americans are greedy when it comes to money (and other things, but for the sake of this post, money). the labor unions are in large part to blame, and you certainly can't blame people with little or no money for stepping in and taking the crappy jobs that americans are too good for, for pay that they are way too smart to take home. i am in the tech industry (software development) and we laugh about the massive outsourcing to eastern europe, and to a lesser extent, india. people boo-hoo about losing their jobs to them, but they'll switch to satellite over cable for five bucks a month difference and then boo-hoo again when they can't understand "johnny" with all of his dialect training on the customer support line. a lot of indian coders may not be as good or as educated as some american coders, but they are dirt cheap and a dime a dozen.

i was here through katrina and a funny thing happened afterwards...all of the fast food restaurants, gas stations, etc. that were at one time staffed by lower and working class couldn't reopen because they had mostly been shipped off to houston or lacked public transportation to get to their jobs. sure, they weren't illegal workers, but they were jobs that most people around after the storm were too good for. the short term effect was that you could make $14 and hour working at wendy's...had the hispanic population not moved in and taken over that income bracket from a jobs perspective, the suffering stores may have been forced to raise their prices to cope with the long term shortage and more expensive workforce, which the general population would undoubtedly have complained about as much as they complain about that socioeconomic class around here.

a good friend married a girl he met in romania about a year and a half ago and has been trying since then to get her over here legally...it really is a joke, i don't know how they expect anyone to go through the mountains of paperwork, control numbers, and general bureaucracy that it has transformed into.

for everyone who is calling for minimum standards for immigrants and the like...i sure hope you are american indians. i certainly don't condone illegal immigration, but you really should crack a history book and read about the laboring classes of immigrants (both legal and illegal) that helped build this country into what it is today over the past few centuries.

__________________
1983 300D classic white 196,xxx
2007 toyota yaris lb
2007 nissan versa (wife's)
2001 nissan frontier
2006 bmw r1150gs
2001 ducati monster 900
2003 zr7s
2007 klr650