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Yes, her room and board was part of the program. And she was making $128 a week during that year. Yet, she saw the limitless opportunity here, even for someone for whom English was a second language and struggling with the cultural differences. Native born Americans have neither of those problems.
After we married and were waiting on her paperwork to process, I suggested she attend classes at the local community college rather that sit home being bored. She took a few IT courses and was hooked. I spent evenings teaching her about databases (she was taking a class on Access). Once her greencard was in good order, she found a job doing simple database work. She looked for further opportunities and eventually hooked up with a company with educational benefits, earning a Masters' in Software Engineering by working during the day and going to school at night. (She had the equivalent of a B.A. in Linguistics from her home country (in the former Soviet Union), planning to be a teacher there.) The point is that she looked for opportunity and worked to make it pay off rather than looking for someone else to care for her. We expect no more of others than we are willing to do ourselves.
While lots of Americans cry for "lack of opportunities", they have no idea about the struggle of the legal immigrants.
As a legal immigrant myself, it's really difficult for me to sympathize "the plight" of the Americans when I know what the legal immigrants must have gone through.
Aside from language and cultural problems, most foreigners, who entered US legally, aren't allowed to work until they become legal immigrants, a process often takes 10+ years. However, so many legal immigrants including myself overcame those major problems and became contributing members of our society.
The issues with the poor American people lie with their culture, not lack of opportunities or lack of money.
The only group of people who should receive government assistance is military personnel injured in combat. They are "us" and not civilians who make poor life choices. They should get prompt and quality care before one dime goes out in welfare or SS.
How is one to determine that the company you went to work for is going to go out of business or that things completely out of your control is going to crash the economy?
You don't know, it's called life. And, knowing this, what are "you" doing to prepare for these possibilities? Personally, I live below my means, carry no consumer debt and have emergency savings. This is how I and my small business has survived the recent downturns. It also allowed me to retain good employees.
And when we tried to tell you that they are rampantly abused and tell you real life examples that we see everyday, you say we're making it up.
So you have no interest in seeing the problem or doing things to fix the problem because you'd rather pretend the problem doesn't exist.
So there's no way I want to back your idea of creating more social programs when you won't even admit that the social programs we have our being abused or commit to fixing them.
Worse than that, you say it's okay that they're abused because at least they help some other people one way or another. Which just tells me you should never be in charge of anything that costs money ever. Especially other people's money.
For my part, I know too many people who were at rock bottom in their lives who, through lots of work and support, turned their lives around. These people have become productive members of society who contribute much to their communities.
#alllivesmatter right?
Then you donate to them, open up a charity, ask for donations and crusade to help those people you describe.
What's that? You don't want to? You want to spend other peoples money to do your charity? How benevolent of you! How caring!
You don't know, it's called life. And, knowing this, what are "you" doing to prepare for these possibilities? Personally, I live below my means, carry no consumer debt and have emergency savings. This is how I and my small business has survived the recent downturns. It also allowed me to retain good employees.
I don't believe you. That said.......you don't do all of these things overnight plus it doesn't even answer my question.
Because many people don't like to pay for the decisions of others
This is a society. We must in some regards work with each other. We all already are "paying for the decisions of others" in so many ways, across the spectrum.
I would prefer not to pay for an unnecessary buildup/increase in military expenditures, for instance. Or my taxes going for two dozen pointless investigations into a bunch of groundless BS. But that's life.
What galls me about those opposed to social programs is that things like SNAP (food stamps) cost us very little while corporate welfare like subsidies, incentives, tax breaks, and so on cost us orders of magnitude more, and benefit ONLY companies and individuals who are already insanely wealthy and profitable.
Yet few people seem to discuss that far larger drain on the average American taxpayer, while they are eager to demonize the working poor who receive the equivalent of $5-6 per day in food assistance. Somehow it is those people who are characterized as the ones that will cause the economic downfall of our nation.
Which is, of course, wrong-headed, backwards, hypocritical and false BS, and nothing but.
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