Council member Carl Mumpower and I must have had similar upbringings, learning at home and later in the military that laws were made to be enforced, and violating them would bring swift justice.
Our country is now overrun with millions of illegal immigrants who are thumbing their noses at Uncle Sam. They are sucking the air out of Social Security, overwhelming our schools and medical facilities, and taxing our welfare system.
It’s obvious that our federal government is turning its head, so it’s now up to local communities to act. Our city police and county deputies should round up all the illegal aliens that can be found. Their whereabouts are well-known: Concentrated in certain jobs, they cluster in mostly low-income Hispanic neighborhoods.
We should place these suspected illegals on rented buses and bring in federal magistrates (that’s the least the government can do). Those who can’t produce documents proving they’re U.S. citizens or are here on legal visas would be immediately transported to the nearest southern border crossing and released to Mexico.
It’s so simple, even a caveman could do it.
Once they see the success we have in getting rid of these pesky parasites, thousands of other communities will follow our example, and before we know it, millions of illegal immigrants will be sent packing.
Of course, some will oppose this bold, courageous move. They’ll point out that, just maybe, these lawbreakers might have been enticed. After all, if you’re making $5 a day and you’re willing to participate in a potentially deadly game of Survivor by crossing a few miles of desert or running up the San Diego Freeway, you could end up earning $50 a day to feed your family. Even the fact that many who succeed in reaching the promised land are treated worse than our African slaves were doesn’t deter this quest for riches.
It appears that the federal government deliberately understaffed the borders because they felt we needed this cheap labor. They practically held up a sign that said, “Come on down!”
Those opposed to this plan might also point out that it’s not just big agriculture, textile sweatshops, meat packers and other labor-intensive industries that have illegally aided and abetted this temptation. We individual God-fearing, law-abiding Americans may also have played some part in the browning of America.
Were people like Dr. Mumpower and I diligent in asking the contractor who fixed our roof or the manager of the car wash or the restaurants we patronized whether they employed anyone who wasn’t in the country legally? Did we check the Social Security number of the person we hired to cut our grass or clean our house?
Some will also argue that since there’s evidence of enticement, and since we’ve turned our heads for so long, there might be something wrong with our immigration law—just as there was with the law that said blacks had to sit in the back of the bus, couldn’t eat at the Woolworth lunch counter, and public schools had to be separate but equal.
We cannot be deterred by this soppy liberal intellectualism: We must not lose our resolve to take action!
We must stop these people from shipping $2 billion a month of tax-free money out of the country. (Of course, that’s chump change compared to what’s going to multinational corporations offshore.)
But there are some issues it would be prudent to consider. A substantial percentage of illegal aliens came here unwillingly as children, and many have grown up among us. They may be playing on the Roberson football team, serving on the Asheville High debating team or singing in the church choir. They also may have no knowledge of Mexican culture and may not even speak Spanish.
Meanwhile, the ones we deport have picked up a certain amount of English and a sophisticated knowledge of American geography, along with local contacts.
Since Mexico cannot or will not accommodate this sudden onslaught of deportees, we can assume that unless there’s some serious deterrent, they’ll wind up back here in a matter of weeks or even days. We may have to post what remains of our Army and National Guard after Iraq on the border, with orders to shoot to kill.
This could be expensive and create some political fallout, but it’s necessary to accomplish our mission. We must enforce the law über alles.
Another problem is that many of these illegal families include children who were born here. Some of these irresponsible lawbreakers might choose to abandon their legal children, believing they’d be better off remaining here and receiving the many benefits available to U.S. citizens.
The Department of Social Services will have to devise a plan to provide food, housing, education and health care for these children, from infancy until they turn 18.
We’ll also have to make some economic adjustments. If our plan is successful, millions of these criminals will be deported. It may take awhile to hire all the people who’ve been shut out of the job market for agricultural stoop work and food processing, so our food supply may be temporarily disrupted.
It will also take time to train those slothful welfare recipients to take the place of all the trained carpenters, roofers, plumbers and dry-wall hangers we’ve dispatched across the border. This may cause some labor shortages and a serious slowdown in construction and other industries.
There may be additional fallout in the hospitality sector, but there are plenty of American workers waiting to fill these jobs, albeit at much higher wages. Even if this sparks a serious recession, it’s surely worth it.
Or could it be time to secure our borders and consider the terrible “A-word”: “amnesty”? I know that’s right up there with those other “A-words”—“abortion” and “adultery”—in terms of conservative abhorrence.
Historically, most naturalized citizens and their descendants have made great Americans. And isn’t it possible that by turning our heads at the border and giving them jobs, we suckered these immigrants into coming here thinking they’d be welcome?
All I’m really trying to say is that the solution to this problem is not pure brown and white.
[Jerry Sternberg has been active on the local scene for many years. He can be reached at gospeljerry@aol.com].
Social Security has a fund called the “earning suspense fund” which is currently sitting on a little than 285 Billion dollars. Social Security estimates that at least 3/4’s of the money put into the fund comes from undocumented workers. This is hugely important to the debate, which (financially speaking) seems to focus on whether their net contribution is draining or adding to our vastly expanding deficit. The current debt expansion has nothing to do with illegal immigrants. There are lots of different models depicting benefits and drawbacks, please read them. A good way to start is to do a search for “earning suspense fund”.
Discosure: I volunteer teaching English as a second language and search out people whose culture has something to teach me. Most my friends are North American.
Jerry, I occassionally like your writing, but this was a tough one to understand. I read all the way up to “shoot to kill” thinking your head was up your a**, before I realized your tongue was in your cheek.
I must assume you don’t really mean all the ignorant stuff you said in paragraphs 1 through 13, right? If you’re going to use irony, always risky, please try to be very clear about what you really mean, and you might want to do it before paragraph 12.
Thanks.