Thread: Honest debate on immigration needed

Honest debate on immigration needed

Published: Thursday, July 26, 2012, 6:00 AM
Star-Ledger Guest Columnist By Star-Ledger Guest Columnist

dsOBAMA.JPGJonathan Ferrey/Getty ImagesSome Republicans question the legality the Obama administration's immigration policy.

Members of the Republican Party are questioning the legality of the Obama administration’s immigration policy, essentially DREAM Act-light, which gives young undocumented immigrants a reprieve from deportation. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano supports the policy change, but that really isn’t the point.

We can debate President Obama’s right to act unilaterally, as the GOP has criticized, but that’s a debate for another day and would frame the discussion around legality, thereby perpetuating the larger issue: the widespread misapprehension that immigration is about the law.

Anti-immigration folks insist on talking about the unlawfulness of undocumented immigrants. The position contends that if immigrants reside in the United States in contravention of American law, they are morally indefensible and, some believe, purposefully flouting our way of life. The position is flawed for two reasons: It assumes that our laws are beyond reproach — a mind-set that has led to some of the worst atrocities in human history — and it closes the book on the debate before it ever gets going. The logic is as follows: It is illegal, therefore it is wrong. Case closed.

The reality, however, is that laws are human constructs, just as imperfect as their creators. The founders of this country understood the dynamic between law and citizens, which is why we have amendments.

Some of the most heinous acts in human history have been perpetrated in the name of the rule of law. During the Salem witch trials, citizens were sentenced to death based on mass hysteria, fabrications and vendettas. Slavery was legal. Only a generation ago, it was illegal for African-Americans to drink from the same water fountains as whites.

Railing against the laws of the time, civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “We should never forget that everything that Adolf Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

We could rattle off countless examples of unjust laws throughout human history, but they would all boil down to the same conclusion: Being a law does not make it just. In fact, when laws are unjust, it is our duty as citizens to challenge them.

Our country was partly founded on that very premise. Puritans rejected a British government that did not recognize their religion. They braved the Atlantic to colonize New England and create a society whose laws would tolerate their beliefs.

Comparing today’s immigrants with the immigrants of yesteryear, as many immigration opponents are wont to do, and citing them as shining examples of legal immigration is a specious argument because it disregards how laws have changed.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” but only if you were white. According to “They Take Our Jobs!” author Aviva Chomsky, about 25 million Europeans immigrated to the United States between 1880 and World War I without visas or passports, and only about 1 percent of them were turned back at Ellis Island. “There were no illegal immigrants from Europe because there was no law making immigration illegal for Europeans,” Chomsky writes. Nonwhites were summarily denied entry.

Immigration is a complicated, multifaceted issue that touches on nearly all aspects of American society, from health care to the economy. The hopes and aspirations of millions of people, Americans and immigrants alike hang in the balance.

As such, it is an issue worthy of meticulous attention, rigorous debate and intellectual reverence. Let’s not disgrace it, and ourselves, by dismissing the conversation prematurely on the strength of blind and childish adherence to temporary laws.

Pablo Andreu, the son of undocumented parents who received amnesty from President Ronald Reagan, is a volunteer with the Community of Friends in Action, a Leonia-based nonprofit group devoted to supporting immigrant workers. Share your thoughts at njvoices.com.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/20...gration_n.html

They picked the wrong guy to have anything "honest" on.

Pablo Andreu is typical invasion supporting scum. He compares the large majority of Americans that are found in numerous polls to want our existing immigration laws enforced to the murder of 6 million Jews in Nazi Germany.

This comparison is not only false and highly derogatory, it is a comparison that increases the amount of violence we are seeing from illegal aliens towards American citizens that is resulting in the needless deaths of thousands each year.

Pablo Andreu and the Star-Ledger are the real nazis here because they are the ones defaming those of us fighting to protect our homeland from invasion to the degree we are the ones being killed due to the exploitation of our existing American border and immigration laws.

Americans lose our jobs by the millions to illegal aliens, see our wages depreciated on millions of more jobs where they wont pay the bills for a debt and tax paying American, and are being thrown into poverty at an alarming rate as America is moved into economic and political parity with hell hole Mexico.

And to add insult to injury, we are called Nazis by invasion supporters like the Star-Ledger and Pablo Andreu so that when these invaders have formed a legalized voting block, as compared to their current felonious stealing of elections happening now, and the guns are taken up as part of the Globalist agenda they serve, then their GENOCIDE against Americans will be justified by their Nazi and Racist labeling applied to innocent Americans defending their lives.

W