That's because your silly pledge is meaningless to me.

I could care less if my bedspread is flipped. I travel a heck of alot for business and I think daily maid service is a complete waste of money. All I do is shower and sleep in the room for 1 or 2 nights. Like I need to have the whole bathroom and room cleaned and my bedspread flipped after 1 night? Most places nowadays won't even refresh your towels unless or change your bedsheets unless you ask so there's even a lesser need for the maids. I eat in plenty of restaurants that don't have illegal immigrants working in the kitchen and I always rent a care when I travel. And like I said before, vegetables are for sissies

EastChestnut - I absolutely agree with everything you said. I've said before - I'm not against immigrants. All I want is for us to first, secure our borders and second, have a reasonable system in place for immigrants who want to become American citizens.

I'll accept anyone who plays by the rules and not thumb their nose at us because they decide they don't like our rules (i.e. current illegal immigrants). And if you come here, you come on our terms not yours. It pisses me off to no end these illegal immigrants who think they have the right to tell us how to make the rules, how long they should be able to stay, which services we should give them, etc...

And integration is also key - if you (i.e., an immigrant) want to come here, then assimilate into our culture, not the other way around. Go ahead and celebrate Cinqo de Mayo (I do, I'm always looking for a reason to party) and I'll celebrate St. Patrick's Day. But for crying out loud, learn the friggin language of the country that you're asking to take you in as a citizen.

They want to learn English. There are plenty of immigrant kids in ESL classes in the South. I grew up going to a HS with ESL kids and they came out speaking perfect English, better than what I hear in Brooklyn. Ok, so your bisabuela don't speak-e de Ingles, so what? She's old and lives with 6 other relatives in the house taking care of her. If she's a resident alien, she can't vote and she's not working--so who cares.

I'm not going to waste my time with the English-only debate. I grew up with that debate since I was a zygote and I've seen what happened to people that were mistreated and given corporal punishment at home for speaking Spanish in public and having to reject all that they are and where they came from.

It's hard to reject your culture when parts of your family are accessible less than 3 hours south by car, but Hispanic families that move here do integrate.

Dude, go get some cheap tickets on Southwest and go visit San Antonio for a quick vacation. It's not a hell hole, and you'll have a great time. And it's cleaner than any of the whitest of the whitiest suburbs we have up here. (oh yeah... I forgot... they're about to pass up Philadelphia in city size fairly soon... as will Phoenix).

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Buh-bye.

Gasp... here is a city that has a giant Spanish-speaking population, has zero wage tax, zero income tax, zero business privledge tax, zero gross receipts tax. If you've ready any of my posts, you'll know what this picture is of (and this town is maybe 60 years younger than ours is... it's also mega-old).

The only reason why I'm not there anymore is that it aint' exactly no IT mecca... but none-the-less... retirees from OH, MI, PA, NY, and NJ are moving here by the boatload. Apparently your mom and dad don't have a prob living in a place that is "practically Mexico"

Sometimes my parents mouth off the xenophobia with the illegal alien biz. How quickly my dad forgets that he grew up on a parcel of land that shared the Mexican border, and used to go to MX to party as a kid.

They shut up when I reminded them who reroofed their 2,000sqft rancher in less than 8 hours, and they've lived through their childhood like I did in an integrated bilingual community.... and the Hispanics that live near them voted for the same bastards they themselves voted for (the crazy liberal LULAC is in Corpus, SAtown ignores them).

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Buh-bye.

The fact is, they are here ILLEGALLY. They should all be deported. Build a wall and end it. We could use the military to do patrols but they are currently over in Iraq being killed by road side bombs. Question for anyone who thinks they should stay and get all the benefits. How about if someone enters your house illegally and demanded that they are allowed to stay. What would you do? Cower like a punk or kick them the hell out? I think you know what should be done. The other fact is, they had zero affect on our economy with there pathetic displays in our streets. Now, if the government doesn't do what a vast majority of Americans want, and that is to stop ILLEGALS from coming into our country. Then what is next? Anyone know what Fox does to ILLEGALS who enter mexico? He deports them. End of story. And this whole debate with the Dems. and Repubs. just proves that they are all the same. They are out for there own interests and not ours. If we, the real Americans took to the streets we would cripple the economy.

That poll is skewed in that it didn't address the respondents' views on legal immigration. I favor sealing the border and shipping all illegal immigrants out of the country, too. But ONLY after giving all who are here already a chance to get legal status and streamlining the legal immigration process. Requiring in both cases that the applicants submit to criminal and pschological background checks, and that they can show they have the means to support themselves.

You think Iraq is expensive? A foreign-born diaspora would be orders of magnitude more expensive than that.

Building a wall to keep the "Monguls out" is just laughable. I won't even go into that debate. I don't want my home state to look like East Berlin the further south I get to my father's old homestead.

I'd rather like to see your zeal redirected at corporations who are dumping loads of American taxpaying citizens out of work in favor of cheaper overseas labor--thus indirectly shifting their labor costs onto state welfare systems and making such burdens even more difficult for those in the States still working.

Yes, illegal aliens do not deserve nor have the right for most assistance programs. That's where bleeding-heart liberals are misguided. And yes, they do rely on the hospital serve-all mandates to get their healthcare. That cost is not as significant as the money we dole out in premiums to insure the folks getting super-high-tech treatments when they are at the end-of-life stage.

His illegal immigration problem is vastly different than our illegal immigration problem. Those seeking to stay in Mexico may not be solely quality-of-life motivated. Economically motivated, yes (as in drugs or avoiding prosecution). Mexico is a transit point for illegals coming from other Latin American countries and elsewhere headed for the United States.

It's real Americans who are employing these people to begin with. If you step into a Wal-Mart and spend one dollar you are supporting this system. Or eat at a restaurant. Or have someone park your car at a Kinney. [long list follows]

American consumers demand cheaper goods and disregard the ends to get to those means. "Hey there's a sale at Penny's!!!" We rush to the store to buy clothes manufactured in some country that most Americans can't find on a map by people they don't know in working conditions they don't care about.

American employers are concerned, day and night, about the cost of labor. In a slow-growing, stagnant and declining economy they will take action to push down labor costs to improve profits. Labor is typically anywhere between 35 to 50% of the entire total of Expenses on an Income Statement, if not more (and in some industries, it's almost 100%). That is BIG. If you can cut that portion of the pie down quickly you can make a mediocre profit into a big nice profit.

Those two reasons alone is what drives globalization. Nothing else.

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Buh-bye.