{"id":747,"date":"2011-11-01T15:11:20","date_gmt":"2011-11-01T19:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live-immigrationreform.pantheonsite.io\/?p=747"},"modified":"2015-08-21T09:40:21","modified_gmt":"2015-08-21T13:40:21","slug":"what-draws-undocumented-workers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2011\/11\/01\/what-draws-undocumented-workers\/","title":{"rendered":"What draws undocumented workers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mr. William Chip, a FAIR board member, responded to a recent Washington Post article by Michael Gerson about GOP campaigns&#8217; strategies concerning illegal immigration through the following letter to the editor:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In his Oct. 28 op-ed, \u201c <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/accommodation-of-anger\/2011\/10\/26\/gIQA9wFNNM_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">Fanning the flame on immigration<\/a>,\u201d Michael Gerson said that GOP campaigns that challenge the provision of subsidized education and medical benefits to illegal immigrants are \u201crepellent\u201d and that, in any event, it is economic opportunity, not government benefits, that are the \u201cmagnet\u201d for illegal immigration. Mr. Gerson missed the point. These benefits may not be magnets for undocumented workers, but they are incentives for otherwise temporary workers to bring their families to this country and then stay put.<\/p>\n<p>Before the 1970s, most illegal immigrants left their families at home, where the cost of living was much lower. The families were the \u201cmagnet\u201d that eventually drew these migrants back home. After the Great Society\u2019s expansion of public subsidies for health care and the Supreme Court\u2019s 1982 decision opening public schools to children of illegal immigrants, the calculus changed.<\/p>\n<p>I have no doubt that Mexicans love their kids as much as we Americans love ours. If public schooling and nonemergency medical care were unavailable to the children of undocumented workers, their parents would not bring them to this country in the first place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mr. William Chip, a FAIR board member, responded to a recent Washington Post article by Michael Gerson about GOP campaigns&#8217; strategies concerning illegal immigration through the following letter to the editor: In his Oct. 28 op-ed, \u201c Fanning the flame on immigration,\u201d Michael Gerson said that GOP campaigns that challenge the provision of subsidized education<\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2011\/11\/01\/what-draws-undocumented-workers\/\" title=\"Read More\">Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[5,3,1513,11,6,4,10,7],"tags":[1185,20,1186,718],"yst_prominent_words":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":749,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions\/749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}