🚀 go-pugleaf

Rich Infamous wrote:
> 
> On Oct 28, 1996 07:02:38 in article <Re: ILLEGALS SUE TO KEEP FREEBIES!>,
> '"Angelmoon"  angelmoon@concentric.net>' wrote:
> >
> >
> >BajaRat <BajaRat@ix.netcom.com> wrote in article
> ><326e5249.701776@nntp.ix.netcom.com>...
> >>
> >snip
> >>
> >> Hmmm.... let's get this straight, Katz. You figure that even though
> >> some mojado invades the U.S. and violates U.S. laws that said mojado
> >> should get freebies? Por que? And, while you are sitting on your
> >> pompous ass in New York, California is being overrun by mojados you
> >> charge that opposition to this is 'racist'? Man, you are quite a piece
> >> of work, bagel boy <heh heh>.
> >>
> >Ah, BajaRat, you have something there.  Maybe we should ship all the
> >illegals to Katz' house and let him pay for them.  Then they could get
> >their freebies that he thinks they deserve and we wouldn't have to pay for
> 
> >it.
> 
> --------------------------------------------
> 
> It would be great if all of the pro-immigration people would foot the bill.
>  Instead, they want everyone else to.  Why?  because they're the ones
> profiting from the cheap imported labor.  So you see, they benefit twice.
> But don't expect them to admit it, ever.

Could it be that it's just because that if you actually close the
borders, the prices of lettuce and cocaine will at least quadruple?

Think of subsidizing illegals and undocumented migrant workers as
subsidizing low prices for the things you just can't live without. Or
maybe find some Americans who'll do the same work for the same pay with
the same freebies... Hmmm, how about jobs for all of those folks who are
going to have to leave Welfare?

Here's an alternative to all of that. From the HTML version of 
_In the Fall_, (c)(copr) 1996 all rights reserved TJH Internet SP and
Earth Operations Central ( http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/fall-1.html )
(this is a work of fiction, etc, any similarities to useful political
strategy are purely intentional.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

> In 1995, following the preceding Republican sweeps of the House and Senate floors, a series of
> legislative and regulatory changes were swiftly enacted, and despite the liberal agenda of the
> Democratic presidency, a tide of conservatism swept the land. Eager to distance themselves from
> the "tax-and-spend traditions" of the Democrats, the Republicans promptly did what they did best,
> promoted establishment business interests by relieving the tax- burden of the wealthy (minimal at
> best) and placed the staggering national debt squarely upon the backs of the poor.
> 
> As an adjunct to removing millions of "lazy good-for-nothings" from the Welfare rolls, many
> near-revolutionary policies were instituted. Following the lead of the Californian Proposition 187,
> which legislated a policy of total non-support for undocumented aliens, Federal law was enacted in
> 1997 requiring greater control of the borders, reporting of suspected illegals, and speedier
> deportations. By 2001, the borders had been very effectively sealed. Political will combined with
> radical advances in automation, and the borders became totally impassible to anyone not
> possessing the correct documentation. One long-term result of this house-cleaning was a drastic
> reduction in certain types of crimes in border towns, which had some social benefits, undoubtedly...
> but the other immediate result was a dearth of cheap labor in the fields of the agricultural states.
> American workers could not be hired for such low wages as could the illegals, and so a
> compromise was reached: Able-bodied entitlements recipients would receive wages commensurate
> with those that the illegal migrant workers had enjoyed. The net payments were approximately the
> same as they'd have received sitting around the house with the kids, so that worked out. The only
> difference between the treatment that the illegals had received and the treatment that the new
> cheap-labor class would receive was that the low wages of the new laborers were taxed, and they
> continued to have Medicare coverage, within the drastically reduced limits mandated by the
> Republican cost-cutting legislation. Still, not enough field hands were made available through
> industry-wide utilization of only members of this new economic subclass... and so subsequent
> legislation was enacted to tighten the net.
> 
> Women on Welfare must undergo sterilization (reversible, with improved Norplant progesterone
> implants) after having so many children, at state expense. Actually, this was not that bad an idea, it
> certainly was saving a lot of entitlements money, simply through vastly reducing childbirth billing.
> However, subsequent ancillary legislation required that women on Welfare, or Aid to Families with
> Dependent Children, and later on, even those on Food Stamps, must register their children with
> State-run day-care and pre-school facilities, most of which had, oh so fortuitously, boarding
> facilities for the children of mothers whose jobs were distant enough.
> 
> Women on any of the above-mentioned entitlements programs, whose children were old enough to
> be eligible for such alternative to direct parental care, were required to accept such work as was
> available to them, or both they and their children would lose such entitlements as they had. Thus,
> any female receiving entitlements who did not have a babe-in-arms suddenly found herself out in
> the fields hoeing lettuce or picking vegetables at less-than-minimum wage, while their children
> were raised at these de-facto orphanages. Admittedly, the day-care and pre-school facilities were
> clean, well-maintained (as much so as any school), and well- staffed, with staff all certified
> teachers and Child Development professionals... but it is difficult to lose one's children, no matter
> that they go to a better life than had been otherwise possible.
> 
> The Republicans had, admittedly, done their best to live up to their campaign pledges. They also
> attacked the increasing problem of rising out-of-control crime in the inner cities concurrently with
> their tightening of the border. In many cases, the National Guard simply occupied high-crime
> districts, and vigorously enforced curfews with lethal force and extremely intrusive methods of
> information-gathering. They finally created, through an administrative fiat, what amounted to a
> National Identity Card, and the first people to receive this card were those who were receiving any
> type of entitlements, and the first of those issued the new cards were those whose primary
> entitlement was mere freedom: Probation and Parole recipients, who were really not in any position
> to in any way argue.
> 
> The new de facto National Identity cards were based upon driver's licenses issued by the State of
> Maryland beginning in 1994. These used digital imaging, and on-card data storage, with a
> magneto- optical stripe on the back, and Universal Product Code laser- scannable non-alterable
> ID coding on the front. The format of the Maryland Driver's license so well conformed to anticipated
> needs of the various interlinked information-retrieval systems that the format was mandated through
> the Code of Federal Regulations as the new national standard for Drivers' Licenses and
> non-drivers' State Identification, with the additional fields for a compressed holographic
> representation of the person's fingerprints and genotype to be eventually added, as well as a
> second magneto- optical data strip, the so-called "user-datastrip". All persons in the various
> entitlements systems were required to upgrade from their previous identification to one of the new
> IDs, and the various separate agencies (whose data was often stored in vastly differing formats on a
> variety of antiquated mainframes) tasks of collating information was greatly simplified by the
> adoption of an external standard for information interchange - the cards that now were required
> wallet apparel for all entitlements recipients.
> 
> This was not a legally mandated de jure National Identification Card, but the de facto standardization
> of format amounted to the same thing.
> 
> Society itself, or at least the segment of society that received entitlements, became a
> minimum-security gulag with internal passports required. 
> 
> Foodstamps were not issued as specie, but were written as data to the cards, which could be read
> by point-of-sale scanners and debit devices. Illegal trading of foodstamps became a thing of the
> past. An entire underground economy was eliminated almost overnight.
> 
> Section VIII projects landlords were required to receive payment via the cards, or direct deposit,
> the latter being the preferred payment mode.
> 
> Presentation of the cards (with thumbprint and password validation) at various checkpoints, such as
> the receptionists' desks at various entitlements-agencies, was successfully used as an alibi
> defense in a number of criminal cases, and thus encroachment on rights became accepted as a
> permissible evil. The card would prove to be of benefit as much as it would to detriment, and so
> they became accepted.
> 
> So accepted were the cards, in fact, that banks began to first prefer, then to require, that the cards
> be used in lieu of automated teller-machine cards, and soon the issuance of a credit card became
> less the issuance of a piece of plastic, and more of the issuance of a set of codes for
> state-authorized writing to the secondary datastrip on the card.
> 
> Possession of hardware and software that could write to the state- datastrip, the primary datastrip
> on the cards became at first restricted by administrative, and then later by criminal law, regulated
> by Federal agencies as disparate as the Federal Communications Commission, the Interstate
> Banking Commission, and the Law-Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the Federal Bureau
> of Investigation. Eventually, functions of all of these agencies were consolidated into one
> subagency of the National Crime Information Center... and thus were born the National Identification
> and Information Laws.
> 
> Meanwhile, welfare mothers worked at substandard wages in the fields, hoping for accumulation of
> sufficient labor-points to allow them to visit their increasingly estranged children at the "welfare
> orphanages" (as they came to be called), and as a part of the continuing drive to remove all
> undocumented workers from the country, it became ever more difficult to secure work without an
> officially-approved identification card... and when the Social Security Administration announced
> that it was phasing out its own identification cards and that soon it would accept only official
> machine-readable State IDs as identification for purposes of entitlements-processing, the last straw
> was in place.
> 
> The old, the young, and the rest of society all had machine- readable IDs by the year 1999.
> 
> Without a OneCard, as they came to be known, one simply didn't exist. All other ID, including birth
> certificates served only as supporting evidence for the issuance of a OneCard, and indeed, new
> birth certificates were issued in the form of OneCards.
> 
> The countryside became nearly overrun with female workers. The Health and Human Services
> became the nation's largest employer, finally outstripping and eventually absorbing Manpower,
> Incorporated, in 2000. The new Republican administration functions of Manpower were much more
> streamlined than any Federal bureaucracy could be, and the administration decided that if
> Manpower was selling, they'd buy it. HHS had forced Manpower into near collapse, anyways, and
> the Manpower personnel staff simply got their paychecks from a new source, and did basically the
> same old jobs. Welfare births dropped precipitously. Out-of-wedlock births became rather rare,
> since unemployed mothers could look forward to perhaps four years with a baby before they had to
> give it up and go back to work, hard work in the fields, at substandard pay.
> 
> For the parents, a life in the fields was possibly the best life for which they might now hope; a
> high-school diploma meant simply that one might be eligible for a supervisory position within the
> entitlements establishment. Without OneCard, and technical schooling, one could hope for little
> else. The gap between the rich and the destitute grew ever wider, and as the price of education
> grew and government funding was eliminated, the middle class died, and with it died its morals.
> 
> In the work camps, there were reasonably clean beds, showers that worked, and free minor-care
> medical staff and facilities. In the morning, busses or vans drove cadres to the fields or the
> orchards, and American agriculture remained profitable and illegal aliens were expelled in droves,
> mostly returned to Mexico to swell the ranks of the impoverished there, and to foment revolution.
> 
> But what of the men? Drifters and hobos who had subsisted for years as migrant undocumented
> citizens by showing up for work at the various labor halls and pickup-corners found themselves
> slowly forced into a regimented society. This was obviously not to their tastes, or they'd have been
> working in factories somewhere. When one state "went OneCard", they tended to move as a group
> to other states, looking for field work or day-work... but often they found themselves cashless in a
> state which required that only those who were within the entitlements system be allowed to do
> manual labor. 
> 
> Many of these men were petty criminals, vagrants of the sort who are not above stealing chickens
> for dinner and working only for drinking money. Even when this was not the case, as far as the
> various state and local government were concerned, these people were simply on the lam from
> paying local-level taxes. The Federal Government tended to concur, and while legislation was not
> enacted, simple administrative process ensured that without an official change-of-address
> procedure, one was considered to be resident at one specific address... and when one was paid by
> OneCard, the taxes redounding to the local jurisdictions where one was resident were automatically
> deducted along with the Federal income tax.
> 
> As time marched forward, more states began to revise their vagrancy laws. If one was arrested on
> any charge, and one did not have a OneCard, one was held until identity could be established
> sufficiently for a OneCard to be issued. From that moment forward, one was, until legally
> re-registered, a resident of the jurisdiction of the place where the OneCard was issued, and taxes
> were automatically collected. Small towns everywhere found it in their financial best interests to
> round up the vagrant and the shiftless, to register them, thus to collect their shares of taxes.
> 
> The entire system became more grasping and inclusive as time went on. When one became a
> OneCard carrier, if one could not prove that one had received a paycheck from a legitimate source
> within the past month, one automatically was registered as an entitlements recipient. As an
> entitlements recipient, one was by law required to register for the labor placement services.
> 
> Some people regarded this as outright slavery, but the few remaining bleeding-hearts tended to
> agree that the safe, humane and ultimately beneficent labor camps were not only a more pleasant
> alternative to homelessness, vagrancy and welfare, but were a positive economic boon. Besides,
> having eliminated cheap undocumented labor, there simply weren't many alternatives.
> 
> They had some valid points. Ever more Americans were employed forty or more hours a week, the
> numbers of people paying taxes rose ever higher, homelessness was fast becoming a thing of the
> past, and illegal migrant workers had been nearly eliminated from the economic scene, along with
> their inevitable associated importations of interestingly obscure tropical parasites and
> antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. The increasing use of the OneCard in almost all payment
> transactions assured collections of the taxes and fees so vital to a government economy, and the
> rapid near-elimination of cash allowed much more efficient tracking of the economy, allowing
> centralized planning and control of economic factors under scientific methods for the first time.
> Out-of- wedlock births were down, the children of poverty were not suffering neglect and danger
> in poorly-maintained unhealthy projects, but were instead cared for and coddled in learning-
> enriched environments. The culture of violence and despair that most agreed was caused by
> cycles of poor-education, ill-health, malnutrition, and concentration in slumlord Welfare projects
> was being destroyed, slowly but surely, and the American future, a Republican future, was ever
> brighter. 


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