Alien Nation

Illegal aliens. I describe myself as a political moderate, a centrist, and I’m even a flaming bleeding-heart liberal on a lot of issues, but I hafta say, this absolutely isn’t one of them.

I sympathize with their plight, I really do. But the fact remains, they’re ALIENS. And they’re ILLEGAL. That means they broke the LAW. They SHOULDN’T BE HERE.
And if they ARE here, I really don’t believe they have any right to claim they HAVE rights and should get to stay and become citizens.

Not in front of millions of other people who patiently and law-abidingly have been waiting their turn. I’m not a fan of queue-jumpers, whether it’s in supermarkets or across the border, and I don’t think they should be rewarded for calculated illegal behavior. (And I’m including all illegal immigrants here, not just the Latino ones. Yes, Irish ones too.)

It’s just one more reason why this country, best in the world though it certainly is for so many reasons why else is everybody wanting so much to come here, so often annoys the hell out of me. Or should I say its politicians annoy the hell out of me—yes, Democratic ones too—for allowing this to so get out of hand.

It seems that there are a few basics that can be empirically agreed on and not just because the conservatives claim it is so. The incomers have committed a crime by sneaking in here under the radar. With or without fraudulent documents. For the most part, they do not pay taxes on what they earn here, since they have no documentation and must therefore be paid in cash, and if they do have documents the docs are faked or stolen because they’re, like, you know, ILLEGAL aliens and they don’t have legit ones.

Many people BORN in this country complain that illegals get better health care and more consideration and perks than THEY do, and I think they’re quite right to feel angry about it. If this country doesn’t adequately provide for its own people, which it most emphatically does NOT, why should it provide for endless numbers of the illegal and the unskilled? Or are votes in states with lots of illegals (yes, even illegals vote, however fraudulently) at the bottom of that little can of chads? Right down there with snickering corporations who have built their huge profits on the backs of these pathetic people.

I have read in various places that half the illegal alien population is visa overstayers—people who entered the country legally on a time-limited visa, but decided to stay on when the visa expired, and thus became illegal. Once they’re here, there is little chance they’ll be detected and virtually no chance they’ll be deported.
How about some program that will actually be enforced, ensuring that people who enter illegally or overstay their visas will be barred from employment, public assistance, public education, public housing or any other taxpayer-funded benefit? If they are aware up front that they’re not going to get anything out of our system, they might think twice before sneaking in uninvited.

I’m not even convinced that they really want to even BECOME Americans. It sometimes seems to me that they just want to BE IN AMERICA, which is a very different thing. They live in their own enclaves, among their own people, speaking their own languages, reading their own newspapers, watching their own TV shows. They even get to have their own languages on the ballots they (may or may not fraudulently) vote with. Not exactly being part of the great American melting pot, adding to our beautiful mosaic, are they?

What angers me more than anything, I think, is the fact that they refuse to learn English, and expect, nay, demand to be catered to in their own languages. Coupled with the fact that we politically correctly cave in and cater.
Hey! Immigrants! YOU came HERE! Everybody else who comes here learns to speak English the way the rest of us do, so why shouldn’t you? It used to be a point of honor among immigrants that the old tongues got left behind and English was eagerly aspired to. (Which isn’t entirely a good thing: why couldn’t it be both ways, and we could all be fluent in the languages of our immigrant forebears?) Until there's some good-faith movement on this, I don't think they deserve consideration for citizenship.
And I would LOVE to see an English-as-official-US-language bill, and I'd vote for any pol who pushed one. Even if I have to avert my eyes and hold my nose. But then I've been doing that for YEARS in the voting booth (exceptions: Gore, Kerry, Schumer, Clinton), so I'm sure I could manage to choke down my rising gorge one more time.

I honestly don’t know if I believe the assertion that these people are here doing jobs Americans don’t want. Even if that’s so, isn’t it exploitation on a mass scale, and aren’t the Yuppie couples who employ an undocumented nanny or gardener on the cheap responsible for it just as much as the vile big corporations? Or is it all just a great big sly wink at the expense of poor desperate people, which is utterly reprehensible?

Oh hey, and what about terrorists? How easy is it for THEM to waltz in? I don’t think anyone with two brain cells to rub together and make a thought actually believes enough has been done in that direction, though probably it would never be enough to be proof against a determined jihadist.

I really don’t know what the right thing to do is. The aliens ARE illegal. It’s very sad, what they go through. But I don’t want them to become legal with full rights ahead of people who played by the rules, and I don’t want to make them felons, either, or let them die in alleys, or deport them to their apparently horrible and hated and poverty-stricken homelands.

To require them to declare their intent to become citizens, to pay back taxes and a fine FOR BREAKING THE LAW, to take a simple English competency exam—that doesn’t seem too much to ask, does it? And I still think they should be somehow punished...yes, that’s right, punished, how illiberal a position is THAT, get over it...for jumping the queue.

Still, they just seem to want to live here, not to be a part of here. Witness all the national flags displayed in those protest marches, until some of the more media-savvy among them suggested that if you want to be AMERICANS, it might be a better idea to wave AMERICAN flags in Americans’ faces.

It’s a tough one. But it’s not the age of Emma Lazarus anymore. Maybe we can no longer afford to be sentimental about the huddled masses and the wretched refuse of other countries’ teeming shores. Even my own much-admired-by-me Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now in favor of building a wall along the porous-as-papier-maché Mexican border—a wall that should have gone up decades ago, except that pols kept it down for expediency’s sake. And maybe we can't trust Canadian border integrity either...

And I don’t care one little bit that this makes me sound like some pigdog no-neck lard-brained on-the-take Republican congressman from South Dogsquat, Redstate, USA. I feel that I have amassed sufficient Democratic liberal credentials down the years, yea verily since the time of JFK, before I could even freakin' VOTE, to offset this to the side of centrism, and I don't have a problem with it. That’s all.