Current Events: Financial and Immigration reform

Earlier today, the senate voted against opening up discussion on financial reform which would aim to prevent the need of future bail outs of Wall street by Washington D.C. Republicans have been cited as the party which blocked the vote from passing. I think that it would be safe to say that this "no" trend coming from the republican party can be expected to continue through out the rest of Obama's presidency. Unless of course they win back a majority in November which will change the way the legislation is written and then the "no" torch will be passed to Obama in the form of his veto pen. While republicans defended what could have been a national toss up in opinion on healthcare reform, it is my opinion that Americans overwhelmingly want financial regulation reform to prevent wasteful allocation of their tax dollars. The on the street consensus is that those guys have way to much power and money for it to continue like it is. They either need to be broken up or have restrictions on how they conduct business.

Edit: Just days later, Republicans decided not to filibuster the vote which would open up debate on financial reform. In my opinion this was a wise decision for republicans seeing that financial reform is extremely popular with the american people. Republicans already have a bad stigma associated with their party about them being in bed with big business. This was especially driven home during the bush era when the vice president Dick Cheney gave huge government contracts to companies he was formerly associated with.

Also, Goldman Sachs is being criminally investigated for knowingly selling bad investments while claiming that they were AAA rated. This criminal investigation and the oil spill has caused setbacks in the stock market.

Moving on to immigration reform, Arizona just passed a state wide immigration reform bill which makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant. Here is president Obama's response to its passage.

While I would agree with the racial profiling injustice this bill would create, I hardly think that enforcement agencies are going to be raiding homes and cars in search of illegal immigrants. What is likely to happen is that they are going to continue their border security and stop people along the border who are traveling. When caught as an illegal alien this new law allows for harsher punishment. This will reduce the amount of illegal crossing along the Arizona border which was the intention of the bill.

Protest movements against the bill have started up across the country and is now officially condemned by the government of Mexico. One such protest resulted in a conflict between police and protesters in which the protesters threw water bottles at law enforcement agents.

Opinion section

Personally I feel that in order to get a grip on the immigration issue facing the country right now we would first need to get complete control of our southern border. The border fence along with increased man power on the ground and in the air could accomplish this. Requesting national guard presence for some length of time would be ideal as well. Not only would this stop the flow of illegal aliens to and from the united states, but it would also decrease the flow of illegal narcotics.

Once the border is stable, immigration can be re opened the legal way which is encouraged by the United States. Personally I think that this country needs passion and motivation which are displayed in the attitudes by Mexican immigrants coming to this country today. To many people have become apathetic and have no real motivation where as immigrant workers are some of the hardest most motivated people that I have ever seen. We need more Americans like that but it must be done in an orderly fashion to give our system time to deal with he mas influx of people to the united states.