velessa | (no subject)

I may be opening a can of worms here, but I'm genuinely curious: what's your position on illegal immigration and Arizona's new law?

This is one issue where I'll be seen as far more conservative than liberal. I'm against illegal immigration, and here's why: illegal immigration is illegal. You can't just sneak into another country, knowingly breaking the laws of that country, and expect to have them pat you on the back once you're there and go "oh all right, come on in, since you're here now you can go ahead and take advantage of our publicly funded resources!" But that's what happens here. WTF? If that were allowed in other countries, I might have just up and moved to Canada during the Bush years. =p They are NOT "undocumented residents," because they aren't supposed to be residents at all. They are here ILLEGALLY! When did "illegal" start meaning "perfectly fine"? If you break the law, you suffer the consequences; we don't get to shrug and go "eh, go ahead and break the law, it's fine." It's no different from committing any other kind of crime, and it should not tolerated, just like any other crime. It completely baffles me that some people think it's totally okay for people to just come here and stay illegally, and it's completely unfair to the immigrants who do go through the correct process.

I have no problem with immigration as long as it's done legally and through the proper channels. I have a master's in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages for crying out loud; I've worked with and know and like these immigrants! Hell, I grew up in one of the most diverse areas in the country where I was a minority most of the time. So, seeing as thousands of people manage this apparently amazing feat of entering the country legally every year, why can't the thousands of Hispanics streaming across the southern border? (I'll just focus on them since they seem to be the issue at the heart of the debate). And don't give me any of that "they were here first" nonsense. No, they weren't; their population is the result of Spanish invasion and conquest, just like the resulting populations of any other colonial imperialism that happened throughout the world at the hands of Europeans. The Spanish overran and decimated the civilizations that were already here, just like those who came after them. If you want to go that route, none of us should actually be allowed to be here except for the so-called Native Americans; but even they aren't really native to this continent, they're just the folks who traveled across the Asian land bridge and happened to get here first. Anyway, the point is that Spanish settlers conquered and killed in order to establish their dominance and form the culture to their liking, just like later waves of invaders. And since the US government is the most recent settlement to establish dominance here, they currently get to make the rules about who stays and who goes. That's just how history went, and that's just the way it is.

And now a big reason we need these rules is to help keep the population under control. Just look at how the country's population exploded in only the couple of hundred years of open immigration. There are only so many resources to go around, you know? It might not be so bad if immigrants were to spread out more, but do you see enormous immigrant populations in the hundreds of thousands in like, Montana? No, instead you see them concentrated in relatively small areas of the country which then struggle to support them. We have them here in California, which is suffering and straining under waaaaay more people than it can support, with not enough space, food, water, jobs, schools, hospitals, police, or anything else to go around, and more people coming every day. Northern Californians are always pissed at Southern Californians for hogging far more of their share of the resources than they create because they have more people. It certainly doesn't help that these immigrants tend to be Catholic and have enormous families, either (boo religion, again). Another decade or so and the state will probably collapse from the neverending stream of people coming here. Yes, we need people who are willing to work the lousy jobs picking fields and such, but only so many. And who's to say the actual legal citizens don't need or want those jobs, anyway? In this economy, I'll bet they do! There shouldn't be a hundred guys sitting outside of every Home Depot in the state every day, all day long, trying to get day labor work. How is that good for anyone?

As for Arizona's particular new law, I'm not really seeing what the big deal is, or why people think it's going to cause so many problems. It enforces the laws we already have: if you are here illegally and are caught, you get thrown out. If you want to be here, go do it the right way. People say it will lead to racial profiling, but I'm not so sure about that. As I understand it, the police are only going to be nabbing people who are already doing something wrong, regardless of origin, and THEN possibly asking for proof of citizenship. It's not like they're going to go around grabbing every brown person on the street and demanding identification, at least I would surely hope law enforcement officers have more sense than that! They're going to be catching the usual band of bad guys, thugs and gang members and drug dealers, etc. The bad guys go to jail, and now maybe they can also rid the country of them by deporting them while they're at it. How is this a bad thing?

ETA: I'm completely against illegal immigration, but I wasn't aware that Mexicans have next to no way of getting here legally. I couldn't understand why they'd pay thousands to smugglers instead of just using that money to go through the immigration process. The legal immigration system itself needs serious reform.

More importantly, I am also completely against anyone who hires them and makes it so they feel the need to come here illegally in the first place! It's because those jobs pay next to nothing and are basically little more than slave labor that no citizens will take them, but the immigrants are so desperate that they will. That's disgusting, that some of these industries rely so heavily on cheap labor they know they can get easily with few to no repercussions for doing so illegally. If they had to pay real living wages and benefits and all the other things they should, and if they had to suffer serious consequences for hiring illegals, they'd go out of business, which means their businesses are flawed and unsustainable from the start! Eliminate the jobs for illegals, majorly crackdown on the businesses that employ them, and they won't come here. Why do we allow this to go on?

I'm also completely against the fact that WE have to pay to support illegal immigrants. Of course they want to come here! As soon as they do, they have access to free medical care, schooling, and a ton of other things we pay for through taxes. Do they contribute to these resources they gobble up? Nope, since they're not hired legally and therefore aren't being taxed. So all of these resources are strained, bursting at the seams with teems of people they're trying to accomodate but shouldn't be using them in the first place. It's completely ridiculous. No citizenship should equal no access to public resources, end of story.

And yes, I do see the potential for abuse with Arizona's law. I bet it'll be overturned anyway, but I think it sends an important message that we seriously need do to something about illegal immigration. Hundreds of people cross the border every night, and even if they get caught, they just turn around and do it again a little later. Something more substantial needs to be done than just sending them back to the border. They'll never stop as long as they think it's still better to come here than anything else.

I don't know, I should probably just keep my trap shut, and I'm truly not trying to poke an angry beehive or offend anyone, but I simply do not understand the argument in favor of illegal immigration. I'd like to hear some other viewpoints.