Imigration in America

[kandrathe]

What sets the price of drugs? ... So what is it?

The price a user is willing to pay for them (both monetary and physically).

Just legalize, and the gangs lose their no. 1 source of revenue.

I just don't see the same progressive government that is contemplating outlawing salt allowing the use of heroin. They know what's best for us. The gangs will turn to kidnapping, and other crimes (e.g. Somalia).

Go to a pharmacy, or a hospital. If you've got the basics of chemistry, you can find near-exact equivalents for speed, heroin, opium, tranquillizers, you name it. It's all there, in the *legal* pharmacopoeia, already.

In very limited supplies. I'm sure Pfizer and Merck would be able to find a ready supplier though.

There's a difference between "unwilling" and "unable". I'm offering my solution. I think it would work - or at least, work a hell of a lot better and cheaper than what's happening now. Whether there is the will to implement this solution is another matter. If the US will never adopt any policy but drug war, then obviously, the drug war will continue.

I agree. Both Republicans and Democrats here are following the "drug war" path. Funding waxes and wanes with the political winds. It's the local cops who have to deal with streets inundated with narcotics as interdiction fails to cut off supplies.

So long as migrating to work is illegal, yes. If migrating to work was easy and legal, then there would be much less market for people to enter illegally. Why pay for a coyote, when you can just go to the border and apply?

The traffic goes both ways. Slavery is illegal, and legalizing slavery would not be an answer to reducing the flow of human trafficking. This is more easily masked currently due to the flood of southern commuters going to work in the US.

First, there is a restricted pool of people who want to migrate. It's large, but it's not infinite. There is also a restricted pool of opportunities, and once they are filled, people will no longer come to fill them. If migration stops because the jobs are already filled, then great. Equilibrium! You might have to fiddle with lowering minimum wage laws, but I wouldn't be opposed to that.

The people who come now don't know if there is a job for them or not. They come based upon hope alone.

Second, lots of illegal migrants receive paycheques, which means they pay social security - and never collect. I'm sure they don't get much in the way of a benefits package, but they do generate tax revenue. Cash under the table does not generate a paper trail, and if they're hoping for citizenship, they're going to need a paper trail.

Paper trails lead to investigations and deportation. They know the game. Most illegal workers don't pay any taxes.

However, you are absolutely right that it is employers' savings driving this. But, if minimum-wage guest-worker labour was readily available in whatever quantities you needed, would employers risk hiring illegals on a large scale? Would migrants choose to migrate illegally for terrible wages, when they had the option of migrating legally for minimum wage? It would at least diminish the problem. I suspect it would more or less eliminate it.

I think there is something that can be done for guest workers, beyond making it easier to become documented (in a US embassy in their home nation preferably). If the law allowed that guest workers payed no social security, minimal taxes, and had some cheap option for health care, then it might work. It would be ironic that guests workers, would from a libertarian sense, be freer than the citizens.