Reader comments
A to-do list for the presidential front-runners

About illegal immigrants and their families: The law should be changed so that children of non-citizens are not given automatic citizenship by birth. That way, they can all go home together. That's the way it is in most countries, anyway.

Problem solved.

It seems to me that a critical examination of our so-called preemptive foreign policy is also in order, as it affects everything else.

Unskilled laborers are in such oversupply that unemployment among the native-born unskilled is double the overall unemployment rate. But weren't my grandparents' generation of immigrants also unskilled? In fact, they were slightly more skilled than the native population; the US desperately needed all the tailors, stonecutters, retail clerks, and so on, arriving by the shipload.

Those earlier immigrants brought with them a strong sense of self-reliance, entrepreneurialism, a belief in education for their children, optimism about the future and belief in their new land, and their children were just as likely to end up lawyers, engineers, or accountants as the children of native-born Americans. By contrast, the American-born children of Mexican immigrants, two and a half times likelier to drop out of high school than the average American-born kid, earn less than the national average as adults.

U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants are twice as likely to be on welfare as the American average, and -- disturbingly -- their children are even more likely to be welfare-dependent. The lack of such programs a century ago meant that only the self reliant bothered coming.
It's just obvious that you can't have both free immigration and a welfare state.