Word Play

Illegal: As an adjective, contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law.

             Legal: Of, based on or concerned with the law; permitted by law.

Immigrant: A person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence; a person who leaves their own country in order to settle permanently in another.

Most of us can splice illegal or legal together with immigrant to make a fairly sharp distinction between which is allowable and which is not. Yet it fairly staggers the imagination that we have reached a point in the discussion of our border security where a vocal segment of our society wants to equivocate immigrant and illegal immigrant as if there were no difference whatsoever between the two.

I am torn between wanting very badly to believe the liberal’s and their media are just that stupid or believing that they just think there are enough stupid people out there that can’t tell the difference that they can make up a story that doesn’t exist and expect to sell it.

Andrew Cuomo—the cartoon character they let govern New York—famously and emotionally spewed recently that, “Unless Republicans are all Native Americans then they are immigrants too.”

We can’t all be Elizabeth Warren but for most of us, our ancestors came here a generation or two or three or more ago and in most cases became citizens legally and when they gave birth to our parents, us, etc., we were also citizens. I feel like the stupid one for having to take time out to explain what should be as obvious as Governor Cuomo’s generous nose on his face but I keep hearing they don’t teach civics in high school anymore and that most of us wouldn’t recognize what passes for history.

In fact, Governor, if you want to take your example to the limits of its idiocy, Native Americans are actually Russian immigrants who came her about 14,000 years ago when it was just a long hike from Russia to Alaska right before the last global warming crisis.

The likes of Representative Luis Guitterez (D-CA) spewing his near militant rants about the rights of illegals doesn’t do more good than harm either. The rights of illegals?  Illegals?

And then we have braniacs like Geraldo Rivera weighing in and equivocating the equivocation  with statements  like “Illegals are not criminals. They haven’t broken any laws.” (Except maybe the one that made them illegal.)

As long ago as 2013 (and that’s all the further I felt like going back) a Rasmussen Poll showed that 80% of Americans supported stricter border controls. Sixty one percent of Hispanics supported stricter border controls in that same survey until illegal immigration was reduced by 90%. Fifty six percent of Hispanics opposed Federal benefits for immigrants going through the legalization process.

Things may be different in California, Rep. Guiterrez (I hope you laughed as hard reading that as I did writing it), but that is consistent with the way most of the Latinos I know feel about the subject.

In the 90’s I used to sponsor a floor covering installation training program. One of the courses we offered was a certification course for installers that afforded them some protection from jobs gone bad and offered our suppliers protection from bad installers, blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, one of our largest accounts sent three crew chiefs to a certification course and we immediately had a problem when we discovered not a single one of them spoke more than a few words of English and my instructor was not bilingual. He asked one of our other employees—we’ll call him Juan because…that was his name—to come interpret the questions on the written portion of the test so the students had a chance to pass.

Juan refused. Angrily. I distinctly remember our conversation in which I hardly said a word and he told me that he hadn’t spoken English when he came here either but he learned it. And he became a citizen. And I could fire him if I thought he should help a group of guys here illegally take advantage of a system that allowed them to exploit it.

I, of course, did not fire him. Neither did his boss but it was nice of him to give me the chance.

If the left would stop screaming and demanding the impeachment and assassination of Donald Trump for a second, they might learn that they aren’t the only ones with ideas about immigration reform.

You’ll have to take my word for it but I know a lot of conservative type folks and not one of them is anti-immigration.  Every single one of them is anti-illegal immigration. And so are a majority of the people guys like that Guitterez moron claim to represent (unless he’s claiming to represent illegals but that would require an admission on California’s part that they actually do let folks who are not citizens of the United States participate in their election process).

The RAISE Act backed by President Trump sounds like a good starting point for discussion (remember how discussion works?) but I personally think it is too harsh and restrictive. If it were up to me I’d let everyone in who wants in and is willing to sign the guest book and allow us to vet them and make sure they are not guilty of any felonious crimes. Prior to President Trump enforcing the border security laws we weren’t stopping many of them from coming in anyway, were we?

I’d also let anyone who is here already stay if they would merely register themselves and allow us to go through the vetting process and then work toward citizenship or honor the time limits of their work visas.  If the MSM were honest enough to report it, President Trump has already done the same thing for 750,000 illegals and is willing to do it for millions more if Congress would quit worrying how it would look to help him and…help him.

If you can’t clear the vetting process, however, you are gone or you can’t come in in the first place. If you sneak in or don’t register your current presence we should only assume that is because you can’t clear the vetting process and we will hunt you down and send you back. If you commit a felony while you are here we will send you back.

Simple enough? Perhaps you should all breathe a sigh of relief that I am not in charge, but there are a lot of guys I hang out with (you know, scary conservatives) who feel the same way and if this nation ever believed in an open dialogue again instead of hysterical screaming maybe we could get some stuff figured out.

All we care about in this instance is border security.  We want to make it hard for the drug dealers to do business and we sure don’t want to let anybody through with a history of raping and murdering people. Sorry Luis Guitterez. Everybody else, come on down.

There’s more to say, of course—about the welfare burden, prison overcrowding, gang activity, the economy--it’s a complex issue and I’m already over 1000 words and I’m no expert anyway (when’s the last time a CNN airhead ever admitted that?) so have fun deconstructing my argument as you uncork a bottle of white wine. But I think you get my point.

Oh, and one last thing, stop throwing that stupid chart on Facebook of what a small sliver of America is actually murdered by illegals. You can’t be so stupid as not to realize that a nearly identical chart with an even smaller sliver of murder victims exists to describe people killed in random mass shootings.  Careful, gun control freaks.

If 3,000 people murdered on 9/11/01 isn’t enough for you, how about if it were your daughter?