http://ozarkssentinel.com/Missouri-ahead-of-the-game-in-dealing-with-illegal-immigrants-p1034.htm - http://ozarkssentinel.com/Missouri-ahead-of-the-game-in-dealing-with-illegal-immigrants-p1034.htm

I think they did/are. Perhaps if 5 million illegal aliens were deported, our national unemployment rate would go down.

Because we would have to hire new people to deport that many illegals?  

 

I give the measure a big ole

That is all.

While it's nice to have legislation to deal with the problem of enforcement (And it seems like this did a better job than Arizona by not creating a legal loophole), it's still just a Band-Aid on a bullet-hole until we fix our immigration policy. 

But you all already know my thoughts on that. 

Agreed.  Not to trivialize the point, but I dream of a day when I dial a technical response number and not be prompted to dial '1' for English.

As far as the language goes, I don't think anyone should be able to demand that they are provided bilingual services in a legal sense. However, as far as the free market goes, which is the true law in the U.S., they can, do, and will continue to demand it. If businesses want to keep up and profit, they'll provide that service.

 

While some things are great in principle, that don't do so well on paper. For instance, I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO PRESS 1 TO  SPEAK ENGLISH GAD DANGIT sounds okay as a Facebook status, but if you're running a business, taking away the touch tone language option could mean a good amount of business lost. So this is certainly a case where the law means little in comparison to the market.

 

As for the police checking for immigration status, I actually have a question for the edu-ma-cated here on the forum. Isn't immigration a federal matter? If so, even if the police check the status of a suspect, there's no guarantee that the government will follow up on the report. In fact, and I don't feel like linking but it's out there, they've proven that they rarely do. So really, again sounds great in principle, but really only works to fill up county jails and waste legal system dollars.

 

Immigration is a funny issue. There are lots of small businesses that are American run but exist because of labor provided by illegal immigrants. America is a fairly restrictive place to run a small business if you play by the rules. Especially with rising minimum wage laws cutting down market competition to where you'll make more goofing off at a fast food restaurant than you will busting your ass working for a small business owner. Because of that, there are alot of businesses around here who wouldn't make anywhere near the profit if they were forced to hire legit.

 

So where there's a small hole in the economy created by those illegals, they could create an even larger hole if they were pulled out.

 

It's not about Americans not willing to do the labor, it's more about the standards that employers have to live up to legally. The employment field has to remain competitive just like the economic field, and when that element fades, small business owners are forced to make compromises.

 

I'm not saying that's religious, but it's how I see it. I could be dead wrong, but I think that this issue is more complicated than SPEAK ENGLISH OR GET OFF MAH DAMN LAWN.

You know, up until this thread I actually agreed that having a national language is silly, but without a national language, couldn't a law theoretically be passed in Spanish or French or Russian? I highly doubt any lawmaker would do that, or such a law would pass for that matter, but if it did, then wouldn't courts need to not only consider the meaning of the law, but the validity of the translation, since most languages do not truly map to other languages perfectly?

Maybe someone more lawyerly could clarify on this

Crieky, do I really strike you like that?

Alright, I'll give you that my wording of the question may have failed to stress that I meant that question as a purely academic exercise, but it is an honest question. 

Allow me to add conditions then: Given that I don't see this being a serious issue any time soon for America, and not advocating a National language at any foreseeable point in the future, could that hypothetically be a condition for a National language or would such translation issues have no bearing on the meaning of a law, no matter the language it's written in?