Sometimes your heart and head go different directions...like, you are cruising down the highway, you see a skunk...your heart says run the little smurf down, but your head says you don't want your car to reek for three months and a tomato soup bath doesn't sound good. So you make the right decision and swerve across 6 lanes of traffic to avoid him. Well done.
http://www.thebreeze.org/2006/04-03/op2.html
The rather volatile immigration issue is another one. My heart says one thing...I really like most of the Mexican immigrants, and lets be upfront...that is what this is really about, nobody pays attention to all those illegal Canadian border crossers...the ones I have encountered have almost universally been nice, hard-working, cool peeps. And on a personal level, I like them.
My head says something else. The illegals have deliberately, specifically, intentionally broken several laws. I don't want to take my hard-earned money and pay for their health care, their social security, etc., any more than I do the redneck trailer trash mothers of twelve living in a trailer and watching soap operas all day while I trudge off to school and work and what have you. No, I don't hate them...I just fail to see the justice in people like me working our smurfs off so clueless wonders, lawbreakers, etc. can live a good life. I guess you could say my self-interest rebels at that. I work too hard and too long to get back as little as I get.
But it isn't about just the money...it is about the respect for the law and whether the law has meaning. If you can break one law, why can you not break another?
Current immigration laws have relegated a population almost one-and-a-half times larger than New York City to a state of poverty, fear and invisibility. With their meager and often undocumented wages largely sent to their families back home,
No, current immigration laws did NOT do that...BREAKING the law and their sense of obligation to the people back home did. By breaking the law, they have to live "under the radar". People who illegally employ them are also "under the radar", and hence crimes of opportunity and greed are probably on the rise. While I honor and respect the sense of family that has them sending money home, I fail to understand how the resulting poverty is caused by the laws. Part of the consequence of committing a crime is the fear of getting caught and the threat of punishment. In this situation, we have somehow turned it around to where obeying the law puts you to blame for the poverty and fear of others. No. That is not just. That is not right. And how does it equate that I should obey a law if other people are rewarded for breaking the law?
As was pointed out by a commenter previously, I am not heartless...but I also think when the schools allege, despite being better funded than any other public school system in history, to not have enough money....when the healthcare system is unable to adequately provide for law-abiding citizens, when medication costs are ridiculously high...for many reasons, including the need to cover costs associated with insurance, HMOs and so forth...and I see people who, all emotional factors aside, are practicing criminals being rewarded because they have the chutzpah to be criminals, I do have a problem with that.
If I go out and steal your savings, are you going to be upset? And if you know I am doing it, and I am open about it, and I am taking your neighbors money as well, and open about that...and the public officials come up with "Well, he is helping the banking industry by circulating the money. We need to put him on salary" would you be a little miffed? Do you see a connection?
Yet he cannot escape the caste rhetoric when arguing in favor of the visa reform, which he purports would be “a legal way … fill the jobs that Americans are unwilling to.” Such statements reinforce the subhuman (read: sub-American) category in which we have consigned 11 million people.
I see dude working here...but it is NOT a caste or class system...unless you consider criminals in classes. At the risk of being seen as inhuman, I tell the following joke that is not meant to be funny: we have 2 divisions of criminals in the U.S.;violent and white collar. Maybe it is time to add a 3rd class...green collar criminals. People who, like white collar (allegedly), do no harm yet have violated the laws. Except...both classes DO do harm. White collar criminals may not wave guns and knives, but in some ways they are far MORE devastating to people's lives. And the green collar criminals have fundamentally shifted the economics of life in the U.S.. They add stress, shift the meaning and reality of wages, creating poverty not simply for themselves but for legal citizens. These criminals, while certainly people I am sympathetic to in my heart, are creating hardships for people who are NOT breaking the law to be here.
Note: I have said in the past, and still believe, we should have essentially open borders in regard to immigration by people with no criminal record. But we do have laws in place which, though I don't like them, are still there. And simple dislike or disagreement with a law is not sufficient justification to break it.
Here is a look at it from a different angle:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-hicks1apr01,0,5758338.story?coll=la-home-headlines
During the student protests, the American flag was only occasionally on display, while the Mexican flag was omnipresent. A student said he was waving the latter in support of La Raza (the race), while another asked why illegal immigrants were "treated like criminals." Perhaps he wasn't aware that crossing the U.S. border without the required visa is now, and always has been, against the law.
If you understand what is being said here, it actually speaks against my call for open borders...because part of my belief is people coming here are wanting to engage in a better life. And to do that, you have to buy in to the "American ideal", participate in U.S. culture...not celebrate what you are leaving behind.
Nevertheless, protesters in Los Angeles were welcomed uncritically by the city's leaders. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the crowd of 500,000 last Saturday, "There are no illegal people here today."
Criminals, yes...illegal people?
It is a complicated situation with no easy answer. We got ourselves here...good luck getting out.
4 years ago
1 comment:
"when medication costs are ridiculously high...for many reasons,"
Primary reason medication costs are so high: It costs over 50 million dollars for a drug company to get a drug through the proper channels to be approved. They then have 4 years of exclusive ownership before other companies can start selling knock-offs. How on earth are you supposed to recoup 50 million dollars in 4 years? Let alone make an actual profit. Not to mention that if I recall correctly, that figure doesn't include R&D costs. That's just what it costs to send it through the approval process.
"I have said in the past, and still believe, we should have essentially open borders in regard to immigration by people with no criminal record."
This then begs the question, how do you filter out criminals? On another side of it, you can't have open borders with an income tax. It just can't be done. There are a great number of other money reasons why this country can't have "open borders." Of course if we had the tax system as it was when this country was founded... but then people would actually be able to understand the law, so I can see where that would be a problem. But even with that, there should still be a citizenship test(entirely my opinion of course). At least something to show that the people coming in understand what it is that has made this country great. My reasoning for this is along the lines of "you have to buy in to the 'American ideal', participate in U.S. culture...not celebrate what you are leaving behind."
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