I think everyone is disgusted by the failure to fix our broken Immigration system, but what exactly disgusts you is dictated by your ideology. So regarding immigration, what disgusts you? But be forewarned, that question is a trap. When the disappointment in a policy reaches the level of disgust there is clearly a moralizing component, so here your ideological perspective and fundamental morality are essentially indistinguishable. And the longer the impasse goes on, the more repugnant the morality of Immigration Reform opponents becomes to me. I see a Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, with broad bi-partiasan support among Americans and most politicians, but blocked by the House GOP, including sometimes by the people who once publicly supported it, all to appease the most racist and reactionary slivers of their constituencies, and I am disgusted. I listen to liars demanding increased Border Security, knowing full well that they that the bi-partisan bill passed in the Senate includes $30 billion for hiring at least 19,200 more Border Patrol agents, $8 billion dedicated to the Southern Border Fencing Strategy, $750 million dedicated to E-Verify implementation and expansion, $4.5 billion to carry out the Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy, and—if necessary—another $2 billion allocated to recommendations of the Southern Border Security Commission, and that all this the money is in limbo because they are too filled with hate to allow a Pathway to Citizenship for their own neighbors, and I am disgusted. I hear the undocumented, people no different than all the undocumented that came before them since the late 19th c. when the first laws to restrict entry were enacted, and no different than the people than came before the categories were created, getting refereed to as “invaders,” accused of being “terrorists” and “plague carriers,” compared to a “car thieves,” “kidnappers,” “serial killers,” and having their status referred to as a “major felony” based nothing more than the radical’s vitriolic irrationalism and deliberately delusional reinvention of within American law, and I am disgusted. I see that these immigrants are here to work and live, that they have no other crimes in their history except the issues of status, and that they are members of our communities. Their friends, associates, family, and every meaningful day-to-day connection, the whole of their life’s stability, is here. To deny that they contribute is to ignore a good chunk of the realities of how the country functions, but as it stands now, they are so legally marginalized, their contribution is more likely to be rewarded with exploitation and hate than anything else. And then I hear lunacy of “self-deportation” and how they are not entitled to any chance of security within our borders unless they are first ripped from their homes, sacrifice all income, security, personal connection and support, and return to places that they left for any reason from civil war to violent anarchy to the trap of subsistence to flat-out starvation, and I am disgusted. I see the compromise “Dreamers” Bill, that would only aide children brought here so young that America is the only home they know, that sets education requirements on them to keep their homes, and still the House GOP blocks any action on it, and I am disgusted. I see Obama acting entirely within his Constitutionally granted authority to provide protection from legal harassment for the Dreamers and reprioritize Immigration enforcement resources onto the border itself and hunting down those engaged in serious criminal activily, and I hear him called “tyrant” and “unAmerican” and I am disgusted. I see children and families already in the custody of that enforcement, already within the legal processes that will decide their fate, who just happen to be refugees, a class of persons that every nation on Earth has both legal and moral obligations to aide – as we were taught by the horrors of WWII, notably the abandonment of the Jews – These people are desperately fleeing brutal criminal gangs that were initially founded on the streets of American cities still financed by own drug culture. Yet the radicals block busses full of these children and families and spew incredible hate and wallow in the most cancerous xenophobia, and I am disgusted. I see Obama ask for $3.7 billion to deal with child-refugee crisis, half of which was ear-marketed for increasing border security, and shades of the reaction to Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the House GOP slashed it by almost 2/3s, effectively killing the security aspect of the bill, and further cynically redirected pre-existing foreign aide to the three countries at the center of the refugee crisis, and worse still tacking on a cruel measure to strip the only recently granted legal protections to “Dreamers,” and I am disgusted. The starting point should not be the convenience of a category the is applied to a person based on things they have no control over – this year were willing to be welcoming with full legal status but the next year no, people from this country get treated differently under the law than people from that country, this person won the Diversity Visa lottery but the other one didnt, the person from this region look different from the person from that region – The stating point must be that they are all human, no less so than my grand parents or yours, and they are already here, and they have been for many a year. A pathway to citizenship that doesn’t destroy the lives of people it is designed to assist is not only logical, it is within our reach. And that, regarding the issue of Immigration, is the morality of an American. The immorality of the radical is called “American” only in so much as the radical has been granted that status through accident of birth.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 16:13:16 +0000
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