re: #163 sagehen

My dad’s parents came here in the mid-1920’s — I don’t know if they were legal, it was after the 1924 racist quota bill, but maybe they had visas. possibly.

I do know for sure they didn’t speak any English. They weren’t any kind of Christian. They had 6th-grade educations, and did low-wage work. Whatever taxes they may have paid were nowhere close to the cost of their kids attending public school, and receiving medical care at public hospitals. They were criminals; their religious observances required wine several times a week, but they were too paranoid to put their names on the Prohibition-exemption special Jew lists.

But their offspring… were two doctors, two lawyers, and the founder/owner of a specialty auto-parts business. All of whom paid income tax in the highest bracket for 40-50 years each. Each one of whose work (even aside from taxes) provided more benefit to society and to the nation than the costs of absorbing all of them into our polity.

Steve Jobs father was a Syrian immigrant. The economic value added by Jobs all by himself outweighs by orders of magnitude the damage done by criminals or terrorist immigrants from Muslim countries.