I'm so sick of this debate. Why is this even talked about? It seems so patently obvious. Here's the executive summary:
Being anti-illegal-immigration is not being anti-immigrant or racist.
Lots of people all over the world "do the right thing". They go to the US Consular Office in their country. They fill out forms. They wait. They get background checks performed on them. They wait. They pray to whatever deity they prefer to help speed along the process. They wait. And, eventually, their number comes up, and they get a visa and work permit, and life is good.
Any sort of amnesty program is a slap in the face to the many many hundreds of thousands of law-abiding immigrants everywhere. It says, in no uncertain terms, that they were a dumbass for waiting, when they could have just slipped across the border and waited for an amnesty program.
As far as a guest-worker program... I'm uncertain how this is going to help in any way that the Shrub-In-Chief says it will. Sure there's a lot of jobs Americans simply won't take, but they won't take them because we're too conceited about what our salary should be. We simply don't want the "$1.00 per hour" or whatever pittance it is that illegal aliens get paid to pick fruit in Southern California.
Are guest workers going to be immune from minimum wage? My guess is no. Which means -- guess what -- guest worker programs are either going to cost America more money (because employers will have to multiply by a large factor what they pay their immigrant workers) or, much more likely, employers will just stick to the underground workers who get paid squat.
So basically, amnesty - won't work. Guest-worker program - won't work.
What will work? Making it a felony to be an illegal immigrant. (Although, I'm sure one could already find laws that already make it a crime, like the New Hampshire town who decided that trespass laws' verbiage applied to illegal immigrants)
If you're not legally here, I'm not convinced you should actually have a "full set of rights and privileges" the same as people who played by the rules.
I think the issue isn't so much that a presumptionis being made that opposing extra-legal immigration is being anti-immigration, but rather whenever the topic is brought up, it's Latinos who exclusively get shown on TV. There is certainly a racist/bigtoted element to the movement in the Southwest US. It's invariably white males who resent the influence Hispanics have on their culture.
You are correct that Guest Worker programs are a bad solution. We need only look to Europe to see how poorly they actually work.
I totally agree with you it has gotten out of control.They want to stay let them pay the same amount of health ins. as the rest of us and quite getting handouts for everything, that the rest of us legal citizens have to pay dearly for because the immigrants are getting everything free, so our tax dollars pay, and all our benefits that we pay for, the prices are, skyrocketing leaving middle class citizens in the poor house.