Thread: Editorial: What kind of people are we?

Editorial: What kind of people are we?

al.com
By Mike Hollis
The Huntsville Times
Sunday, October 02, 2011, 7:15 AM

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of federal appeals over Alabama's new immigration law, one question is not so much what the U.S. Constitution allows but what kind of people we want to be.

There is no argument over whether 11 million or so people entered the country illegally and are still here.

Nor is there any argument that some illegal immigrants were criminals before they got here and have continued to break the law. There is nothing redeeming about the presence of those who have already committed a crime, and they should be deported as quickly as the opportunity arises.

But the question of how to handle those whose only offense is crossing into America has proven to be be much more difficult to answer.

Sponsors of the legislation setting up a crackdown said they were passing a jobs bill. And they did, along with a number of other measures designed to make life hard for undocumented workers and their families. The law goes beyond tough measures passed in other states, including Arizona and Georgia.

"This will create jobs for unemployed Alabama citizens," state Rep. Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, a sponsor of the bill, has said. "We want to discourage illegal immigrants from coming to Alabama and prevent those that are already here from putting down roots."

Hispanics moved here because they hoped to improve their lives by working long hours in menial jobs for below-market wages. By one measure they succeeded. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, about 95,000 undocumented immigrants worked in Alabama in 2009 and 2010, making up about 4.2 percent of the labor force.

If the law was intended as a "jobs bill," as its supporters say, its E-Verify section requiring employers to check the immigration status of employees, in addition to other job-related provisions, should have been sufficient.

But Alabama's Republican lawmakers, who champion limited government, were not content to stop there. The law they passed this spring would use seemingly every government tool available to send illegal immigrants fleeing.

Indeed, every one of Alabama's several thousand of sheriff's deputies and police officers would become proxy agents for the U.S. Border Patrol checking for immigration papers. Illegal immigrants would be banned from public colleges, period, and could be arrested for simply asking for work. If the law were upheld, good Samartians who help undocumented immigrants would become felons.

The strategy to "attack every area of an illegal alien's life," as Hammon has put it, suggests a grim, clenched-jaw ruthlessness far out of proportion to the issue.

We Alabamians generally are decent and charitable people who share generously when misfortune befalls others. But we can be led astray.

By Mike Hollis, for the editorial board. Email: mike.hollis@htimes.com.

http://blog.al.com/times-views/2011/10/ ... eople.html

The strategy to "attack every area of an illegal alien's life," as Hammon has put it, suggests a grim, clenched-jaw ruthlessness far out of proportion to the issue.

Far out of proportion to the issue? What is the economic impact of 20 million plus illegal aliens in this country? What is the impact on the society of a disproportionate number of illegal aliens committing serious crimes and filling our prisons? What is the impact on our education system of millions of children who cannot speak English? What is fair about US citizens being denied jobs because THEY cannot speak Spanish, but illegal aliens are not denied because THEY cannot speak English? What is compassionate about encouraging people to break the law (on both sides of the border), while our government and foreign governments do NOTHING to fix or mitigate the circumstances that drive foreign nationals out their own countries? Why do we tolerate a government that will not enforce immigration laws, will not monitor and enforce work visa requirements, and will not respond to states who are crying for help? What are the consequences of "tolerance", "compassion", etc....? (Well we know the answer to that one....foreign drug cartels occupying our cities, national parks with warning signs for OUR citizens to stay away, thousands of deaths every year of US citizens from illegal alien criminal behavior, emergency rooms overwhelmed, a drain on our social services network, etc etc etc).

The most compassionate thing we can do with illegal immigrants is tough love. THEY need to fix the problems in their countries, not create more problems for this one. Our own citizens are more than we can handle.

Illegal immigration is another case of misplaced compassion, when we treat illegal immigrants as citizens without subjecting them to the laws that every American citizen and legal immigrant must obey. People from all over the world clamor to become citizens of the United States. Some wait as long as 20 years to be accepted. They study our Constitution and pledge allegiance to our country. Many are as poor as the illegal immigrants we now allow to stay here.

Re the compassion issue. This quote from another RATBSTRD post on this page, a post swhich probably should be used as a total response to Mr. Hollis' narrow perspective on the Alabama immigration law.