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Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Ilegal Immigrants Don't Vote

So the illegal immigrants marched on Washington demanding citizenship. That's nice. But they might just as well have demanded free Slurpees.

Yes, the House is considering a bill that among other things would effectively grant amnesty and allow people presently living in the United States illegally an avenue by which they could become citizens. Yes, this would be a superb time for a passionate grassroots movement one way or the other. Yes, the mall in Washington, D.C. is the site of many great assemblies of the American people, banding together so that their collective voice be heard.

The people fighting for the rights of illegal immigrants compare their cause to the civil rights movement of the 1960's. This is fairly apt, because never since that time has a group with so little political clout tried to exercise it.

At the beginning of the civil rights movement, African-Americans could not vote and generally occupied the socio-economic underbelly of this country. They were denied many basic services provided to Americans. The combination of all of these things served to keep Black America depressed and would have continued to do so ad infinitum had certain Black leaders not impressed upon some people with political clout just how immoral the system was.

Feel free to trade out some nouns in the last paragraph and find precisely the same situation with which we are dealing now.

The major difference is the level of immorality of the system. For instance, African-Americans (or at least their ancestors) were largely brought here against their will and I cannot imagine there are many illegal immigrants who can say the same. Illegal immigrants to this country have made the choice that living here while being denied certain rights and privileges afforded to American citizens is preferable to living in their homeland under whatever auspices they were living there. They were not brought here and then kept so socio-economically depressed over generations that returning to whence they came was a virtual impossibility.

Do I have some inherent right to the largesse of this nation because my ancestors came here 150 years ago rather than last week? Can we really deny people the right to come here? On what grounds?

On the other hand, don't we have to draw the line somewhere? We are talking about admitting a group of people representing the lowest socio-economic levels, levels for which we as a nation are having difficulty providing reasonable services as it is.

I have to admit here that I am strongly ambivalent on this subject as, according to recent Gallup polls, are most Americans.

Building a 700-mile fence on the Mexican border is a horrible idea. It sounds like restitution for 25 years of failed Republican efforts to fund the Star Wars defense plan. But fences are expensive, and not just once. I work with a lot of ranchers, and fence maintenance is a reality of their life. Several times a year, somebody has to traverse the length of every fence on a ranch to ensure that it is in sufficient repair to contain cattle or sheep or pigs or llamas or emus or whatever they might be trying to contain. And what kind of a fence actually contains people? Should it be modeled after the Berlin Wall or the Great Wall of China? I hope the Democrats carry the mid-term elections so that there will be somebody around to point out how inhumane an electric fence would be. God knows we wouldn't listen to the UN.

An even worse idea is making illegal immigration a felony. We deport illegal immigrants as it is (theoretically, of course - were this strictly true, we would not be having this discussion), so we could only be suggesting imprisonment for these people. Brilliant. Rather than extending the rights and privileges of responsible citizenship, let's house and feed these people at a cost of $40K per person annually without a shred of benefit in return.

So now I'm that guy. I have no solution to propose, only criticism of everyone else's solutions (which, in all fairness, are really stupid). I don't know the answer - I don't even think I understand the question. But I am sure that the proposal on the table is asinine.

It is not, however, as asinine as supposing you can influence congress if you have no money and cannot vote.

Stay tuned as I discuss abortion and the death penalty and continue to alienate both of my readers.

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