At Last: A Chance to Irritate Everybody.

The United States has a legal foreign born population of 42.5 million people.  God bless every one of them.   We also have slightly more than 11 million illegal aliens in this country.  Our problems are with this group, not our immigrants, so please do not talk about, “immigration” reform when you are really talking about illegal aliens.  [That is like calling a car thief a, “spontaneous entrepreneur.”  But I digress.]

            Getting rid of criminals entering our country illegally should be an aggressive goal and a human rights no-brainer.  But (BUT!!!) there are all of those children.  The fact is that almost 7 of every 100 students in U.S. schools are the children of illegals.  A significant number of these children were born in the United States and are, therefore, legal Americans themselves, even though their parents are not.  I am not ready to deport these children or separate them from their parents.  It would be inhumane, and against every principle of Christian charity that I claim.  I have stated in more than one column, going back to 2011 that I think the so called, “Dreamers” have a de facto if not de jure right to citizenship.  Children did not come here by there own choice, and the sins of the father should not be visited upon them.

But what about their parents?  What about the person who’s first act in coming to this country was to break the law?  How do we deal with them without backhanding the legal immigrant?  How do we make it perfectly clear that while humanity says you may stay, justice says you deserve punishment?  Can we serve two masters?  Yes.  But it is a hard choice.  I believe that if these illegals want to stay they must do so under severe punishment.  If they choose to stay, they will have all of the responsibilities but none of the rights of an American citizen.  They chose to circumvent our laws by coming here, and now they must reap as they have sown. 

If I were writing these laws, as Congress should, I would say that the adults who came here illegally shall never be United States citizens.  They may stay, but they must work, they must pay taxes and obey the law, but they shall have none of the rights of United States citizens.  They will receive no government assistance; no vote; no standing as citizens; only those protections we would provide for any human on our shores.  They will have legal protection.  They may receive help from private, charitable sources.  But they have no legal standing.  If they want to leave the country and start the legal immigration process from scratch, well, that is a different story.  But if they stay, as I believe they should be allowed to, they do so as a burden, not a guest.

Our finite resources should go to assimilating and aiding the legal immigrants that come to our shores.  As I have said many times, if you want to make room for illegals, I want you to also point to a map of the world and show me the country from which we are going to limit immigration so we can accommodate illegal aliens who are now going to be entered into our system.  Whom are we going to exclude?  What families are we going to delay, remove or reject?  Who gets a, “No” so others can be told, “Yes.”

You may have noticed that I have not mentioned President Obama and his message in this discussion.  There is a reason for that.  He is irrelevant.     

Don’t short change honest immigrants and keep the faith.