I would rather limit illegal immigrant rights to the bare minimum (i.e. that of any visiting foreign national) have more open borders and less ambiguity.

What happens when they graduate college?  They get thrown out for working illegally?

Twenty-four-year-old Muslina is leaving behind her four-year-old son to work in Saudi Arabia.

“I come from a village about 15 hours away from Jakarta by bus. I want to work in Saudi Arabia so that I can make enough money to put my son through school,” she says.

On the other hand, I am sure the migrant workers are a large source of Income to many families across the archipelago.

Just goes to show you how highly work abroad is valued!

You have worked in Malaysia for 2 years as a housemaid, where you had to sneak behind your boss’ back just to make a quick phone call or send a text message to your family back

Toronto looked like Cleveland 40 years ago, now it’s a global Mecca. And it’s not an accident that it’s 50% foreign-born.

There are haves and there are have-nots on this planet and we can’t risk too many of the have-nots coming over and joining the haves. If we did, a more egalitarian distribution of life’s blessings may erode the level of comfort that the West has come to enjoy at the cost of the plunder and propped up dictatorships of many Third World countries, a plunder that leads to the creation of these very refugees in the first place.  Under our current system, I can only foresee a trajectory which leads to the world’s richest countries becoming virtually impregnable fortresses, facing down dark skinned, ragged trousered invaders as they rock up at the coasts.  We shall indeed fight them on the beaches.

On the upside it’s good that illegal immigrant’s kids have access to education – unlike a lot of other countries.

~Felipe Calderon

Now if only Western countries would get their acts together!

Whether it is or not is debatable.

In any case you could call Japan the land of 417 ‘welcomes‘.

I remember seeing a poor Chinese in a slum in Tangerang.  She looked as smart as my Hong Konger pal K.  Suspect however smart you are you’ll never escape a trap like that.

- From Emma Lazarus’ New Colossus

Yet, many countries (Spain, we’re looking at you) don’t get it.

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As an aside, my pal wrote a nice paper on using incentives to encourage Europeans to have more babies and therefore relieve the growing debt burden on younger generations.  I don’t think she was too happy when I told her we should just import more immigrants.

Oh that’s right, it’s probably profitable for cops to find an illegal foreigner or two.