Welcome Illegal Alien Program?

[Torsten]

What do you think about foreigners in your country? I'm asking because I got the following email from a US citizen by the name of Frank. Frank is an American entrepreneur and apparently he is quite angry because he thinks that the 'illegal aliens ravage' his country. He is what he wrote to me: 'What the hell is this? I was born in Ohio in 1961. I have a grasp on the English Language, thank you very much. Is this part of the "Welcome Illegal Alien Program?" Teach them just enough to ravage this country by taking, taking, taking, legally if Osama, sorry Obama gets elected.'

To give you a little bit of background information, you should know the following. In 2002 and we started an email based newsletter list for learners of English. The list is a so called 'opt-in' -- this means you can get the newsletter only if you subscribe to it. However, up until about 1,5 years ago the list was 'open-subscription'. This means anyone who entered their email address on our online form would start receiving email based English lessons from us. What we didn't know at that time was that running such a list is rather risky because 'spam bots' would enter any email address available on on the web into our data base and as a result people who had never subscribed to our list would start receiving emails from us. Apparantly this is what happened to Frank too. His email address is available for any spam bot to collect from his website and so he received an email English lesson from us although he had never subscribed to it.

I guess this piece of information is important in order to understand his reaction. Still, I'd like to start an open discussion on the situation of 'illegal immigrants in the US' as well as other countries. What do you think of foreigners who come to your country? For example, I know lots of Germans who think that there are too many foreigners in Germany. As a matter of fact, I guess that the vast majority of all Germans think that way. What about the Americans? Do you agree with Frank Raven? Do you have too many illegal aliens who ravage your country by taking, taking, taking?

Many thanks,
Torsten

TOEIC listening, question-response: Should we go to Disneyland or Disneyworld?

[Jamie (K)]

I'll bet that Frank's problem is not with just any foreigners who come to the US, but with the ones who sneak in or who in some other way are here illegally, without the necessary government permission. We don't see many of them where I live, but in some parts of the country uncontrolled illegal immigration is causing huge social and economic problems.

For example, it is bankrupting the medical systems and the school systems of certain states, because they have to treat or educate huge numbers of people who never pay taxes, so there is money going out for people who never put any money in. This is part of the "taking and taking" that Frank is talking about.

Another problem is that illegal immigrants are depressing wages in those states, because they work for far less than an American can work for. After all, if you never pay taxes, you can keep all your money.

A third problem is that if people sneak into the country illegally, the government can't find out who they are and keep the bad ones out. The illegal immigrant population contains quite a few known violent criminals -- many of whom have been previously deported and have come back. Not only do they commit a lot of crime here, but they are hard to trace, because there is no record of their arrival or location.

Besides all that, in addition to people who come to the US just to work, there are people who sneak into the country with other plans, such as members of Al-Qaeda or Hamas.

Many illegal immigrants work and live under stolen social security numbers, which is a type of identity theft. This causes identity confusion, and the person who really owns the social security number can have legal and credit problems because of things that the illegal immigrant using their number has done. And in the US, if you have bad credit, you're in huge trouble.

Most, but certainly not all, of the illegal immigrants come from Mexico, which tacitly encourages them to go to the US, partly because money sent home by Mexicans in the US makes up a huge portion of the Mexican economy. There have even been cases of groups of illegal immigrants being escorted onto US soil by uniformed soldiers in Mexican military vehicles. (Whether they were really soldiers and acting under official orders is not clear.) However, even as Mexico lobbies for unrestricted immigration for anyone who wants to go to the US, that country deals very, very strictly with immigrants living illegally within its own borders.

Almost every American has some relative within living memory -- usually a parent or grandparent -- who was an immigrant, so I doubt Frank's problem is with foreigners in general. I think he's upset by the problems caused by foreigners who are here illegally.