Talking Points: Immigration

Hey, remember a week and a half ago when the President announced that he was going to direct ICE to ignore the law (and half of their reason for existence). Yeah, that’s still a thing. I’m not going to debate whether an elected official directing his subordinates to ignore the law is illegal (it is–there’s no debate on the subject–it’s called obstruction of justice). I don’t mind debating the Illegal Immigration issue, but we all have to admit to a few facts or it becomes a big clusterfuck.

The vast majority of migrant farm workers are American Citizens. I know it’s hard to believe, because it’s been drilled into us for years that our low-cost food and other products is the result of farms paying scut wages to poor immigrants because their undocumented and have no power. Except that’s the opposite of true, Farming is the most protected industry in the US, and one of its protections is that farmers are exempt from a wide range of payroll and OSHA laws and regulations. How do they find American citizens willing to put up with that? It turns out that whole hordes of people will do whatever it takes to not starve.

The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t guarantee a child the right to stay in the US if his or her parents are foreign nationals. The relevant clause of the 14th Amendment, the one that declares any person born in the US or its legal territories to be a citizen of the United States says nothing about that person having a right to grow up in the United States. The fact is, there is a wealth of rights that are reserved until a person reaches adulthood. This “anchor-baby” notion does nothing for anyone except encouraging stupid people to take ridiculous risks during the most fragile period of an adult woman’s life (at least until she reaches seniority).

There is not a flood of anchor babies being squirted out for Free Welfare Cash. Anchor babies exist, but they aren’t an epidemic. Of the few that do exist, if their parents had any idea of the lifelong shitfest their children would have to endure, they wouldn’t bother trying this law-hack. Speaking as the child of two natural-born Americans, born on a US military reservation on a spoils-of-war territory, I can honestly say that every encounter I’ve had with the Federal bureaucracy started with me being asked for my green card and ended with me showing my consular birth certificate to a supervisor while explaining the laws that make me a natural-born American citizen while writing “Okinawa” as my place of birth.

No one is against immigration. The question at hand is the treatment of illegal immigrants. That is to say, people who have entered the country illegally, are staying here illegally and are probably breaking a few related laws to do so. This is close to my heart because my wife is a legal immigrant, and every time they “reform” the laws to make it easier to be an illegal, they make it harder and more expensive for us to maintain her legal status.

Coyotes are filthy criminal assholes, and no matter what is ultimately decided about the immigrants themselves, the coyotes, regardless of race or nationality, should be punished in some way that better people than me can devise, because everything I can think of as suitable violates the 6th Amendment. Seriously, the nicest thing I can think to do to them would be to banish them to one of the Aleutians with a pen knife and a bottle of Deja Blue.

I have no conclusion, and there are a lot of facts that are misinterpreted or just ignored, but these are the ones that I can’t ignore.