Profile For Egbert S.

Regarding illegals taking jobs -- seems like a lot of illegals are working in strawberry fields, lemon groves, janitorial, restaurants...very tough low-paying work. If they deport Jose who is washing my pans, I'll have to pay twice as much for some high school kid who won't do half the job. Are we focusing on the right people? How about the Asian MBA's and PhD's who are coming in, buying up businesses, slashing headcount, wages and benefits, or bringing in more of their countrymen to replace domestic workers? That's probably more of an economic problem than Ricardo pulling onions for $2 an hour.

A) There's lots of crummy jobs that no one wants to do -- why not allow guest workers who will do them well and cheaply? B) To maintain living standards for American workers, you need protections: minimum wages, benefits, maybe even unions. Our government, which is supposed to work for us, could help a lot: partnership with industry, health insurance for workers, more tax on corporations and the super-wealthy tycoons and tax breaks (I mean REAL tax breaks) for the working class. (What we have now is the opposite, it's unbelievable how we let the leadership bend us over a barrel.) C) Economic revolutions (like industrial revolution, free trade revolution, tech revolution) are painful and a lot of people get displaced. Other opportunities will eventually appear for the displaced -- we don't have have masses of unemployed stocking knitters or wheelwrights anymore -- but the transition can be painful. Try to look and plan ahead.