The Coming Immigration Fight

With health care legislation passed and settled till November a President who likes to get the American people mad is busy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue looking for yet another issue he can rile people up over. It is highly likely that the issue of choice will be immigration reform. Assuming the President chooses to stick to progressive ideology in handling immigration (as he has with everything else) there is a lot we can look forward to in the coming fight.

For starters we can look forward to a much more scattered and bungled debate. While health care reform debates are framed in a manner that pits Republicans and a lot of Democrats against the Progressive left immigration reform, or amnesty, is an issue that generally pits people against people. I say that without labels because many Republicans will support amnesty, and many Democrats will oppose it.

An immigration debate will be one in which we can expect to see two fragile parties get torn at a little more, and the American people get pissed off a lot more. The general reason for this is that the stereotypical views of what a “republican” and a “democrat” think about immigration are extremely hypocritical for both parties, and it can be assumed that the leaders of both parties will attempt to pigeonhole their ranks into those stereotypical views.

For Republicans the stereotypical view spewed by talking heads is that the border should be shut down and illegal immigrants should be sent home, period. It’s a pretty simple line. In what manner is this hypocritical approach? Try every manner.

Republicans constantly hound the foreign policy need for free countries, push the idea of free markets, and support low taxes. With illegal immigrants however they ignore the need to let people escape poverty stricken countries like Mexico, reject the free movement of labor from one market to another, and justify the two previously mentioned acts by complaining that illegal’s don’t pay taxes. Go figure.

And to make matters worse there are Republicans like Lindsey Graham who have decided they reject this ideology of Republicans and instead want to grant illegal’s amnesty, but only so he can get the President to support his “national ID card” that would store everything from your social security number, your government run health care info, your fingerprints and maybe even your DNA as well. So much for individual liberty and privacy.

On the Democratic side the hypocrisy is even more egregious than on the right, if that’s at all possible. The stereotypical Democratic approach, and more than likely the one the President will take, is that all the illegal immigrants in the United States should be granted amnesty and the border should be left the way it is. Basically your average Democrat wants to keep the status quo but add on the fact that illegal immigrants are no longer illegal - we should just ignore them.

This approach is a laugher that really gets me, especially when its outlined by union loving former hippies who can’t wait to read you Keith Olberman’s latest talking points about how God is actually FDR. Really now? They love unions, minimum wages, striking and civil rights. But they don’t like illegal immigrants, they just like the relatively free labor they provide for Tyson Chicken and California share crop owners.

It has to make you wonder whether Democrats are really so innocent when they cry about how Republicans are going to benefit from big business now that campaign finance reform is gone. It definitely has me wondering considering the policies they support are basically providing dollar an hour slave labor in the twenty first century.

If they love workers rights so much maybe they should consider extending them to people of a different race and culture who have come across our southern border looking for the opportunities America granted to our great grand parents; and the rights people like FDR, and later Everett Dirksen helped to give them.

So you’re probably sitting there wondering “if this guy writing here hates both parties’ immigration policies so much, where does he stand?” I’ll confess I’ve had to think a bit to answer that question. My answer takes me to someone I’ve brought up a lot in my articles whom you probably think I mention too much. But he made sense and held logical ideas, which we need to learn to follow today. Thomas Jefferson said in 1774 as part of the “Rights of British America” that:

"Our ancestors... possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as, to them, shall seem most likely to promote public happiness."

Immigrants south of here have decided that their public happiness lies in America. Why should we impede them in their search for it? When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration that “All men are created equal” he made the statement knowing full well that it did not entitle men to remain equal. Because, as he knew and stated in the previous quote, “chance, not choice” could hinder their prospects in life. Because of these men who are created equal should be able to make choices in society to become equal once again, or maybe even get ahead in life. Such an outlook is the essence of freedom. Also, in the same line of thought, choices can also set men back in life.

Whatever the case since when is it the governments job to impede the natural process of freedom? Government should not tell a man what choices he should make, it should let him succeed or fail. That said it needs to make sure it lets men make that choice. With that in mind I will tell you that the government should put an end to “illegal immigration”, the reason being that allowing it to continue would be to allow men to continue to not have choices in life.