OK, here I am picking up where I left off at what seems like too long ago, now:
Birthright Citizenship, and it's 'problems', as they are seen as problems by others.
The element of the issue I want to discuss this time is the Mexican side: Mojados, and the babies that anchor them. (Maybe we can call them mojaditos?)
I'm already on record with opposing the status quo that allows mass mojadoism, and those who cater to them. But I'm not really talking about them.
Nope. I'm not. The issue is Birthright Citizenship, and the citizenship status bestowed upon their offspring who are born here.
I've heard some compelling arguments in favor of the idea that the Supreme Court can rule against citizenship status for mojaditos, all based upon the law and other considerations. I'm seeing that they may have a valid point, even from my limited conservative view of what the constitution means. That aside, I also believe that the words of the constitution mean what the common 'man on the street' would understand them to mean in the context in which they were adopted. So, I can see this going both ways, and both ways being accurate from a legal perspective (a perspective that I, admittedly, am not schooled in, so take that for what it's worth.)
(Despite these arguments, I still favor the simple language interpretation that currently rules the day. To me, this interpretation is the most legit because it passes the 'man on the street' test. Once again, for what it's worth.)
Now, on the subject of mojaditos, and a Supreme Court challenge: do we really want to go there?
Anybody who tells me they want to deny status to these children must first explain how the hell they can take a kid who spends his whole life living in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago or Topeka ... and then say he is not a part of our national community?
And if he's discovered by I.C.E., what are they gonna do with him? Deport him to a country that he's never been in, or a part of?
This is America. We don't penalize kids for the misdeeds of their parents, and the 14th Amendment not only did some justice for Blacks, it also says, if indirectly, that one's social caste is not fixed at birth.
These are American kids, who grow up to become American adults. And if you do not believe this, believe it anyway. Believe it because I said so.
I've spent my entire life (from age three) surrounded and immersed in the people and culture of first generation Mexicans.
Sure, many of them may possess peculiar interests in the absurd distractions of mariachi, FIFA, and classically mutilated Chevys in colors God never intended.
Truth be told...
And I'll say it...
In large numbers they absolutely do provide annoyances of epic proportions. Well, so did (and still do) the Irish, and everybody seems to think them damned Irish are pretty cool, now.
But they also host Super Bowl parties, join Little League, barbecue on July 4th and enlist, and die, in the United States Armed Forces at levels far and above their representation in the population.
(Among the fallen: the Mexico-born cousin of a coworker who was brought to this country as a baby, and amnestied according to the 1986 law)
They mow their own lawns, wash their own cars, and their kids aren't afraid to break a sweat for a few bucks.
Hey guys, Social Security is going broke. Americans won't breed at replacement levels, and white boys think they're entitled. Who's taxes are gonna pay for all that shit you promised for yourself later in life?
You don't have to like the mojaditos, but don't blame them. Blame the The Power that wants the status quo to continue. Any attempt to deny them status is mean spirited, ignorant and unjust.
It's not only wrong for America, it's also not what America is about.
It's just wrong, period.
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34 comments:
You seem to have left out the argument side of it and gone with declaring your conclusion, and are crossing folks who are Mexican with all illegals. (Not that there's much wrong with the first, just thought you might want to consider something that might speak to those who don't agree with your conclusion.)
I happen to know a decent number of non-citizen residents-- you going to claim that THEY'RE not part of our national community? For love of green apples, half are Marines! Being part of the "national community" has crud to do with being a citizen.
i dont just 'know' some noncitizen residents. i'm blood related to some.
but i'm not talking about those people, nor denying that they are anything.
a mexican is a mexican, culturally and everything else, before he is legal or otherwise.
but again, i'm talking about their children who are born here, not the others.
I like the point about "blame the power that wants the status quo to continue."
Specifically, those who hire cheap farm labor and nannies....
....not quite as sure about the idea of refraining from deporting because of their parents' actions....quite frankly, there are hundreds of thousands of American kids (millions?) with their dad or mom in jail that are suffering because of wha their parents did. Shifty, dicey status for law.
Build the fence, change the 14th if we need to.
Oooh, good point, Bike.
A little closer in setup, we still take back stolen property, even if it's benefiting innocent children.
i'm not talking about those people, nor denying that they are anything.
You categorized "not a citizen" with "not part of the national community."
a mexican is a mexican, culturally and everything else, before he is legal or otherwise.
Nope. When my great-grandfather came over here, he became an American first. Otherwise, he would have stayed "home" instead of making this home. That's the special bit about America-- you play by the rules and become an American, you're just as American as someone who traces back to the founders.
I don't know. The people who keep complaining about Mexicans are starting to sound like professional victims. Woe is you. Jesus, snap out of it and quit whining.
I think that it's wrong for folks to profit from their folks breaking the law.
Mmmm, mojados!
...Oh wait. Sorry, I was thinking of mojitos.
Just say it:
you want to force my daughter to have to deal with violent gangs, drive on streets crowded with unregistered cars to the job where she'll work her cute little hiney off to pay for the social infrastructure that those willing to bypass legal routes use for free.
Golly, gee, you mean that's just a probable side effect of what you want? Fair's fair, Gino-- if you get to accuse me of wanting the side effects of what I think is right, I get to accuse it right back.
What I WANT is for their parents to have never violated the law. If we keep making it highly profitable to break the law, with few or no downsides, we'll get more lawbreaking.
Gino, effectively what Sailorette is saying is that when you have people who are not here legally, they are compelled by that circumstance to do extralegal things to live.
Not a good recipe for being trated well at work ("do this or we call ICE") or anything, and it's not a stretch to contemplate that people who get here and stay here by going around the law might sometimes do other things that are prohibited. (like Latino street gangs, though admittedly not all of these are composed of illegals)
Build the fence, enforce the law, then we can see how wide we should open the gate of legal immigration--to be done with medical tests and a background check, just like they did at Ellis Island way back for your ancestors.
when you have people who are not here legally, they are compelled by that circumstance to do extralegal things to live.
Precisely. The life of an illegal immigrant isn't exactly one of luxury.
People come here and put up with that shit because there is a massive inefficiency in the North American (and increasingly global, whether you like it or not) labor market. And no amount of fence-building and law enforcement is going to change that. You are deluded if you think otherwise.
The arguments about crime and gangs are nonsense. We have plenty of home grown varieties. And several of the cities with the largest illegal populations (El Paso and San Diego come to mind) are statistically among the safest in the US.
Come on up to Brewster, Brian.
Don't come in the winter, though-- the illegals that slam into your car and vanish will turn out to have been driving cars that were legally totaled, and most folks from areas different than this don't have nearly enough uninsured driver insurance.
This isn't just observation:
One such eye-opener appeared as "The hit-kill-and-run state" stories, published in 2005 in the Arizona Daily Star. "The seven states with the highest rates of fatal hit-and-run crashes," the paper reported, "are also the seven states that have the most illegal immigrants, according to two think tanks." With 500,000 illegal aliens, or 9 percent of its population, the paper reported, Arizona ranked fifth in that measure behind California, Texas, Florida, and New York. About 5.6 percent of Arizona's fatal crashes between 1994 and 2004, the newspaper reported, were hit-and-run.
(Go down to this quote and read on-- it'll skip the names-and-dates stories and get you to the data.)
Of course, San Diego is huge-- do they have a large illegal population by proportion, or gross numbers? If it's gross numbers, and you look at a proportional risk, the stats are going to be skewed. There's also the possible difference between illegals who can hop across the border and those who are in, say, Washington. (There's always the illegals from other places, but they're a small enough proportion that it doesn't change much.)
Yes, Brian, people are crossing deserts to get here. That said, a lot of them are crossing in vehicles, and I dare suggest that number would be reduced if we simply put vehicle barriers on the border.
In the same way, a lot more are crossing on foot, and I dare suggest that having a barrier to people a distance from the vehicle barrier would reduce that number.
Eliminate? No, but economics is decided on the margins. Tell someone he's going to walk from the border to Tuscon instead of riding, and it's an entirely different equation for what he's willing or able to do to get here.
Bubba--been to that section of the border lately? I lived there for 7 years...you couldn't go more than about 30 miles south of Tucson on any road that went anywhere (and there aren't that many) without a very good chance of running into a BP checkpoint.
There are patrols throughout the desert...you run into them all the time if you go hiking or biking in Organ Pipe, or in the Santa Ritas.
There is a big freaking wall through all of Nogales and quite a ways beyond.
This all existed before the manpower in the Tucson sector was tripled...a tripling which has arguably had some effect at the margins (it is also possible that the net decrease in illegals coming in has something to do with the economic slowdown, particularly in construction in places like AZ.)
Look, I'm not arguing that you can't reduce some migration at the margins, and you can certainly push it elsewhere along the border (one of the reasons so many more illegals started coming across in AZ in the last couple of decades was because of crackdowns near El Paso and San Diego.) But you are not going to build and police your way out of what is fundamentally people responding to artificial barriers in the labor market.
Foxfier--I don't suppose the that being unable to get a driver's license has anything to do with being uninsured, or that being in uninsured AND in the country illegally might make one decide fleeing the scene of the accident is a good idea?
I'm not saying it's cool to leave the scene of an accident (particularly a fatal one), but rather that this is a pretty predictable consequence of criminalizing a large class of people by their mere presence.
There's actually been a fair amount of coverage on the (negative) correlation between immigrant populations and violent crime. Some examples:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2007474,00.html
http://reason.com/archives/2009/07/06/the-el-paso-miracle
http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/22/immigration-and-crime
http://immigrationimpact.com/2009/07/10/large-immigrant-populations-keep-cities-safe-just-ask-el-paso-tx/
Brian-
no small number of them HAVE driver's licenses for their stolen identities. Used to buy or rent houses, too.
The chance of getting caught, though, is low enough that they'd rather save the cash-- buy a junker car, don't insure it, don't hang around if there's an accident.
How often have you totaled your car? Even figuring in the "nothing to lose" screwing around-- ever seen someone deliberately spin their car on an icy road?-- the net risk is pretty low.
Will the New York Times run a correction on its immigration story?
That aside-- if it is such an open and shut case, why are they all talking about average reported crimes rather than number of illegals charged with crimes?
Maybe that didn't fit their story.
Quote:
In fact, a high-ranking FBI director said gangs have followed the migration paths of illegal alien laborers to avoid big-city police departments that have cracked down on their activities. An example is the notoriously violent Salvadoran gang known as Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, which has spread throughout the U.S.—to at least 42 states—and continues expanding.
It's also well known and accepted on BOTH sides of the argument that illegals are unlikely to report crimes against themselves.
(Side note, I find it highly offensive how many statistics conflate those who follow the law and immigrate to the US, and illegals who do not.)
ok, we are way off track.
the topic is not illegals.
it is children born to them. in other words, 'citizen resident Americans'.
"Anchor babies" being the sticking point, I believe?
Children born for the purpose of aiding one or more parents-- sometimes entire families-- in violating US law and for material gain.
Brian--if the BP checkpoints are on the few ROADS there, well, that would be part of our problem, then, wouldn't it? Specifically, watching ROADS instead of the border is going to miss everyone who, ahem, isn't dumb enough simply to walk along the roads.
OK, back to the main topic...
There are all kinds of people with all kinds of opinions on immigration policy. I think there is plenty of room for people of good will to have substantial disagreements on this stuff. But this discussion of birthright citizenship has exposed a subset of people so obsessed by the perceived threat from immigration to our economy/culture/safety/way of life that they are literally going after children.
That is a position so utterly devoid of humanity and compassion that it does not merit respect. And it wouldn't even merit engagement, were it not for the fact that so many otherwise reasonable people seem to be taking it seriously. A fact that I find horrifying, frankly.
I cannot believe that I am the one pointing this out. I don't even like children.
I didn't say anything about "nice". I referred to compassion and humanity. There is a universe of difference.
Saying "they think exploiting children is compassionate and humane" would be needlessly insulting.
Sort of like taking the angle that trying to keep the functioning letter of the law in line with the spirit of it is targeting children would be....
As did Margret Sanger, as does Planned Parenthood.
Do you seriously think that birth-right citizenship was supposed to make it so some poor b*****d would be birthed by a mother who just wanted a welfare ticket in the US? Seriously?
(By the way, I still wait for you two to defend not imprisoning criminals who have children, no taking back things they've stolen, because that's targeting the children....)
foxfier: if either of those two analogies werent so ridiculous, i would address them.
and its ok to type out your words here. i'm hardly the blushing type.
Why not? I bothered to respond to your ludicrous notion that it's "going after the children."
If we're going to limit conversation only to things we don't find incredibly misguided, we're not going to have a lot of conversation.
Typing enforces the same way speaking does, and I'm trying to remove the words from my vocab.
The Right is so full of it here it isn't even funny. They use the Constitution to browbeat people with, except in the places they want it changed. They throw the Constitution in the President's face when their imaginary gun conspiracies bubble up in their brains, but when he defends people's right to build a mosque based on the Constitution he's out of touch with people. We can only hope that when their heads stop spinning they can see straight ahead of themselves again.
Seriously, what I'm seeing is this: the only answer to criticism of the Right is "No, U!" and whenever they find an issue they want to use the Angry Professional White Victim Bots start hitting the tube just like the Angry Professional Black Victim Bots.
I see this whole birthright issue as yet another piece of scary music the Right wants to play because November is right around the corner. And true believers like Bukka and Foxette who have drunk the Kool-aid so deeply just keep rolling along with the mantra even though in the real world the crazy-con act is really starting to wear a little thin on people.
But I hope they keep the rhetoric and the fear-mongering and the double-standard they live by going, because the more strident and conspiratorial and wild-eyed and uncompromising they get the more it's going to slip away from them.
I say keep the 14th as it is just to watch them squawk around like a couple of wet hens. It's fun to watch.
...The point of the Constitution is that you follow how it's written, and if you don't like it, you change it.
Why is this so incredibly hard for people to grok?
So nice to see the tradition of "I am passionate and insulting you" as a form of argument is alive and well.
I kind of like your "obtuse to the point of being irrelevant" tradition myself. Takes years to get it right I hear. You do it better than most, I'll give you that.
Oh, how sharper than the butterfly's tooth....
That is not an argument.
Neither is calling those who disagree with you bullies, irrelevant, ludicrous, child-haters and implying that they're Nazi like.
We left actual arguments a long time ago. My first post was a mild complaint about the lack of a decent argument for the conclusion.
I offered arguments, from a quick scan, to include:
citizenship is not related to being part of the "national community,"
that, as it is the result of an illegal action, birth citizenship for the children of illegals is different than other groups
that the existence of unlimited birth-right citizenship is not good for children
that the original intent was not to give citizenship out like it's a crackerjack prize.
I said browbeating, not bullies. I didn't say you were irrelevant, I said you were obtuse to the point of irrelevance - operative word being obtuse. But before we carry on I want you to show me where I called those who disagreed with me child-haters and implied they were Nazi-like.
I happen to think you are obtuse, but that's not only just my opinion, it's also something you are still young enough to fix. It would entail being less of a pedant, and finding a way to laugh once in a while and be much less doctrinaire. These are not irrevocable faults. I am guilty of them myself from time to time and I work on correcting them all the time. You can work on it and everything might be a little clearer, especially concerning what I did or didn't say.
I heard your points and arguments and said that it was hypocritical for the Right to browbeat people with the sanctity of the Constitution in one argument and then advocate changing it in another. I said I felt that that was politically motivated rather than motivated by principle, which I still believe. I said that it is starting to look like the Right is generating the same kind of theology of the Victim that the Left has.
My reference to you was that I felt all you are doing is whining. Constantly. I also said that I have a feeling you've drunk the Kool-aid too deep by now. And then I said - from my own subjective experience - that I'm starting to also notice that regular folks are starting, slowly I'll admit, to take another look at the arguments the Right is setting down and they are finding the same inconsistencies and hyperbole I was just mentioning.
Your response was to justify your Constitutional bait-and-switch argument by just ignoring my point and bowling on ahead. This is a pretty clinical definition of obtuse. You can see the cars, you just can't get out of the way. This was followed by a comment that didn't address the points I made but instead was a pretty lame attempt at shrugging me off.
But if everything I say is going to be taken as an insult, maybe instead of just working on being obtuse you ought to see a psychiatrist. You're already imagining I'm saying things I'm not, and everything I say seems to be a threat.
There's a very good explanation for the impetus behind your communication on these things. It's called being an intellectual fraud. Just because you have a dictionary doesn't mean you understand what the words mean.
"We" is this entire thread. Not crystal clear, but my mention of the original post was a hint.
"Brow-beat" is a verbal form of bullying.
Taking something to the point of something means that you are going to the second thing via the first thing-- for someone so upset about me being "obtuse," you're doing a grand job of it.
Brian accused those against unlimited birth citizenship of going after children.
Gino followed it up by pulling out the Hitler card.
As to me being pedantic, of course I'm detail oriented in a strictly written format when something worth caring about is being argued about; what is the point of wasting time only to find out both sides agreed and were just saying it unclearly? Unless you're one of those sick people who enjoys finding something folks care about so you can crap on it.
As for the rest of it-- you know jack and crud about me, or how often I laugh, or any other relevant details. You really don't even know much about me even online, or you would not accuse me of following ideals without considering the real world.
Since it's clear from your obsessive turning of discussion to me, rather than the topic of the post, I'm done talking to you here. If I want to be bathed in irrelevance, condescension and insults I can turn on the TV.
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