I wonder how many times Glenn Beck will turn out to be wrong before people stop putting any stock in his opinions? Then again, being wrong got him this far and it seems the wronger he gets the bigger he gets.
But I hate to tell Glenn Beck: immigrants pay to get into this country. I'm not talking about paying the shady guy who will hide you in his van and then set you loose in the desert to find your way to the nearest town and equip you with only a gallon of water. I'm not talking about the drug runners who pay drug mules to risk their lives swallowing 50 balloons.
No, I'm talking about good ole' fashion legal immigration. The same kind that Glenn Beck's family probably used.
When my wife and I moved back to the states (college abroad) we had to get my wife a green card because she was European (read "Socialist"!!). We didn't use lawyers because we couldn't afford one. We just had to become experts real quick on the INS and the lovely i485 application, the i130 application, and about 15 other applications who's code numbers I've since forgotten.
Even without lawyers and with our costs at a theoretical 0 dollars on that end, we had to pay about 1800 dollars in application fees for all the paperwork we had to submit. It's amazing how each fee adds up. And they're all very expensive. It cost her 12 dollars to apply for her driver's license and the DMV but each INS application was around 200 bucks (memory fails me on exact costs).
So not only is Beck celebrating slavery... he's factually wrong. We charge immigrants to come into this country.
In fact, The Inflation Calculator tells us that if they had just kept the immigrant fee in line with the rate of inflation, it would have only cost us 125 dollars to apply!!! (based on the earliest year of 1800 to 2008 inflation adjustment).
And working the other side of the equation, if the INS had been setting the fee back when the constitution was drafted, it would have said:
