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22 Comments

1. ESK:

   How did he pay taxes? Did he also borrow someone elses identity?

2. Marcus Johnson:

   What part of “illegal” alien don’t you understand? When politicians break the law this web site goes berserk, but when a person does it that somehow makes it okay? What of the Racine County Deputy Sheriff who was killed by another illegal alien just last week? Illegal aliens are a blight on our society. Chuy is just more trash that needs to be thrown out of this country. If you support breaking the law, then why not open up your house so thieves can take thing to make their lives better?

3. Ice:

   Both my wife and I are very thankful that our parents came to this country, legally. Chuy probably wishes that he did, but he didn’t.

   Our laws and rules are to keep order but if we keep making exceptions we will see more disorder in society. Isn’t the election of rule breaking, rights violating Judge Ziegler a good example of how far society has gone?

   If there is no way for Chuy to be made legal, he must go back and do it the right way.

4. Steve Kroll:

   Marcus makes a great point. No one is saying that Chuy isn’t a hard worker. In fact, I don’t know any lazy immigrants. The fact of the matter is, however, that Chuy is here Illegally. There are many who pay thousands and wait in line to come to our great country. God Bless the one’s that do legally. We need immigration. I have a hard time feeling bad for this hard working family man, but well, too bad. He can’t be here illegally.

   Click My Name to See My Blog Post on Illegal Immigration and the approach that should be taken.

   –
   Steve Kroll
   Dafool.com

5. deputyinsider:

   How can i give a crap about this guy when the government cares more about the health care and education of ILLEGAL immigrants than it does it’s LEGAL residents? GIVE ME the SAME RIGHTS, the SAME FREE HEALTH CARE AND EDUCATION. WHat about MY mortgage, MY healthcare, MY kids education, oh and that costs ME A TON OF BUCKS whiles others go free, WHY make ME learn spanish when Illegal immigrants SHOULD learn ENGLISH!? Till then get off my doorstep. I thought this site had more balls than this… grow a back bone…

6. deputyinsider:

   the ‘author’ of this article just emailed me to remind me that this character PAYS taxes… and PAID for his own mortgage.. as a means to justify his existence here in the US.. FUNNY he wasn’t BORN here which makes him ILLEGAL. So therefore EVERYTHING he does here is ILLEGAL. I agree with Mr. Johnson- OPEN your house to this guy or ANY of the ILLEGAL’s living off our money. Hell, even MPD can’t keep ILLEGALS off the force. Build a HUGE wall, protect it and DEFEND it. If you want to live here do it LEGALLY… oh, wait, that’s to hard!

7. Colleen:

   I am amazed that people can respond to this story of a family in turmoil and feel that they brought it on themselves. I find myself hoping that you are more compassionate in other parts of your lives than you are in the responses you have posted here.

   “Chuy” is a human being. No human being can be declared “illegal.” Whereever he is, he should have the opportunity to pursue what little happiness he can.

   Marcus Johnson: How can you lump all illegal aliens into one basket? If an elderly person drives through a median and into oncoming traffic, killing someone, does that mean that all elderly north shore residents are “a blight on our society”? Your reasoning is specious. It makes you happy while lacking any real merit.

   deuptyinsider: You appear to have a lot of pent-up anger. I hope you are able to seek help for this. As for your argument, when, exactly, were you forced to learn Spanish? And why? Certainly not to do business in the States. And, also, your argument about illegal aliens getting free health care, mortgages, and education is more a statement of your frustration with other forces than your anger at illigal aliens or “Chuy” in particular. You do not actually believe that, by virtue of being illigal aliens in this country, “chuy” and others are given more rights than you and more free stuff than you?

   I appreciate this website because it gives me insight into others’ ideas and rationales. What I’ve read in this thread has thrown open a door to hatred I never would’ve thought existed in this city or this community.

   Thank you for opening my eyes.

8. Christopher Thomas:

   While Chuy sounds like a swell guy, how can we overlook the truth that his life here is based on a series of lies and illegal actions? How many times has he lied about who he is? The trouble with stories like his is that it injects a lot of emotion into a situation which calls for reason. Only fools base policy decisions on the first emotional tale they hear-or the hundredth.

   What about all those jobless people in the inner-city we keep hearing about? Are we to assume that there was nobody that would have wanted a job with pay and benefits enough to pay the mortgage? One could fairly argue that Chuy took the hope of some underprivlaged family of Americans when he took that job.

   And as for the “Bad Guy”, the ATF agent, he is to be commended for doing his job and not looking the other way when the law was being broken. He did the right thing.

   In the end what has happened is something Chuy knew would happen one day–his lies are exposed. Maybe the union will return his dues since I imagine the Bylaws allow only legal workers to be admitted into the union. That would at least provide Chuy a nest egg with which to return to his home. Maybe when he gets there he can work to change his own broken society.

9. deputyinsider:

   yes colleen I DO believe ILLEGALS are feeding of the very system that I drop my money into every paycheck and HOPE TO SOME GOD that an OUNCE of it will be there for me when I NEED IT. YES I HAD to learn spanish, refer to my user name, I’m at RISK. Maybe , you and those like you, should open your doors to Illegals and invite them into your home. Let them live off YOU and not me. Open your eyes and remove the rose colored glasses, they are ILLEGAL. ILLEGAL! What are the wonderful reasons they chose to enter this country ILLEGALLY? Was the paperwork in ENGLISH? I couldn’t be happier if ICE removed every single one of them and sent them packing to where ever they came from. Am I angry? HELL YA! Rights for LEGAL citizens Give me a freakin break! You get a voice when you are legally here. If you feel oppressed because your an illegal alien GO HOME! If you’re mad because you can’t get a drivers license because your illegal, GO HOME! Can’t get a job, loans, etc all because you were born somewhere else and came here ILLEGALLY?? GO HOME!.

10. Bill Stocks:

    For once I aree with deputy insider. Maybe not in that more hateful way, but the jist of it. If I do something illegal, rest assured I will pay for it. They should be dealt with more seriously.

11. deputyinsider:

    Theodore Roosevelt 1907 “In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

12. Lori Lowling-Kwiat:

    I totally agree with nearly EVERYTHING the deputyinsider wrote.

    Colleen - If you have ever been on the side of the fence where you need the aid (funded by your tax dollars) you’d understand you are ineligible. That status does not change without interrogation and until you are on the street and have NOTHING (and no chance of recovery).

    Serve the LEGAL citizens starving in your backyard FIRST!!!!

13. Bill Stocks:

    AMEN!

14. Fraley:

    Um, he wasn’t undocumented. I believe he had documents. But they were fraudulent.

15. Christopher Thomas:

    For once I agree with Lori.

16. Lori Lowling-Kwiat:

    CT -

    Even the laws of nature dictate that you are bound get it right once and a while …

17. Lori Lowling-Kwiat:

    Hey CT -

    I put a “wink” behind that comment (in angle brackets)–so you’d know I was teasing–but the browser deciphered it as an html tag and threw it out.

    A bit of sarcasm ’sall.

18. Alice:

    I can not believe all the hate that has been dropped in all these comments! We can not be indifferent to the adversities of other human beings. Immigration is an economic and political problem, but it also has a human face. Nobody is exempt of going through a tragedy or through very inhuman leaving conditions. You can wake up one day and see that everything you had and everyone you cared for is gone. You could became a refugee, hoping for someone to help you. Who knows, the possibilities are endless. Illegal immigration it’s a huge social problem that has its positive and negative outcomes. But above all, it involves real people looking to works as hard as they can for a better future for them and their families. That there are criminals….in which society, you don’t find criminals! Instead of feeding your intolerance with words and acts of hate, you should be part of the solution and make real and achievable solutions. If you have a brain to shout your anger, you must have a brain to help solve the problem in a fair and human way. Just imagine if that immigrant were you.

19. Lori Lowling-Kwiat:

    Alice –

    We are not discussing the human face of immigrantation. We are discussing illegal immigration! We help solve the problem by explaining that those illegal immigrants are criminals & thieves .. they are stealing your tax dollars and security.

    We have to follow the rules, why not them?? Do you have children??? Do you realize that 98% percent of the people are fighting over 2% of the wealth? Why would you want to spread it EVEN thinner?

    I don’t feel sorry for them AT ALL. Pretty basic, do you think they might have thought that they’d get busted with their hands in the cookie jar? KICK THEM OUT and let in 2 people who applied LEGALLY and let them shake the sneaky asshole’s hand and wave buh-bye… (HA!) Geez, I had guilt about sneaking into the MOVIES at Westown …

    When America starts taking care of their: soldiers; elderly; mentally ill; hungry children and legal applicants I’ll care about the immigrants that come in ILLEGALLY (to open restaurants and smuggle in their ENTIRE family–filling all positions–where they live high on the hog and switch the company from person to person to avoid paying taxes) …

    POLITICAL ASYLUM, SURE. Anything else, NO WAY! THE bus is FULL! We have plenty of teens willing to pick the vegetables and do the dishes, there’s just no work because illegals are filling all the jobs …

    And personally, I’d go somewhere legally. PERIOD.

20. Alice:

    To enlighten a little bit:

    On the Fence: Are Illegal Immigrants Good or Bad for the U.S. Economy?
    Published: June 13, 2007 in Knowledge@Wharton

    A clash of faiths in the U.S. Senate last week led to the collapse of the country’s first major immigration reform bill in two decades. On one side were the pragmatists, backed by the Bush administration, who say the country needs to accept that its estimated 12 million illegal residents are likely here to stay, and it should offer them a path to citizenship. On the other side were the idealists, who say lawbreakers shouldn’t be rewarded, and that doing so would only encourage more illegal immigration. Although Democratic majority leader Harry Reid withdrew the bill, he left open the possibility that the Senate could reconsider it later in the year. President Bush, having just returned from the G8 Summit in Europe, made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill this week to encourage Republicans to back the proposal.

    Buried in the ongoing debate is the potential economic impact of a measure that could change the composition of America’s workforce in significant ways. By cracking down on illegal immigration, the legislation could constrict the future supply of workers in industries like agriculture, construction and restaurants and hotels, especially in the fast-growing Sun Belt. Yet by moving to an evaluation formula for visas that weighs skills more heavily than family ties, it could provide more workers for such booming sectors as high tech and biotechnology. Even so, some high-tech companies have decried the bill for not providing enough annual visas for skilled workers: It would have capped the number at 200,000 a year.

    “What troubles me about the legislation is that it is being marketed as if it does not involve any tradeoffs, that the move to employment-based criterion will be good for the economy and good for the country,” says Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli. “In fact, it will create winners and losers. Whether one likes the legislation or not depends on how one feels about those winners and losers.”

    Cappelli, who heads Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, counts low-skilled U.S. workers, especially African-American men, among the potential losers. Research by George Borjas, an economist at Harvard University, has found that, nationwide, the influx of low-skilled immigrant workers from 1960 through 2000 depressed wages and boosted unemployment among comparably skilled African-American males.

    Cappelli also argues that supporters of the bill have misrepresented the state of the country’s workforce in their efforts to secure its passage. Some proponents, for example, have said that enabling the 12 million existing illegal workers to remain in the United States will safeguard the size of the country’s labor force. This is particularly important as Baby Boomers retire, and active workers have to shoulder such hefty costs as their Medicare expenses.

    “Both the administration and other supporters of the legislation have asserted that there is a shortage of workers in the economy because the workforce is shrinking,” Cappelli says. “This is patently false. The fact that wages have not been rising in real terms — indeed, in most of the past generation they have been falling for all but the very top jobs — makes it impossible to believe that we even have tight labor markets.” Framing the debate in terms of labor shortages just distracts attention from the issue of wages, he argues. “If we expand the supply of workers through immigration, employers don’t have to pay as much to find workers nor provide the other terms and conditions that make jobs attractive.”

    And the people hurt by such a move tend to be those least likely to have a voice in the political process — the poor and uneducated. Cappelli speculates that the debate might play out differently if proponents were discussing a massive increase in the number of immigrant “doctors, technicians and managers.”

    Jobs in the Suburbs

    Bernard Anderson, practice professor of management at Wharton, isn’t worried about the economic implications of immigration reform, mainly because he sees it having little long-term effect.

    For one thing, many of the illegal workers already in the United States are likely to remain, regardless of whether they are offered a path to citizenship. “It’s not humanly possible to round up and deport 12 million people,” says Anderson, who served as an assistant secretary in the U.S. Labor Department during the Clinton administration. “You hear conservatives rail against amnesty, but not once did I hear them come up with a solution to the 12 million people who are already here.”

    He also suspects that neither these workers nor future immigrant workers to the United States will crowd native workers out of jobs or put pressure on their wages. Two-thirds of illegal workers are concentrated in four industries: farming; personal service; food preparation, hospitality and tourism; and construction. In those industries, he says, immigrants are either filling job vacancies that would otherwise exist, or they are part of what labor economists called “noncompeting groups.”

    Consider the construction sector in Philadelphia. “You don’t have illegal immigrants constructing high rises in Center City,” Anderson says. Instead, those jobs tend to be filled by native-born steelworkers and tradesmen who belong to the city’s unions. “But if you go out into the suburbs, into the residential housing developments, much of that type of construction is done by illegal immigrants. Whose jobs did they take? They didn’t take anybody’s jobs because other workers simply weren’t available to do that work.”

    High-tech Migration

    One provision of the proposed reform does worry Anderson: the move from a family-based to a skills-based formula for evaluating visa applicants. That sort of setup has caused problems elsewhere, he points out. In South Africa, for example, men were recruited from other African countries to work as miners and were admitted to the country without their families. “There are all kinds of bad social conditions created by that policy,” he notes, including “a tendency to develop a social and economic underclass.”

    Justin Wolfers, a Wharton professor of business and public policy, also sees potential problems with the push for reform, though for different reasons. He wonders if the focus on border enforcement and tighter restrictions on visas could hurt American competitiveness by impeding the relatively free flow of workers, whatever their skill levels, into the country.

    “Economists generally think that free trade in goods is good for both sides,” he points out. “Allowing people to cross borders relatively freely may also be helpful. If we restricted that, it could cause economic harm.”

    Economic strength often stems from happy accidents of history, like Silicon Valley springing up in California’s San Francisco Bay area. Initially, the Valley came into being because Stanford University encouraged technology commercialization and California was a pleasant place to live. Today, the region draws skilled workers from around the world because it is viewed as an international high-tech center — in other words, because techies want to be near other techies, even if it means sitting in the region’s now notorious traffic jams.

    But this gathering of skilled workers can prove ephemeral. If legislation were to restrict the flow of computer programmers, tech companies could easily migrate to Bangalore or Tel Aviv, which could end up being tomorrow’s Silicon Valleys. “In this country, the universities at the top end are arguably a big source of competitive advantage, and that [advantage] could go abroad very quickly,” Wolfers notes. “The German system was the best in the world before World War II, and that changed very quickly.”

    Good Lab Results

    In general, immigrant workers tend to seek out booming cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Charlotte, N.C., not places like Detroit and Cleveland that are struggling with unemployment. But the effects of these workers on cities are hard to measure: The changes come gradually, and because some of some of the workers are illegal, data can be unreliable.

    But David Card, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, realized that one Sun Belt city, Miami, offered an ideal natural laboratory for studying the effects of immigration. Miami has long been a haven for immigrant workers, both legal and not. Many immigrants to the city, especially low-skilled workers, tend to come from Latin America. Spanish is spoken widely.

    What caught Card’s attention wasn’t Miami’s cultural diversity. Rather, it was a one-time shock to the city’s labor market — the so-called “Mariel boatlift” in 1980, when about 125,000 Cuban refugees arrived over about three months. Approximatelyt half of the “Marielitos” remained in the city, increasing the workforce by 7%. Many of the immigrants came with limited English and few job skills, so their impact on the low-skill portion of the market was even greater.

    Yet in a paper published in 1990, Card found virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rate of comparable Miami workers over the period stretching through 1985. Unemployment did rise in Miami over the five-year period, but it rose similarly in four metropolitan areas without an influx of new workers — Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston and Tampa-St. Petersburg. In other words, the Marielitos didn’t cause the rise in joblessness.

    How is this possible? Card hypothesized that, thanks to two prior decades of Latin immigration, Miami had ample infrastructure for easing the employment transition for non-English speakers, and the city’s robust economy provided plenty of opportunities for work.

    Card’s subsequent research has confirmed his Mariel findings. For that reason, he’s skeptical of politicians’ stated desire to reform the country’s immigration laws to protect American workers. “A lot of people opposed to immigration are [conservative] and haven’t been in favor of programs to retool low-skilled natives,” he points out. “Their fundamental concern is about American culture becoming dominated by less-skilled Latinos.”

    Politicians in border states like Texas and Arizona point to the social costs of coping with illegal immigrants — like uninsured emergency-room visits and additional police enforcement — yet these same politicians have plenty of constituents who benefit from the ready supply of cheap, low-skilled laborers, Card argues. “But no one can get up and say we want to increase the number of low-skilled people in the U.S. so [that we can] have low-priced taxi drivers, construction workers and people to work in restaurants and daycare.”

    Wharton’s Anderson goes even further, arguing that, on balance, illegal immigrants contribute far more to the U.S. economy than they take. “Their employers pay Social Security taxes for all of them,” though they don’t receive benefits, he points out. “When they buy goods and services, they are paying sales taxes. Some of them have purchased homes and pay property taxes. And they are not people who are coming here to be on welfare. They are coming here to work.”

    Source: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1754#

21. Lori Lowling-Kwiat:

    Alice –

    Your first argument was regarding empathy and emotional aspects and not really about economics at al ..l.

    PROBLEMS WITH WHARTON STUDY/HYPOTHESIS:

    1.) Does not take into consideration all the invisible illegals working for cash.

    2.) Based on the nature of what is being studied, the data can’t be measured with any accuracy at all, that factor is loosely noted in the report.

    What about income tax: all immigrants should pay income tax surcharges; legal immigrants should not get seven years to start paying taxes unless young, emancipated, Americans be granted the same rights until age 25; there should be a filing deadline set for illegals, reporting their address, workplace and income.

    Illegals that file should NEVER be granted citizenship and should be evaluated for deportation bi-annually on a case-by-case basis. Illegals: that don’t file; in our prisons; mental hospitals; living on welfare; should be deported post-haste.

22. Tee:

    After seeing all these less than compassionate comments, I had to let you know this story was very touching. People like Chuy don’t want to break the law but sometimes do so to survive. They would come here legally if the government allowed them to. Some apply for visas and are denied over and over again before making the difficult choice to cross the border illegally.

    All of these xenophobic, hateful, unthinking people should try putting themselves in other people’s shoes… You know, with the economy going the way it is, the peso is looking strong against the dollar. Maybe some day you’ll find yourselves climbing over that wall to get into Mexico. You better hope people are kinder to you than you have been to the illegal immigrants here in the US.

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