We have our own continent to deal with. We already have hundreds of thousands of refugees coming to the US from central/south America every year. How many refugees are we supposed to accept anyway?
What is straining to you? I would describe our education system, our legal system, our prison system and our welfare system as all being currently "strained" so we must have different definitions.
(and to the downvoting crew, feel free to explain to me what productive disagreeement looks like, eh?)
You've also made the mistake of thinking that just because you've found one problem that others must not exist. We can have broken systems and problems caused by immagration.
10% ESL students in our public education system should qualify as a strain. 17% of California's prisoners being born abroad should qualify as a strain. Are these numbers not high enough for you? If not, what does too high look like to you?
A 10% ESL student population doesn't solve itself. That's like a child thinking that their refrigerator magically fills itself when it gets empty. If you ignore that solutions have costs than yes by your definition ESL students have no costs associated with them.
I asked about the strain on the legal system due to immigrant populations, specifically the prison system in California. You said we should put less people in jail. While that's true it doesn't solve the problem unless we're going to change our laws to the extent that aggravated assault is no longer a crime. Then we've once again solved the problem by refusing to admit it even exists.
As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes.
By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
Only 10% of California's prisoners have never been convicted of a violent crime. I doubt they all need to be locked up but I'm not seeing those prisons as being filled with peaceful drug dealers like the rumor has it.
I would guess in New Hampshire there isn't much of an immigrant population. I just looked it up and it's about 93% white there. My state's about 2/3's white, I live in a part of town where I don't walk around after dark because I might get jumped for being white which does affect my perspective. I have neighbors who immigrated from Mexico decades ago and still don't even speak basic english. I'm not saying my state should become all white or anything like that, but maybe we've reached a good mix and we could deal with the problems our hispanic and black communities already have because that's a challenge as it is. We're struggling to get them to stop killing each other, make it through high school and to read at a basic level. If we can't do that I don't know why we think we can take on even more people.
19% of high school graduates in the US are functionally illiterate[0]. Nationwide only half of black males are graduating at all. Half. We're already failing to take care of our poor. We're spending a very large amount of money trying to but it happens to be expensive.
If you go back to the start of this thread you'll see I've been consistent that there's a point where taking in more people is no longer a good thing. That doesn't mean I think it's always a bad thing, just that we should be honest that it can be.
[0] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3...
Second, my main assertion is the existence of a point where immigration is problematic. Example: colonialism.
Third, as to the side conversation of whether or not America is experiencing a problematic level of immigration I've already submitted the fact that 10% of students in US public schools are ESL learners. We can add to it that 16% of California's prisoners were not born on U.S. soil and they're so overcrowded the Supreme Court ordered them to do something about it. I'm calling these things "strain". I hope we can agree that immigration plays a role in both examples.
All it takes is a commitment to finally throttle the military materiel manufacturing economy--that was ramped up during World War 2--back to a peacetime proportion of the budget.
As it is now, the U.S. has to continually go out and look for new conflicts, and beat loudly the drums of war, to justify that high level of military spending. We have been waiting a long time to beat those swords back into plowshares, and they just keep making more swords.
I think that the entire quota of 70k refugees can be adequately provided for in less than one month just by taking the buildings on a bare handful of shuttered military bases out of mothballs.
We can accommodate millions more, and take care of the poor people that are already here. Our elected politicians prevent such occurrences using the flimsiest of justifications.
Have you considered appealing to what your audience is likely to care about, rather than the goals you find appealing?
Rent-seeking behavior seems intrinsic to human society, such that any group of people larger than a certain size will be forced to deal with it in one way or another.
At this point, nothing short of a constitutional amendment is likely to put a dent in the military industrial complex. And that's not happening any time soon.
Complaining about it helps me to not lose my sanity. And that's good, because without my sanity, I might do something like endorse an armed revolution to reduce the political and economic influence of the military in the U.S. See, as a sane person, I know that doesn't make any sense. There is a right way and a wrong way to fight fire with fire; that's the wrong way.
And it gets a dissenting opinion out there, on the off chance that someone might stray far enough from their own echo chamber to see it.
So, friend, I ask you to stop and consider how you want people who encounter your lone voice in the wilderness to react. Assuming you care - perhaps you value having something to complain (and thus wish to ensure its continued existence) about more than you do persuading people that It Doesn't Have To Be This Way.
As a political minority, I am well aware that there are literally tens of millions of people who will dismiss my opinions without even pausing to think about them. That doesn't mean that I should stop having them, or stop expressing them in whatever way that pleases me.
I'm not exactly sure what you hope to accomplish by your responses. It almost sounds like you agree with the sentiment, but not the expression. If so, it is not a tad hypocritical to complain about how I am arranging my words rather than try to say it better yourself?
There's always going to be something to complain about. If not how the military-industrial complex is preventing the realization of peacetime prosperity, it might be how we have all this peacetime prosperity, but can't keep the mosquitoes from biting everyone at the picnic. If we run out of truly awful things to complain about, we can always complain about the merely annoying things. So I find your suggestion that complainers would actually prefer that the things they complain about not be fixed to be misguided.
I perhaps could say it better myself, but that's not my goal at this juncture.
"A refugee is a person who is outside their home country because they have suffered (or feared) persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion; because they are a member of a persecuted social category of persons; or because they are fleeing a war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee