I'm fairly sure that Winters is intentionally blurring that line. It's not that we lack the ability to legalize Shakira, but that Shakira is no different from the still-undocumented Jorge. The point of his ads is conflate "deserving" immigrants with undocumented ones, and highlight the lack of serious difference. It's a PR strategy, and it's a sound one.

I believe the Governor of California immigrated on one of those visas.

Pendantry might refer to a bizarre fixation with pendants that is very pervasive among immigrants.

On a more serious note: I think what the Democrats should do is to highlight the inhumanity of some of the draconian measures that the House Republicans embrace and advocate.

Conservatives are right to say that it is neither appropriate nor intelligent to reward the breaking of laws by granting immediate amnesty, but the punishments they advocate far exceed what the crime demands. To suggest that someone who has violated immigration law deserves to have his or her family broken up, or that people who might help "illegal immigrants" (I personally do prefer the term undocumented workers) should be forbidden to do so by law is to suggest that disproportionately harsh measures be taken to inflict pain in the lives of ordinary people. What Democrats need to do is to have people like Albert Pujols--if he is indeed someone who happens to feel as I do--say publicly that they resent the anti-Hispanic sentiment generated by those on the far right. I am a legal permanent resident in this country, and I came here legally as a PhD student. But I do resent the contemptible callousness with which so many voices on the right speak of illegal immigrants. One thing is to talk policy, and to advocate a get-tough-on-illegal-immigration-henceforth approach. A totally different thing is to demonize these people (with whom legal permanent resident Hispanic-Americans have contact and towards whom there is a good deal of solidarity), casting them as despicable criminals.

On a more personal note--and I imagine many well-qualified Hispanics who have come to this country the way I did would agree--I feel incredibly fortunate to have been born to a well-educated high-middle class family in my home country, to have had the opportunities I had in a land where close to 45% of the population doesn't even know how to read and write, and to have come to the US legally to pursue highly abstract studies. How on Earth could I not feel some sympathy for these other people who have not had the kind of fortune I've enjoyed, and who come here to try to help their families out? So long as many continue to paint them as criminals deserving of stigmatization and mass deportation, I will continue to wonder if contemporary righteous and loud indignation towards them is--in some--but the expression of latent racial prejudices.

exactly, and it could be about how much immigrants add, not really who they are.

You're right that the problems are different. But you're wrong to say that the two situations have nothing to do with one another. They do, because the corporations that want these immigrants have chosen this particular time to incorporate riders into the immigration bill to raise the ceiling. They sense, perhaps, that this is a great opportunity for them to get Democrats, unwilling to appear inconsistent in their support for immigrant rights, to back raising the ceiling.

Actually, using baseball players to illustrate the joys of immigration would probably backfire on the pro-illegal immigrant folks.  MLB, like many other industries, lobbies government for ever increasing allotments of visas so that they recruit cheap labor to replace expensive American kids. 

You see, they can sign ten prospects in Latin America for the price of one american kid, give the ten guys a visa and ship them north for the minor leagues.  Of course, like most players signed as prospects, many don't make the big leagues, bounce around for a few years, and then get absorbed into the ever growing hispanic populations around our country.  As a poster notes above, these visas don't offer a route to citizenship, but then again, 60% of our illegal immigration population is from expired visas.  (If I were sarcastic, I would note that these visas do indeed provide a route to citizenship.  Just wait around and you'll catch the next amnesty!)

 One other note, vidal_olmos writes eloquently about how lucky he was to receive an education and come to America.  It sounds like America is lucky to have him, and I mean that sincerely.  But, I think this is an obvious and indisputable instance of where America is benefiting at the expense of a developing country.  How can a country like that improve if America is cherry picking the best students, leaders, entreprenuers, and artists?  

glaivester presents a good example of "magical thinking"; we have 11-12 millions of illegal aliens and he wishes to rely on Minutemen? I see a minute chance of them succeeding.

A serious program would start from allocating money to build up a huge government stockpile of fruits and vegetables. Next we could shut down all farming operations in states like California, Texas and Florida, and reopen those that can prove that they operate with legal labor -- I presume it would be a slim minority. The rest would be fined, as the law already requires.

This action could proceed broadly along the lines of "de-kulakification". Actually, we could even "have a cake and eat it" -- as every illegal alien can be jailed for 6 months, we could organize labor camps and hire chain gangs to the needy farmers.

On April 14, 2006 - 11:52am jhupp said:

It seems to me that this is really outside of the issue anyway. The argument seems wholly based around questions of what to do with illegal immigrants, who are overwhelmingly poor and not extraordinarily skilled. Highly skilled wokers don't really factor in.

One of the problems of the guest worker plan is that it puts them in a class similar to what you describe above. O-1, H-1B, and (it appears) EB-1 status convey no path to citizenship. Because H-1B workers, as Steve Clemons and Michael Lind pointed out just a couple days ago, rely on employer sponsorship and have no inroads to citizenship, they are at the employer's whim.

One of the problems with the immigration debate is that a lot of people are joining in it right now without knowing what the real deal is. O-1 and EB-1 immigrants are exactly that...immigrants. They are Lawful Permanent Residents, what the non-cognizanti would call greencard holders. They can apply for citizenship after they have been LPRs for five years, provided that they have at least three years of actual residence here and have physically been present in the US for at least a year before applying for naturalization.

H1Bs are employment based nonimmigrants and, while they don't have a direct path to citizenship, they have a major leg up on the road to LPR status and, if they can find an employer who needs their special skills and can't find a US worker to fill the job, can, through a more complicated process than O-1 and EB-1 immigrants go through called Labor Certification, obtain LPR status, and voila!! they are on the path to citizenship.

Where jhupp is on solid ground is that the problem we are, or should be, dealing with is the problem of unskilled or low skilled illegals. And that is quite a different kettle of fish than our normal channels of immigration. I am not saying that our legal immigration system doesn't need some major improvement, but, on the whole, it is pretty good, and can be made functional without any legislative overhaul. But legal immigration is not the same as the issue of illegal immigration, and the debate should make that clear.

Indeed, as you'll read here there's even a provision in the H-1B visa rules to provide for the temporary employment of foreign fashion models. For whatever reason, nobody talks about the deleterious impact that has on the earning power of our native-born models.

But these are jobs that Americans just wont do any more at the wages that are offered.