of Legal, Lowering the Cost of Illegal
Back when it was illegal to be in the country illegally, none of this would have made sense. But now that we’ve grown accustomed to complete buffoonery and counter-productive bone-headedness coming from Washington, this isn’t really much of a surprise:
The Bush administration will announce increases in immigration application fees today that will double the cost of citizenship and almost triple the cost of becoming a permanent resident.
The new fees, reflecting an average 66% increase, led immigrant advocates and some members of Congress to criticize them as a “wall” that could bar poorer immigrants from citizenship. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials countered that the increases were essential to help the overloaded agency reduce its backlog and speed service.
My advice to any foreigner who wants to be in the United States would be to get here illegally, for you’ll soon receive amnesty (I’m sorry, I mean “federally assisted undocumented migrant worker relocation program with tax relief“). Then take the money you save on green card fees and contribute to our economy. I guess at this point that’s the most we can ask.
Raising fees to become a legal American? Yes, stripping immigrants of all their money before they even step foot in the U.S. is a great idea. Get ‘em on welfare right off the bat so you don’t miss an opportunity to control every aspect of their lives (including, most importantly, their votes) from the outset.
If the government needs more money, why not charge any of the 12 million people here illegally an “amnesty fee” of, say, $10. Raking in $120 million would probably allow the immigration folks the means to speed up the processing of the ever decreasing number of people who are trying to come to the U.S. legally, apparently not realizing they don’t need to waste that money. But no, in America, we pass the cost on to the law-abiding.
If a department store refused to lock their doors every night, and, to cover the theft losses, quadrupled all their prices, they’d be out of business in short order. What the U.S. is doing is no different, and we’re in danger of going out of business as a result unless somebody wakes up.
Note: My entire blog is at DougPowers.com
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May 30th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Justice Ginsburg’s feminist background evident at Court…
The court ruled 5 to 4 that Lilly Ledbetter, the lone female supervisor at a tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., did not file her lawsuit against Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in the timely manner specified by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The decision moved Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to read a dissent from the bench, a usually rare practice that she has now employed twice in the past six weeks to criticize the majority for opinions that she said undermine women’s rights.
“In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” she said.
Last month, Ginsburg rebuked the same five-justice majority for upholding the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act and for language in the opinion that she said reflected “ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited.”
Yesterday she said that “Title VII was meant to govern real-world employment practices, and that world is what the court today ignores.” She called for Congress to correct what she sees as the court’s mistake.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052900740_pf.html