As many as we can?

We aren't even able to take care of all the poor people that are already here, and you think we can accommodate millions more?

The amount spent on the bombs ($22k) or missiles ($110k) used to [possibly] kill enemy targets could rather easily pay to accommodate a few refugees long enough for them to either assimilate and find jobs or wait out the crisis and return home.

All it takes is a commitment to finally throttle the military materiel manufacturing economy--that was ramped up during World War 2--back to a peacetime proportion of the budget.

As it is now, the U.S. has to continually go out and look for new conflicts, and beat loudly the drums of war, to justify that high level of military spending. We have been waiting a long time to beat those swords back into plowshares, and they just keep making more swords.

I think that the entire quota of 70k refugees can be adequately provided for in less than one month just by taking the buildings on a bare handful of shuttered military bases out of mothballs.

We can accommodate millions more, and take care of the poor people that are already here. Our elected politicians prevent such occurrences using the flimsiest of justifications.

Friend, I think you'll find that a proposal to deeply restructure whole economies and societies will not be well-received by people reluctant to accept smaller changes.

Have you considered appealing to what your audience is likely to care about, rather than the goals you find appealing?

What audience? I'm just some guy complaining about things on the Internet.

Rent-seeking behavior seems intrinsic to human society, such that any group of people larger than a certain size will be forced to deal with it in one way or another.

At this point, nothing short of a constitutional amendment is likely to put a dent in the military industrial complex. And that's not happening any time soon.

Complaining about it helps me to not lose my sanity. And that's good, because without my sanity, I might do something like endorse an armed revolution to reduce the political and economic influence of the military in the U.S. See, as a sane person, I know that doesn't make any sense. There is a right way and a wrong way to fight fire with fire; that's the wrong way.

And it gets a dissenting opinion out there, on the off chance that someone might stray far enough from their own echo chamber to see it.

On the off chance that someone strays outside their echo chamber and encounters your dissenting opinion, the likely response is not what you would hope for. As written, the likely response will be for them to conclude that people outside their echo chamber are disconnected from reality and not worth paying attention to. Then they'll go back into their echo chamber, and your dissenting voice will have wasted a perfectly good opportunity.

So, friend, I ask you to stop and consider how you want people who encounter your lone voice in the wilderness to react. Assuming you care - perhaps you value having something to complain (and thus wish to ensure its continued existence) about more than you do persuading people that It Doesn't Have To Be This Way.

The reactions of others are irrelevant to my desire to express my own opinion.

As a political minority, I am well aware that there are literally tens of millions of people who will dismiss my opinions without even pausing to think about them. That doesn't mean that I should stop having them, or stop expressing them in whatever way that pleases me.

I'm not exactly sure what you hope to accomplish by your responses. It almost sounds like you agree with the sentiment, but not the expression. If so, it is not a tad hypocritical to complain about how I am arranging my words rather than try to say it better yourself?

There's always going to be something to complain about. If not how the military-industrial complex is preventing the realization of peacetime prosperity, it might be how we have all this peacetime prosperity, but can't keep the mosquitoes from biting everyone at the picnic. If we run out of truly awful things to complain about, we can always complain about the merely annoying things. So I find your suggestion that complainers would actually prefer that the things they complain about not be fixed to be misguided.

I'm suggesting that if you want to standing a snowball's chance in Hell of fixing the things you identify as problems, you need to think about how to persuade people. Bluntly, ranting in a person's general direction tends not to be a great way to change their mind, and changing minds is almost certainly what you need to further your stated goals.

I perhaps could say it better myself, but that's not my goal at this juncture.

Not all of them, but a lot of them. Anyway just because we haven't doesn't mean we can't.

I'm positive FED will be able to print some more money, there's always enough for military actions in middle East in the first place.

define "can"

and "we" while you're at it.

As usual, a challenge to the drive-by downvoters: answer the question. At what point have we done all we can? We "can" give ourselves as slaves to refugees to make their lives easier but I don't think that's what was meant. So A) where's the line and B) how close are we to that line?

I don't think we're really straining ourselves to handle the amount of refugees we are currently taking. That means, wherever the line is, we're not that close to it.

By what measure? If you don't know how to recognize when it's become a problem then it's not meaningful when you say you don't see a problem.

What is straining to you? I would describe our education system, our legal system, our prison system and our welfare system as all being currently "strained" so we must have different definitions.

(and to the downvoting crew, feel free to explain to me what productive disagreeement looks like, eh?)

I don't think the strain on any of those things is caused by immigration. If we improved them to make them better for current residents, it would also increase our capacity for immigrants. But I'd see that as just a side effect of fixing broken systems.

You've once again avoided giving even a qualitative answer as to what strain caused by immigration would look like. A first step would be admitting that it's even possible.

You've also made the mistake of thinking that just because you've found one problem that others must not exist. We can have broken systems and problems caused by immagration.

10% ESL students in our public education system should qualify as a strain. 17% of California's prisoners being born abroad should qualify as a strain. Are these numbers not high enough for you? If not, what does too high look like to you?

I've been letting you identify the problems because frankly I can't see any. California has so many prisoners it doesn't have enough prisons for them all. The solution is easy: imprison fewer people. Too many ESL students? That solves itself over time as they become ESL (or even non-English) teachers.

If you don't know what a problematic level of immigration looks like then you have no idea if you're looking directly at it or not. You're telling me you haven't seen any chickens lately, I'm asking what you think a chicken looks like, and you're saying you don't see any right now.

A 10% ESL student population doesn't solve itself. That's like a child thinking that their refrigerator magically fills itself when it gets empty. If you ignore that solutions have costs than yes by your definition ESL students have no costs associated with them.

I asked about the strain on the legal system due to immigrant populations, specifically the prison system in California. You said we should put less people in jail. While that's true it doesn't solve the problem unless we're going to change our laws to the extent that aggravated assault is no longer a crime. Then we've once again solved the problem by refusing to admit it even exists.

So maybe California has more immigrants than it can handle. I can't see it from New Hampshire. Anyway there are several times more people in prison now than in the 80's even though the crime rate has dropped, so I don't think violent criminals make up the majority of the prison population.

As of 2006, 49.3% of state prisoners, or 656,000 individuals, were incarcerated for non-violent crimes.

By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

If the prison system is working at all we would expect to see violent crime drop as the prison population increases. There's a profit motive as well but we have to remember why societies build prisons in the first place.

Only 10% of California's prisoners have never been convicted of a violent crime. I doubt they all need to be locked up but I'm not seeing those prisons as being filled with peaceful drug dealers like the rumor has it.

I would guess in New Hampshire there isn't much of an immigrant population. I just looked it up and it's about 93% white there. My state's about 2/3's white, I live in a part of town where I don't walk around after dark because I might get jumped for being white which does affect my perspective. I have neighbors who immigrated from Mexico decades ago and still don't even speak basic english. I'm not saying my state should become all white or anything like that, but maybe we've reached a good mix and we could deal with the problems our hispanic and black communities already have because that's a challenge as it is. We're struggling to get them to stop killing each other, make it through high school and to read at a basic level. If we can't do that I don't know why we think we can take on even more people.

NH has immigrants but most of the immigrants have been white so far. My great-grandparents were born in Italy, and one of my great-aunts who was born here only spoke French until she was 14. There are still significant French-speaking groups in the southern part of the state. Lately my hometown has been taking in refugees from Bhutan. They don't speak much English but they are great neighbors and businesspeople. 3% of the population of the city are refugees who have settled since 2008, not counting other immigrants.

I think if it's working that's great, I support a cultural plurality. It's like adopting kids - if you're doing well with the ones you have then have at it. If your kids are starving and can barely read, don't adopt more. In my state less than 7 of 10 of both our hispanic and black students are even graduating high school right now. We have too many districts with on-time graduation rates below 60% and those are the districts immigrants and refugees are most likely to flow into.

19% of high school graduates in the US are functionally illiterate[0]. Nationwide only half of black males are graduating at all. Half. We're already failing to take care of our poor. We're spending a very large amount of money trying to but it happens to be expensive.

If you go back to the start of this thread you'll see I've been consistent that there's a point where taking in more people is no longer a good thing. That doesn't mean I think it's always a bad thing, just that we should be honest that it can be.

[0] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3...

You are asserting the existence of strain and that it is due to immigration, so the burden is rightly on you to explain the appropriate metric, provide evidence of that the level at which you have defined "strain" on that metric is met, and provide evidence that immigration is the cause of that.

First, I think your intention is to silence me as opposed to engaging in discussion.

Second, my main assertion is the existence of a point where immigration is problematic. Example: colonialism.

Third, as to the side conversation of whether or not America is experiencing a problematic level of immigration I've already submitted the fact that 10% of students in US public schools are ESL learners. We can add to it that 16% of California's prisoners were not born on U.S. soil and they're so overcrowded the Supreme Court ordered them to do something about it. I'm calling these things "strain". I hope we can agree that immigration plays a role in both examples.

I didn't know there were any wars in South America, lately.

It's the War on Drugs, waged by America, and it's been going on for decades.

So your country has to be in the middle of a civil war for you to be a refugee? Well damn, let's go tell all the people in Honduras and El Salvador that they can't leave and seek asylum because they're not allowed to be refugees.

Most latin immigrants are economic refugees and those escaping local gangland violence rather than regime violence.

"Economic refugee"? This is some way to make a word lose its meaning. At this point any immigrant would become a refugee.

"A refugee is a person who is outside their home country because they have suffered (or feared) persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion; because they are a member of a persecuted social category of persons; or because they are fleeing a war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee

Sigh: According to the researchers, a lack of protection of migrants in the region was based on a "false distinction" between a forced and an economic migrant, instead of focusing on the real and urgent needs some of these migrants have. The report suggested that a better term would be "forced humanitarian migrants", who moved for the purpose of their and their dependents' basic survival. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee#Economic_migrants

How about every single one that asks?