Joe DeFuria said:
Mintmaster said:
To top it off, we have WAY more benefits and social programs.
And this is good because? Here in the U.S., we must by definition rely WAY MORE on ourselves vs. being dependent on the government.
Sorry, I didn't get my point across there. epicstruggle was talking about how the immigrants are taking advantage of benefits and what not. I'm just saying that we pay a lot more per person for benefits, but we still let in a lot of refugees and immigrants. Relatively speaking, you guys have it easy wrt to economic cost.
Have you seen "Bowling for Columbine"? I'm sure you have many gripes with it, but they make a good point about the value of social programs, among other things.
Joe DeFuria said:
Believe me, there are loads of idiots here complaing about us stealing their jobs and ruining the economy who basically want to turn Canada into the US, but in the end this is a far better society to live in and raise your family.
I disagree, though I wonder how you could possibly lump an entire country as a "society", especially when one is as diverse as the U.S.
My mistake, should have said "
I believe this is...". I don't think it's a good idea to make this thread a Canada vs US thread, so I probably shouldn't say anything more. To each his own.
But still, I was talking about Canada as a society, and when you compare the things mentioned in this thread like immigration, crime, trust (e.g. unlocked doors), health care, social programs, etc then it's not hard to see that there's a big difference between nearly all Canadian societies and nearly all American societies, so I don't think "lumping" was that unreasonable in this particular case.
Joe DeFuria said:
Unfortunately, you have infuriated just about every Muslim around the world, and your terrorism problem will now get worse, just as building a wall will infuriate Mexico and it's people. Hell, they'll come over just to spite you.
Um, that sounds more like a problem with
their society, wouldn't you say?
Umm, why? The US killed 5-10 thousand innocent civilians in Iraq that had nothing to do with Sept. 11 or any other form of terrorism, so why shouldn't they be infuriated?
Or are you talking about Mexico? The spite comment was more or less just a joke, but I'd think that Mexicans would just be more motivated to find a way across. I mean, come on, how hard is it to get by a wall? You can't possibly have 2000 miles of wall being guarded continuously.
As for getting angry about the wall, why wouldn't they be? You'd basically be saying "here's a 2000 mile reminder that we are too good for you, so keep your useless ass out of our country". Seriously, if you were in Mexico and trying to get into the US, would a wall really stop you? Would you really interpret the wall in any other way? I know you said you don't really think the wall is the way to go, but that's what my comments were referring to.
Joe DeFuria said:
Hello...trust works two ways, does it not?
As in, with "open borders", how far has our trustworthiness gotten us with respect to our neighbors ability to prevent it's own from illegally immigrating? Particularly when our neighbors actions actually encourage immigration to our country?
So, we are supposed to "trust", and yet, we should not expect the favor returned...
I'm not saying building a wall is a good solution...but we certainly need more active clamping down on borders and illegal immigration.
This is exactly the mentality that led you to war. You want the superficial fix instead of getting to the root of the problem.
You can spend 100 times what you do right now on border security, and maybe you'll increase the cost of successful entry by 10 times. The same thing is true about the Canada-US border. You can make it more difficult for someone to get into the country, but it's going to cost you much more than it'll cost anyone to circumvent those measures.
You should be concentrating your efforts towards integrating them into your society rather than how to get rid of them, because you can only limit that problem so much. These people don't want to get into the US so that they can starve, because that's what they're running from. They want to work for a chance at a better life, as you said.
The source of this problem is that if you do the same amount of work you can live a far better life in the US than Mexico. That's not going to change, so you should deal with it.
Instead, what I think will happen is this is going to become an election issue, and people will be convinced by the media that it's a serious problem that must be solved. They start thinking with a KKK-like "Mexicans are ruining America" mentality, and there's the territorial paranoia I was talking about. I'm not talking about lack of trust in the Mexican government (which you might be right about), it's a lack of trust in how immigrants aren't crippling the economy.
