The Daily Background

NYT on illegal immigration. The title of the article is “Rules Collide With Reality“.

“People ask: Why don’t they come legally? Why don’t they wait in line?” said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, a research organization in Washington. “For most Mexicans, there is no line to get in.”

The United States offers 5,000 permanent visas worldwide each year for unskilled laborers. Last year, two of them went to Mexicans. In the same year, about 500,000 unskilled Mexican workers crossed the border illegally, researchers estimate, and most of them found jobs.

“We have a neighboring country with a population of 105 million that is our third-largest trading partner, and it has the same visa allocation as Botswana or Nepal,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociology professor at Princeton.

Startling facts indeed. The system is broken. This distribution of visas is absolutely absurd and perhaps even borderline racist.

Filed under: Immigration, Z-TDB Blog