migrant workers.

Knowing what we know about SB1070 and its heavy approach to illegal workers, what is your feeling on the issue. Do migrant workers take jobs from U.S. workers? In thinking about this issue, it is important to consider what industries migrant workers tend to work in and what the wages are. Would a U.S. citizen work in these industries and/or for these wages? What role does the recession play in this debate?

I feel that SB1070 is a highly excessive response to a perceived economic and criminal threat by migrant workers in Arizona. Although there is a criminal element associated with some illegal immigrants and drug cartels in Arizona, I believe this threat has been exaggerated. The claim that Arizona had the second highest amount of kidnappings in the world was a blatant lie, in attempts to justify a law that so obviously skirted civil liberties.
I think people need to take a step back at the big picture here. Foreign born workers make up 15% of our entire labor force in America, that is 1 in 7 people. There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants today working in jobs that American workers simply won't do. As the recession hit and more people began losing their jobs, they looked for someone to blame. Instead on focusing on the thiefs on Wall Street, many people focused on illegal immigrants who "took" the jobs they didn't even want. Using illegal immigrants as a scape goat, when in reality, these are jobs that they would not even apply for. For instance, if an American were to lose their office job or mid management position, would they be more likely to go apply for that landscaping job, bus boy position, or strawberry picker (common jobs for illegal immigrants)- absolutely not! The only thing they would be applying for is unemployment. Those types of jobs aren't even on their radar, and yet people scream about illegal immigrants stealing our jobs. It's a very ignorant argument because in the end most of these people benefit one way or another from this source of cheap labor, either through the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables, cheap service and/or labor. If they truly had a problem with that then the smart and effective thing to do would be to stop benefitting from the cheap labor all together. They would need to stop buying fruit and vegetables, stop going out to eat, stop hiring handy men around the house. People just don't see that they are protesting something they are directly benefiting from.