English Only?

 

The idea that illegal immigrants don't pay taxes is flawed. True, they don't pay income tax, although from my own experience of working among marginalised communities in London the majority would be happy to pay the same taxes as the rest of us if they could have legal status. However, governments have plenty of ways of raising revenue, and income tax is just the tip of the iceberg. Purchase tax is paid on most commercial transactions (VAT is 17.5% in the UK, I don't know about the USA) and illegal immigrants still need to pay fares on public transport, put gasoline in their cars and pay road tolls etc. In fact, illegal immigrants, in common with all of the poorer members of society, pay a far higher proportion of their income in indirect taxation than the more affluent. And of course, that brilliant con trick called supply side economics favours cuts in direct taxation for the already rich.

 

And as for public services; if your city, state or whatever has contracted these out to private enterprise you can bet your boots that at least some illegal immigrants are doing the lowest paid jobs. This is certainly the case in the UK, where even entry level employees in the immigration service have been found to be here illegally. That's right, the rubbish collection, street lighting and hospital cleaning that taxpayers get may well be done by non taxpayers.

 

And why do employers use illegal labour? It's cheap, non-unionised and pretty much infinitely replenishable. Agriculture is a great employer of off the books, casual labour - clamp down on that and watch prices shoot up, and then who'll shout the loudest? Those who blame everything on illegal immigrants.

 

 

On the main topic of this thread, though, I have a certain amount of sympathy with the restaurant owner. I have spent several years working with groups of immigrants to improve their language skills, and one of the biggest barriers to integration and legitimate employment is linguistic. The students who make the best progress are those who use their English outside the classroom, so encouraging this is not such a bad thing from that point of view. I'm not so comfortable with the way he puts his views across, but it's quite likely that the media are reporting this according to their own agenda.

 

There are many groups of people who come into this country who refuse to learn or use English.  They waved flags of other countries during protests last spring.  If they don't want to leave here why don't they try and assimilate?