I hear a lot about the “immigration debate.”

I live in Texas.

I’ll give a couple thoughts, and I’ll try not to mention it again (unless one of our politicians says something really stupid, so yeah, I might bring it up again)

• They broke the law, send them home.
  I agree. Many of them have been here for years, and they arrived and stayed to work, and hiring illegal immigrants (we used to call them aliens, didn’t we?) is just as illegal as sneaking across the border.

  So I say this: If you want to deport 11 million people for breaking the law, they are allowed to point a finger (or two or ten) at the people that paid them for work, and those folks get convicted, too. Don’t like it? Don’t break the law. (this should keep the courts busy for a decade or two as folks like Wal-Mart and every restaurant and highway or landscaping contractor in the country say “I didn’t do anything wrong!”)

• They don’t pay taxes.
  They may not pay income taxes. They do pay sales tax on everything they buy, and if they pay rent somewhere (even as a subletter) they are paying the property taxes on where they are staying. Unless you think there are special Illegal Immigrant Stores where they can go get things tax-free. I know I paid more in sales taxes last year than I did in income tax, thanks in part to having three dependents. And I can assure you I’m in a much higher tax bracket (two professional salary earners) than somebody working a minimum wage job. So lets give the whole ‘taxes’ thing a break. It’s a wash.

  If we’re gonna whine about people not paying their fair share of taxes, check out all the corporations that have dodged most if not all of their tax liability for years. Little, struggling, mom-and-pop operations like General Electric, Boeing, Bank of America, Prudential, Microsoft. Let’s fix that problem, too.

  update: I just remembered that in other parts of the country there are state income taxes. Not here in Texas. Our sales tax is over six percent, and local sales tax usually adds 2% to that, so it’s 8.25% in much of the state (alcohol by the drink is 14%, last time I looked, built into the price of the drink by the restaurant). In thinking about it, I imagine part of the resistance to a state income tax at the personal level is the number of illegals who would not file – if we had a state tax, we couldn’t justify such a high sales tax rate.

• If this is so important, why did we wait until 11 million people were in the country illegally before deciding to address the problem? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?