Driving While Brown 2
Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:
We have an illegal immigration problem today only because federal law makes legal immigration so costly and difficult. A concrete-and-barbed-wire wall along the border will not fix that problem, and neither will punitive sanctions on employers who hire illegal aliens. Meaningful immigration reform would focus instead on simply making it easier for low-skilled or unskilled workers to enter the country lawfully.
Like I have said.
Immigration laws became restrictive when immigrants became less white. The less white, the more restrictive.
(Remember how, back in the anti-Italian immigrant days of the turn of the previous century, Italians were invariably described as “swarthy”? So automatic was it that “swarthy Italian” seemed to be one word for a couple of generations. Now, not so much.)
The “immigration problem” results not from immigrants. It results from bigotry.
All the rest is rationalization for bigotry.
Not white. Not welcome.
May 10, 2010 at 10:08 am
I had to think about this one. For myself only, it isn’t bigotry. For example:
A man who lives north of us almost lost his Social Security benefits because his ID was stolen & given to an illegal immigrant to work. The man is in his 60’s & handicapped.
A lady who works in Denver had hers stolen. Then she was informed by the IRS she owed massive amounts in back taxes. The woman who had her SS # worked in a cleaners & didn’t care about the problems it caused the woman whose ID she was using.
It caused problems for the detectives who were working security a few years ago at a club where a May 5 celebration was being held. An illegal had an illegal pistol, got behind them & shot. He didn’t care about the problems the widow & children of the detective he killed have, nor the other detective who was wounded. Nor the problems the state had in getting him back here from Mexico to face a trial.
Or the little girl who was killed on New Year’s Day by an illegal who fired a gun (in celebration like they do at home) at a street light. Instead of taking out the light, the bullet went through her brain.
Or the problems it caused a local school district when they decided that kids who didn’t speak English could go to all day kindergarten for free, but kids who do speak English, their parents had to pay for all day classes.
Or the 3 year old little boy who was killed at an ice cream shop when a crash caused by an illegal immigrant (who was doing twice the speed limit down a major road in Aurora) was driving illegally, hit a truck, pushing the truck into a power supply thing then into the ice cream shop where the child sat, waiting for his ice cream.
The whole immigration situation is out of control. Because the government here won’t do anything about it, the governments everywhere else don’t care if their citizens are sneaking into this country & people come here from everywhere, can’t speak the language, want to work & don’t care how they do it.
So it isn’t always bigotry that causes problems. It’s the crooks who get the people here & provide them with stolen documents so they can work. Or cars so they can drive. Or the people who can’t afford medical care, so they go to the local emergency rooms for treatment & we all get to pay for it.
So, I have to say it isn’t always bigotry that causes people to have issues with illegal immagration.
May 10, 2010 at 4:53 pm
If you talk about Al Capone, you can make a pretty good case that the Italians should not have been allowed in. Or you can use Pretty Boy Floyd to prove the English should not have been let in. (Native Americans would probably go for that one.)
The current immigration policy forces people to try to fly under the radar and increases the likelihood of problems.
Nevertheless, the big picture suggests that the crime rates amongst the central and south american population of the United States is substantially less than among the native born population, despite the cases of pretty horrible deeds by individuals.
I know that, to my shame, my ears perk up when I hear that someone who caused a traffic accident has a Spanish name. But I have only to get on the street to see that incompetent driving knows not race, creed, color, or national origin.
Here is a long list of links to analyses of crime rates by a number of different folks.
Furthermore, I do not think we can separate the conditions under which illegal immigrants live from the prejudiced policies that prevent them from entering the country in the first place.
I wager that, iff hordes of English-speaking white Canadians were flooding the North Dakota border, we would not see half the fuss we see over Spanish-speaking Central and South Americans.