Mr. Navarrette, you make some very good points. It really should be the employers who suffers the penalties since they are the ones profiting from the bargain basement wages they are able to get away with by employing illegals no matter what the ethnic background. For way too long in this country the unofficial policy has been to use illegal immigrants and job outsourcing to depress wages for American citizens.
I do reject the “nativist” claims though. For many of us the reason we don’t want masses of illegal immigrants is because the job of acculturating them is becoming harder because of the decline in the quality of our school systems. In previous times the schools were able to do a good job of teaching the values of our unique political system. Now our schools can’t even get across the basic fundamentals of civics to our own citizens for whom nearly half think the government exists to provide them with a handout. To put it another way, if a you have indigestion the last thing you want to do is eat a huge meal.
