"When the facts are against you, argue the law. When the law is against you, argue the facts. When both the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table."Read the rest here.
This rule of thumb for lawyers has been adopted by the pro-illegal immigration crowd. The facts are against them: 11 million illegal aliens cause a host of serious problems for job seekers, for taxpayers, for public order, for national security.
Likewise, the law is against them. There's no question that immigration laws are legitimate and that every illegal immigrant knows perfectly well that he is breaking American law.
What's left? Pound on the table, demanding that illegal aliens be referred to in ways that obscure their illegality, such as "undocumented worker" or simply "immigrant." "Unauthorized worker" is less deceitful, but still evades the basic fact of illegality.
Imitating Christ: Being a Stranger and Sojourner
21 hours ago
15 comments:
What's too often lost on the Right regarding illegal immigration is perspective on how bad it is. Speeding is 'breaking the law', too, but it's not that weighty an issue even though it's endemic. Illegal immigration does cause problems, it also solves a lot of problems, too - and not always in the ways we think. The 'job creators' Republicans love prefer to keep a large illegal workforce available to them (a cheap workforce with little incentive to use legal remedies against abuse by employers, low wages, and dangerous working conditions) and lack of affordable healthcare results in low paid illegal immigrants using ERs a lot.
The sturm und drang is not about the principal of the rule of law or even about controlling our borders. It's about the same thing it's always about culture, skin tone, religion, and mistaking poverty for moral and cultural failings - and the fact that such a wave of immigrants means America doesn't look or sound like the image of America people have in their heads of 'the way things used to be'.
123, you're projecting. That may be what you like to tell yourself how all Republicans think and act, to validate your own assumptions and prejudices. But you've no basis in reality.
There's no reason something as obviously wanted by most Americans - businessmen and immigration advocates - and so regularly unenforced by Dem and Rep administrations at the state and federal levels should be so vehemently opposed to what is really not all that big a deal. Given our history, illegal immigration is more like a speeding ticket than it is about some high falutin rule of law implying lack of security.
Protests to the contrary about what opposition is not really about remind me of a line concerning Lady Macbeth...
As a long-time now former Republican, I know whereof I speak, too.
C'mon 123, that's gross oversimplification. To Beltway elites, it might be something worth ignoring regardless of whose in power, but to border communities and states, immigration issues are important each and every day. Just how far are you from the Mexican border?
It's the border states where the illegal labor is most exploited, so take it up with your local businesses not the poor trying for a better life and a little money.
Every big city and every corporate farm community in the US has large illegal immigrant populations, north or south. In the north we also have illegal immigrants from around the world, not just LatAm.
The primary 'problem' with illegal immigration is the exploitation of the immigrants themselves and the change they have on the culture and demographics of the communities they are hired in. if they were legal, they and their local employers would be paying taxes to support the services the illegal immigrants use. Companies that use such labor don't want that though as it would eat into the bottom line. Again, take it up with the demand side (American employers) not with the supply side (poor immigrants desperate enough to leave their homes and families to illegally enter a country where they can make money). Thinking illegal immigration is the illegal immigrants' fault reminds me the merciless pursuit of those who've stolen food out of hunger (theirs and their children's).
... reminds me the merciless pursuit of those who've stolen food out of hunger (theirs and their children's).
LOL. Yes - the prisons are full of men mercilessly pursued for stealing food for their hungry families.
When was the last time you were in a prison or in a courtroom during arraignments?
If that would have been my point, that comment would have been a zinger. Unfortunately, that was not my point.
Except your post is full of sentimental gush like that. "Exploited" "the poor" etc. I can take you to a lot of immigrant communities in Georgia--legal and illegal--and you will see a lot of late model cars, tattoos, cell phones, rims, bling, video games, Univision blaring on the flatscreen TV, etc.
"Exploited?" You really don't know the meaning of the term. They are here precisely because it enables them to avoid actual exploitation back in their homelands.
Explouted relative to the Americans they are supposedly taking jobs away from. Exploited need not refer only to human traficking and peasant slave labor - though most illegal immigrants are simply fleeing poverty, not exploitation. If you think companies hiring illegal immigrants would pass OSHA requirements, feel free to believe that. They are also primarily being exploited by being paid so poorly relative to the cost of living here. Yes, Mexican bling is proof they're treated very, very well here and/or are dangerous criminals; poverty couldn't possibly lead people into crime as a way to get ahead. I remember reading similar things about supposed welfare queens. Exceptions do not prove the rule.
I'll tell you who hires most illegal immigrants: other immigrants.
Also, you speak as an authority on OSHA requirements. Which ones are you seeing violated?
They are also primarily being exploited by being paid so poorly relative to the cost of living here.
Again, you don't have a coherent definition of exploitation. If they were paid what you thought they should be paid, then they wouldn't be here, because then they wouldn't be able to offer an employer any comparative advantage. Employers would just hire somebody from the costlier extant workforce.
Immigrants are here voluntarily because even with the low pay and barriers to entry, they're still treated better here than by their own countrymen back home. They are not being exploited under any coherent efinition of the term.
Sure. They can make more money here, that's all, and don't expect to be treated well. Desperation makes one do all sorts of things, but I'm not sure our treating them badly but not terribly makes taking advantage of their desperation alright.
Besides, my main point is that breaking the law coming into the US to work for people who want to hire them is not that big a deal. There's demand, and that demand is where opponents of illegal immigration should be venting their spleen. The fact they are not points to the real motivation behind their opposition to illegal immigrants - the same nativism older generations of immigrants in the US have always shown to new arrivals, before and after the introduction of immigration controls. And all new immigrant waves were often maltreated (if you prefer that term to exploited), and it was always wrong.
Anti-Gnostic,
Some one should drop you off in one of the illegal alien labor-run fruit and vegetable fields that I've seen first hand in Clewiston or Homestead, FL. And probably leave you there.
Hugs and Kisses,
Julio (the son of immigrants)
Stick to issues please, not personalities.
Julio - good luck with workplace reforms when employers can just bring in another busload of ever-poorer Third Worlders. Cesar Chavez figured this out early on. And again, it is striking that they still prefer agricultural worksites in South Florida to places run by their own countrymen.
123 has a great point on the fact that one of the main importers of illegal labor are corporate interests. Large pork producers are notorious for this. Crack down on them, and the effects will flow downwards to the small fries. Were we in their place, we'd do the same thing, as Anti-Gnostic points out, in order to have better quality of living here.
The crack down will not happen however, as the federal government is largely interested in the importation of labor in order to control wages and eventually, when naturalization occurs, raise tax revenue. Our culture of death does not produce enough offspring to keep the cogs greased on programs like Social Security, Medicare and Defense.
Post a Comment