I agree with Dana. If they're not providing healthcare for the immigrants, but give them legal residency, the consequence may be the unemployment of low-income Americans. Immigration and healthcare reform are related to each other. I don't think it's a good idea to totally separate those two when they clearly have affects on each other. Obama says he has a lot on his plate, but what about those detained immigrants who have been separated from their families for years. Aren't those people and their families have a lot more on their plate than Obama does?

http://www.newsy.com/videos/putting_immigration_on_the_back_burner

A lot of news sources in this vdo are saying Obama's doing the right thing by prioritizing the lists, but some says, like me, that he's putting off the time that detained immigrants will be released. This is a pretty interesting analysis. What do you think?

"Giving immigrants a path to legal residency without equal access to health care would not only be inhumane..."

Agreed.
Lets not do either.

Instead, lets actually enforce the laws that stand and "encourage" them to depart of their own accord. Actually prosecute employers for every instance a violation is found.

Actually, pro-immigration groups have been betraying their fellow Americans for the past Decade. By pushing for the admission of 1 million new immigrants per year to take jobs and drive down wages at a time when tens of millions of Americans are not only unemployed but are long term unemployed -- and millions more are in prison.

So why the concern trolling over stabbing low income Americans in the back?

This is one more reason why employer mandates are a suboptimal policy idea.

So let me get this straight, our politicians can't pass health care reform because of the prospect that there will be immigration reform and that we may extend coverage to "today's illegals." Give me a break. I wouldn't hold your breath on immigration reform (even though I think it is needed but that is for another thread). What a pathetic excuse to use.

Not providing basic health care to everyone in the US is short sighted and stupid. Isn't it better to have everyone in the system than to have sick people roaming the streets infecting healthy people? We are one of the the richest countries in the world. Do we really want to deny basic health care to people who need it? What do you expect legal immigrants to do for health care. Go to emergency rooms?

"Giving immigrants a path to legal residency without equal access to health care would not only be inhumane, it would be awful for low-income Americans."

I find that an offensive and somewhat shockingly nativist statement coming from the likes of the American Prospect. Hiring low-income legal residents would be "awful" to low-income citizens? The implication is that low-income legal residents somehow don't deserve jobs as much as their low-income citizen counterparts. Huh?

I agree that everyone ought to have access to healthcare, citizen and non-citizen, documented and undocumented. But the effect of excluding non-citizens, from an employment perspective, will be simply to shift some employment from one low-income group to another. It's not a net loss, or gain, to low-income people as such. Unless you don't consider low-income immigrants "people."

This is probably just a poorly written ("inartful") sentence or otherwise a half-baked thought, because I simply cannot believe a TAP writer would really mean that. It ought to be corrected.

In the Klein interview Ms. DeParle stated "our industry." She did so relative to Pharma savings commitments.

Was that a slip of the tongue or an indication of Nancy's several decade background as a health for-profiteer? Likely the latter.

"Instead, lets actually enforce the laws that stand and "encourage" them to depart of their own accord. Actually prosecute employers for every instance a violation is found"u rally think we can do that or u are just stupid?Just move on or will stcuk with forever

"Giving immigrants a path to legal residency without equal access to health care would [...] be inhumane"

Why? The obvious fact that the immigrants would still choose the US over their country of origin is OBVIOUS PROOF of the fact that their situation in the US is better than in their country of origin! This type of lazy, nations-as-units-of-redistribution thinking is what unfortunately infects so much of the left in the West (whereas the right simply doesn't care about the welfare of immigrants at all).

Why is it that we should focus on giving more to current (illegal?) immigrants rather than on their poorer brethren in the countries they come from (say, by allowing more immigrants into the wonderful anti-poverty program known as the USA).

As far as this: "Why would an employer hire an American citizen, for whom he will have to provide health coverage, when he could instead hire a perfectly legal new resident, who is exempt from health insurance mandates?"

Elementary economics tells you that the issue only arises when you bump up against the binding lower constraint known as "minimum wage". For jobs where this constraint does factor in (as I'm sure it would for many currently illegal immigrants) it would be simple to ensure that businesses face the same cost in hiring somebody covered by the mandate as they do in hiring somebody who is not covered by the mandate. For instance, they could be required to pay a tax equal to the contribution they would make employees who are covered by the mandate. Or they could be forced to purchase a less generous insurance plan with that money (one with higher deductibles or lower coverage?). Either way, the point is that access to public funds subsidizing health care is fairly easy to separate from the burden placed on employers.

lol @ the people who understand human migration and economics so little that they think immigrants hurt the economy and that they'd just "leave".

Those things are the opposite of true.

Ironically, I'm sure most of their ancestors came recently rather than being part of the founding of this nation and the same thing was said about them. It proved to be untrue then and it's still untrue today.

Immigrants compliment rather than supplant American workers for the most part and the drive down the costs of goods and services.

Not to mention they are healthier and younger and use health care resources less because of this.

There isn't going to be health care reform. And there isn't going to be immigration reform.

Congressmen and Senators can read polls and they aren't going to sacrifice themselves for Obama or anyone or anything else.

Klein and Goldstein represent the political liberal elites. These people aren't even liberal in many respects of the word but are rather simply political and ideological elites who live in their own rarefied world of opinion hacking. Their disregard for the market effects of mass immigration on the lives of average and lower class Americans belies any claimed concerns for those people.

That the Democrats intend to reward those who have broken our immigration laws with legal permanent residence is a stated goal of the party and hence any failure to include the significance of that with regard to health care legislation is simply intentional deception. That is the norm for the open borders elite. Deception and racial/ethnic politics are their chief modus operandi.

The claim that the legislation prohibits benefits to illegal immigrants is indeed belied by the refusal to include "language in the bill requiring government agencies to verify legal residency." The law for decades has said that employers aren't supposed to hire illegal immigrants but is functionally set up in a way that guarantees it won't be followed.

"Why would an employer hire an American citizen, for whom he will have to provide health coverage, when he could instead hire a perfectly legal new resident, who is exempt from health insurance mandates?"
That's silly. Why would you exempt employers from their responsibility even if you were to ban taxpayer dollars from subsidizing the health insurance of the amnestied? And what's the source that says this is being proposed?

I'm trying to figure out how this post dated on the 13th can reference an Erza Klein post dated on the 18th. Klein's immigration post has comments closed and if you go to his blog in general and the recent archive, it's not even there. What's that about?