ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

I think of myself as a humanitarian and as a liberal,kind,giving,charitable person. However when I think of the government making laws to protect ILLEGAL immigrants, I bristle. Cruel as it seems, I am against giving these people anything but orders to leave the country under their own steam. I do not want my taxes to pay for their passage home, their medical care, food, shelter or special benefits for the children they give birth to over here. They have broken our laws and they are criminals People here go to jail for breaking the most minor of laws. These illegal immigrants have imposed themselves on this country without any respect for our rules or standards of citizenship.
Now, if we want them to be safe and comfortable when they sneak over the border then we should make a law that promises them protection for no reason other than that they are human beings. But as the situation is now, people who break the law have no right to seek protection from it. Inez, you came here from Holland. As I understand it, you were legal on every level. What do you think of the amnesty and privileges people are actually picketing and marching for? It seems to me that allowing this kind of protest is a travesty against every human being who goes through the mountains of paperwork, endures the entire naturalization process, struggles to learn the language and attempts to adhere to the basic tenets of this country. I can remember stories of my grandparents studying for their citizenship exams, failing and trying again. I recall my own mother flunking kindergarten because she could not speak understandable English. Yet now, I hear of Filipino parents coming over here to join their children who are given social security and medical benefits I cannot have even though I was born and educated here and have been working in the system since I was fourteen years old. Again, this is a case of if you make a law...you don't make exceptions just because the economy needs cheap labor. A law is a law not a flexible thing that changes when we need to exploit a hungry helpless group led to believe they will live the American dream they see on their telvision sets IF they have television sets. The answer to this is to change the law to accommodate these "poor,helpless" people who violated our rules and that idea is the most ridiulous of all. It means one law applies to our citizens and another to someone we need to work like an animal.
This brings up another issue that infuriates and shocks me: Why do we feel it is ok to pay illegal immigrants wages that ignore their human needs, starves them and contributes to crime, drugs and illegal contraband they do so they can stay ALIVE in a country they should not have entered in the first place? In my opinion, they should get NO work and NO pay because they are illegal. They should be sent home to do their homework if they want to live here.
BUT to keep them here, work them like cattle and then make laws to protect them because they help our economy is far more cruel than simply saying, "Go home until you have passed all the requirements that United States citizenship demands."
This is an issue you are far more knowledgable about than I, Inez and I would love your take on it.
We have another problem here as well What makes these people think it is so desirable to trade the values of their own country for the materialistic opportunist values we have here...values and attitudes that ignore the poor, the weak, the infirm and the elderly. Schools that care about a score on a test rather than individual ability... ..attitudes that give respect and status to those with money. What on earth is so great about that?