More immigration musings
Up to this point, I’d been leaning in the direction of enforcing existing immigration laws on undocumented residents. Which meant deportation, not amnesty. I’d argued it was better for them, and for us, that they’d leave if they were here illegally. I reasoned that their situation here was awful anyway.
But I just realized, while composing a message to an associate, what was going on in the back of my head. That is, we have a huge problem in this country on how poor and disadvantaged people live. And I was trying to fix that problem in a terribly misguided way: I’d found an excuse to deport all those people rather than find a way to ensure that they could live here humanely. Although there still are practical issues with amnesty, letting poor people into our country as citizens isn’t one of them. Summed up: “The less people here that we shit on, the better”.
The way we treat poor people simply sucks. The immigration debate is a huge smokescreen for that travesty, given that most immigrants start out here in the lower classes. Deport all the immigrants, and you still have a flooded Lower Ninth Ward, a broken Detroit, etc. And deportation is a cruel option, one we should try to avoid if we can.
Amnesty looks like a much better social solution right now. I believe that illegal residency creates social problems that would go away if the government gave legal status to most illegal residents - existing social problems for all residents nonwithstanding. And that is a distinction I failed to make earlier.
But we should proceed carefully. There still are a few people in the world who we don’t want in our country under any circumstances. Our national security is of primary importance in immigration handling. Do I trust the government to handle this competently? Let’s not go there, cause that’s a dark place. But we should try to do the right thing… if it is at all possible. I have faith that we can, in some way, work this out.
And if we can’t right now, we can try again in 2009.
(That’s my thinking on all national issues right now. Anything good that happens before the next presidental election is dumb luck, in its dumbest form.)
(just to be equitable: would it not be gross and awful if John Kerry ran for president again? Al Gore is gaining a ton of popularity right now just for an environmental movie and an SNL skit. I love him all over again. And Bill Clinton would win a landslide if allowed to run for a third term. Even the widely detested Hillary Clinton would have a shot at dethroning the GOP. And yet Kerry makes no attempt to hide his desire to step up to the plate again. Puh-leeeeze! Barbato isn’t the horse-face we should be putting out of its misery right now…)