Immigration Reform will die in Congress??? Thoughts???

I agree that it will either die or a grossly watered down version will come out.

It's a complex issue and there's no easy answer, IMHO.

Many conservatives take the approach of "they broke the law coming here, so they're criminals, deport them all".  I disagree completely because the US has ALLOWED them to come here, even though it was against the law.  Republicans want lots of cheap labor for business and Democrats want lots of low income people to have low income babies to vote for them.  Hence, we are where we are.

My fix is to just make work visa's easier to get so people wanting to come to the country to work can do it legally.  Maybe it's not even a visa, just a non resident work ID card so they can legally work here and pay taxes.  Our birth rate is dropping like crazy, and we need more workers.
Then reform the legal citizenship process so it's not a 10 year $100k (don't really know how much it costs) type of process.

Oh, and if you combine the work visa's with legalizing drugs that pretty much wipes out the need for a $100000000000000000 fence boondoggle. 

Sounds good to me Tony. My husband is an immigrant. One of the hardest working taxpayers I know. 

I think you treat them the same as if they were just coming over.  Let them apply for work permits to get on the books and paying taxes.  Then allow them to start the "new" streamlined citizenship process (whatever that looks like).

As you mentioned, we can't deport them because it's just not that simple.  Many have children that are US citizens by birth and it would get really whacky very fast.

I used to have the attitude of throw them all back when I was younger.  Then I moved to Chula Vista, CA (south of San Diego) and would get to watch the border patrol hunt illegals down like animals.  One morning I heard the choppers flying over chasing illegals and looked out on my back patio.  There was a young couple in their mid twenties cowering on my patio holding their three children and crying in fear.  It couldn't have become more obvious that they were not criminals, they just wanted a better life for their family.  They were dressed like they were going to church.

I fed them breakfast and wished them well.

See Kate, I'm not all crazy conservative. 

Yeah, I agree.  There are a ton of complexities.  Medical care, legal rights, drivers licenses, etc...

This is one of the big reasons I feel congress will kick this can as far down the road as they can.

The one thing nearly guaranteed to pass is that the tech billionaires (Zuckerberg, Ellison, Gates, et. al.) will get their quadrupling or more of H1-B visas so that those who make a living as tech workers will experience some strong downward wage pressure.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/h-1b/american-tech-workers-lose-out-in-h-1b-lottery-216341

I'd pile on a little as well.  I've hired a few H-1B Network Engineers in the past and it was an option of last resort.  I think it cost us around $10k to go through the process, plus paying for international travel.  The two I hired, I actually had to pay more than I would have a local dude because they were being recruited from all over the world.

So, as Brian mentioned there weren't enough qualified candidates locally so I had to go overseas (and pay more).

You mean to say there were no other qualified candidates in the US?  Really?

I can't speak to Brian, but I'll answer in the context of my position.  Mine goes back a few years to ~2005 when I was looking for high level Cisco certified engineers holding the CCIE certification.  There were only 4 people in the state with that certification level and they all were very happy where they were.  I had a nationwide search on and was offering $115k/yr. for the salary.  I got a couple nibbles, but nobody wanted to move to Nebraska and the positions sat open for over a year.
I eventually opened the salary up to pay somebody whatever they wanted, and still couldn't get any interest because there are zero unemployed CCIE's.  They all have very good paying jobs and you have to convince them to quit their current job because yours is better.

I was eventually approached by a recruiter who had some international candidates and we decided to move that direction.

Could I have hired just  anybody, who wasn't qualified and train them for two or three years?  No, because a CCIE is the rough equivalent to a doctor with a PHD specializing in a certain area of medicine.  A mistake in this position could cost the business I worked at tens of millions of dollars in less than a day.  It wasn't a training ground.

Now, granted highly educated college graduates coming in and working on H1-B Visa's is a lot different than low income workers sneaking across the border so we're probably out in the weeds a bit.

We're not in the weeds.  Zuckerberg made a deliberate effort to steer the immigration legislation towards massively ratcheting up the H1-B limit.  His agenda of boosting Facebook's profits by flooding the supply of tech workers to achieve wage suppression became the immigration bill.  Some type of immigration reform is likely to pass.  What passes may not not even address, or perhaps minimally address, the illegal immigration situation.  It will almost certainly open up the flood gate for H1-B visas.  Enough money was steered to enough politicians to guarantee this.  As with nearly everything that comes from Washington, we again have the best government that money can buy. 

I've seen places that fill their ranks with H1-b workers getting paid 1/3 or less the prevailing rate, maybe $15-20/hr when a green card or US citizen would pull perhaps $60-70 for the same work.  These visa workers sit 8-12 in a closet converted to workspace, and they live together crammed into an apartment by similar numbers.

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-immigration-bill-political-win-mark-zuckerberg-fwdus-20130627,0,4908127.story

^  yeah, what he said. 

The truth is, it's a global economy.  No matter what, people who are qualified will do the work.  If we put in place policies that force people to hire Americans in America then the company will just open up offices overseas.

That's exactly what's happened in the manufacturing industry.  Unions and many other entities forced companies to not hire foreign labor and mandated they pay higher wages to their employees through collective bargaining and laws.  It's not exactly the same, but it's the similar economic law that governs them both.

I thought it was the free trade acts that caused that. What if companies would have had to pay high tariffs on goods manufactured overseas and sold in the US? That might have kept some of it in the states. The wage gap in the USA is huge and growing. That can't be good for the economy.

I don't think allowing more immigrant work visas will help. 

I'm the furthest thing from a macro economist, but I think you're correct in the context of manufactured goods.  In my industry (IT Services) the tariffs don't really apply because it's services that are being done remotely overseas or people being brought over for employment purposes (H1-B) when we can't find candidates locally.

As for low income workers the current Visa program doesn't fit them at all.  If we were to implement something like that it would have to be a whole new program.  Go to the US embassy, pay your $10 and have a background check to get your immigrant worker card which would allow you to legally cross the border and get a job.

Now obviously there are the complexities of having 20M people from Mexico commuting across the border every day and taking over 95% of the low income jobs.  That would cause downward wage pressure, so I recognize my simplistic approach has a lot of issues as well. 

Like I said, they'll likely just kick the can down the road versus try to fix this very complex issue.

Not to mention most of them not commuting... They are gonna get over the border and stay.