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| 2007-06-07 register | login | ||
Immigration: We Need Moral Leadership, NOT a Legal UnderclassI have mixed, mostly negative feelings about the bipartisan immigration reform bill S. 1348. First, though, let me share this for people who keep repeating 'what don't you understand about illegal?'. When a traffic cop stops a speeder, suppose he tells him 'You got here in an illegal manner. You're going to be taken back to where you were last driving legally, plus a few hundred miles for good measure. If you pay $5000 and wait a few weeks, maybe you can come this way again. Letting you just pay a fine and keep driving would be rewarding your illegal manner of getting here.' Come on, people - there are laws, and there are penalties, and people who break a law pay the penalty and then can go on with their lives. A five thousand dollar fine for a violation that did not hurt or endanger another person strikes me as way on the high side. And as for skipping line, undocumented persons who pay a fine still go to the back of the waiting list for permanent residency.And, do people screaming about 'illegality' realize that the United States ILLEGALLY DEPORTED more than 400,000 hispanics back in 1929, just because there was competition for jobs? And that in 1954 as part of 'Operation Wetback' uncounted numbers of American citizen children were illegally deported, with techniques involving sweeps of hispanic neighborhoods, random stops and ID checks of "Mexican-looking" people anywhere on the street? I wouldn't mind asking that new immigrants be required to study some rights and responsibilities of U.S. residents and citizens, and English - but could we somehow require U.S. citizens to study our own history? Gee whiz... I will grant that Kyl has more courage than I ever had thought. I never saw a positive fibre in the man until this year. However: a permanent guest worker program is a form of legalized servitude. Check out this report entitled "Close to Slavery:" http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/SPLCguestworker.pdf from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Guest workers are missing fundamental rights that other workers have, first and foremost the practical ability to switch jobs. Do we really want to create a nation with a large legal underclass of people working in substandard conditions? [snip - removed proposal for a win-win solution from here and gave it its own separate item --GV 7/7/07] Here is a link to all information including text of the bill. I've noticed a lot of news articles neglect to give the bill number, which makes the actual text hard to find. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:s.01348:" |
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