Monday, May 22, 2006

Slippytoad's got it right

Well, surprise: World Net Daily took the passage about Hitler and the Nazis out of the piece I wrote about last week. George Orwell, call your office. Meanwhile, a commenter on Crooks and Liars named Slippytoad pretty much summed up my feelings about the whole immigration "debate":
If you bothered to ask me what my position was, I would tell you very simply that we need to do three things: #1, we need to prosecute companies who wink and nod and hire illegals. This would stop the incentive for people to come in the country. If they don't have jobs to come to, they will stay home. #2, we need to make a serious and abiding effort to improve economic and trading relations with Mexico so that their economy is not an open cesspool of corruption and misery. We contributed to that mightily with the ill-conceived NAFTA giveaway to large corporations. We need leadership to come up with a trade program that actually improves economic conditions for everyone, instead of just for large companies. #3, we CANNOT deport 12 million people, and more importantly we should not. What we should do is make a sane and rational process for becoming naturalized that isn't up to the whims of paper-pushing assholes, and not insist on horrific punitive measures that are only there to make racist pricks feel good about "administerin' justice." The people are here, and they have families here, and some of them believe it or not are refugees from oppresive regimes who came to America because they thought it was the land of the free. We owe it to them to give them the opportunity to do it right, instead of wasting tremendous amounts of taxpayer money, blood, effort, and time doing a purely spiteful thing like yanking them out of the lives they have established here and putting them in tremendous peril, just because we've suddenly decided to enforce the rules that we've been winking and nodding at for 30 years. Large corporations enabled this situation by nudge nudging and selectively enforcing immigration laws. Nobody, especially the Republican Congress, deserves any political capital for suddenly creating a crisis out of whole cloth and capitalizing on it.

And that's what I'm really fucking sick of. The hysterical bullshit assertion that this is suddenly a crisis. Jesus Fuck, I grew up in Denver, Co, and know goddamn well what's going on. DO NOT presume to tell ME what I do or do not understand about immigration. You have no idea who I am or what I do or who I know, so you can climb off your fuckin' high horse of knowledge and come down here where your assertions stand or fall based on their truth. And the truth of it is, we are engaged in this discussion because Republicans are scared shitless of losing their base. And the reason they are using this issue is to scare their base with the image of a bunch of "filthy brown people" scumming up their alabaster fucking communities. And any impulse in that direction I encounter from anyone will be met with unremitting, withering scorn. Deal with the REAL ISSUE. Do not make up fake issues to scream about. I will mock you, I will get the facts, I will jam them right up your ass, and I will shut you down. Bank on it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, it worked so well last time with the whole gay marriage thing.

Anonymous said...

One other thought. I remember it being stated in Economics 101 that a telling sign of the state of the economy can be judged by sentiment towards immigrants (illegal or otherwise). It amounts to this: If the economy is good, people don't care. However, it's only when people feel financially insecure that they'll scream about getting rid of immigrants and shutting down the borders. The rants center around how the immigrants are taking jobs away from "us".

I think it fits the current econ-climate.