The immigration debate moves to the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday in a challenge to the Arizona law that punishes employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Court watchers expect that this action will signal how the court might handle the more expansive Arizona immigration enforcement law SB1070.
The governator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down a commencement address in Arizona last May because “with his accent, he was afraid they would try to deport him back to Austria.”
I suggested then that we should, perhaps, boycott Los Angeles since that whole city had lined up to encourage blatantly illegal behavior.
Arizona’s law requires employers to verify the eligibility of new workers through a federal database. Arizonans hoped it would shrink their status as the center of immigrant smuggling.
“Immigrants can’t ‘steal jobs’ nobody else wants,” my friend Lido “Lee” Bruhl suggested. “If it weren’t for the guest workers, all those jobs would go to Mexico or someplace else overseas.”
Huh?
“And don’t even get me started on the so-called ‘economic burden’ of immigrants,” he continued. “The reverse is actually true. They receive less health care, less welfare, less public schooling than our own downtrodden do. Immigration actually improves economic conditions, because those so-called ‘illegal’ immigrants spend money on the same things everybody else does.”
Yeppers. Like coyotes. And sending money back to the economy of Mexico.
Um, Lee? Hello, Lee? Earth to Lee?
Congress has jinkered with how aliens may cross the border and with immigration policy since the Naturalization Act of 1790. Back then, only “free white persons” of “good moral character” could become naturalized. Fortunately for them, most of today’s Congressmen are native born. Congress increased the residency requirement to five years in 1795, a requirement remains the law of the land to this day.
The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 has been amended many times and is contained in the United States Code as the basic body of immigration law. That law defines who is an alien and delineates the rights, duties, and obligations of aliens in the United States. The alien must establish that he is admissible to the United States as an immigrant. It’s the law.
“That doesn’t matter,” Lee said. “These people are here now.”
Ignorance can be fixed.
Stupidity is forever.
“Our border with Canada is the longest nonmilitarized border in the world,” INS Executive Associate Commissioner Michael A. Pearson told Congress in 1999. “This border, however, is not unmonitored or uncontrolled. The INS maintains 114 Ports-of-Entry (POEs), 8 Border Patrol Sectors, and 44 Patrol stations along the 3,987 miles of border with Canada (excluding Alaska).” The INS maintains another 43 Ports-of-Entry along our 1,969 miles of border with Mexico.
Perhaps Lee would like those Ports of Entry emptied so people guest workers can simply walk across anywhere.
I understand why liberals like Lee don’t geddit.
Laws are only advisory.If your Congress decrees that an evil, dirty, dark business must or a nasty, rich Republican baron must give up property or starve Mexicans by increasing ethanol in gasoline, why then those laws must be enforced.
On the other hand, if the other Congress, the one made up of evil, dirty, dark businesses and nasty, rich Republican barons decrees that crossing the border is illegal, why those laws are safe to ignore.
By George, I geddit now.