Illegal Immigration, and the NSA

[pecunium]

The issue of illegal immigration is in the news (what with half a million people coming out in LA to protest the planned legislations being bandied about in Congress and the Senate).

I know what I think would, not solve, but greatly change the face of the problem: Actually enforce the laws, in combination with increasing the fines.

The cause is people being able to come to the states to get work. It doesn't deter them that they might be deported, because the lure of money is a magnet.

Employers aren't paying any real penalty for hiring them. Wal-Mart was caught using them to clean the floors. They were fined a token. Make it costly for businesses to hire large numbers of illegal workers, and they will stop hiring them, which will reduce the number who are interested in making the trek. Doing all of that, and ending up unemployed.

Some will come and get work as gardners, day laborers and the like, but the numbers will drop.

We will have to pay more for grapes, houses, celery, landscaping, chicken, and all sorts of things we get cheaply now because we pay people who can't protest the pittance they are being paid for their work.

But that's not really what I'm writing about.

The people screaming about this have been harping on the fact that these immigrants are here illegally. I just saw some Republican member of the House explaining that amnesties (like Guest worker programs being allowed to accept workers who are already here) are not the answer because rewarding people who break the law will only encourage more people to break the law.

Which is, of course, where the NSA comes into this, because rewarding someone who is breaking the law right now (and admits it) is what DeWine, and Spector and all those who support trying to change the law to make what Bush has been doing legal are talking about.

And these same people admit that rewarding lawbreaking is a bad idea, because it will only encourage the person so rewarded to break other laws.

Comments

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

And these same people admit that rewarding lawbreaking is a bad idea, because it will only encourage the person so rewarded to break other laws

You should submit this as a comment to Daily Kos or one of the other sites where these matters are currently being discussed, because this is a connect-the-dots that I haven't seen mentioned yet. Also, a good point.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I don't know how.

Feel free to link to this. Right now (at the risk of seeming flip) I'm sort of busy, what with working, packing and being engaged in a heated debate with two of the officers in the room about the duty of a gov't to look after the poor; they made the mistake of saying that nowhere in the Bible does it say to redistribute wealth.

TK

[trinker.livejournal.com]

they made the mistake of saying that nowhere in the Bible does it say to redistribute wealth.

...?!?!?! Wow. Go get 'em.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I did.

They got off lucky, they kept it to the OT. Had we gone to the Red Letters they'd have been boneless bags of pulp when I got done beating on them. As it was they were just black and blue.

TK

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I still don't understand why fundamentalist Christians are so gung-ho on the OT, except that the OT has a lot more blue law potential.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

What? WHAT? WHAT????????????

The mind is past boggling.

[elf]

Isn't it cute when they mistake political propaganda for holy scripture?

I have friends who hate arguing with fundamentalists. My only problem is that the bible-thumpers run away as soon as you actually pull out the book & start looking at passages.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

These aren't fundies (so far as I can tell... given the level of semi-intimate contact one gets in situations like this, I'd lay long odds against it).

They just said something silly and I whipped out the big guns. I considered taking orders as a Jesuit, so I am tolerably aware of the book.

The way the debate rolled out, the OT was where the debate went.

TK

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

Wow. How far did you get in considering that choice?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I was young. I'd say, all in all, I got to somewhere between half and three quarters of the way to entering the shaping process.

But I have some real reservations with Ex cathedra and as a result some of the other doctrinal positions of the Church. That made me decide I couldn't be a truly faithful servant, and so I put it aside.

But a lot of the attitudes, and drives, which led me to ponder that calling led me to the others I have taken up, journalism and the Army.

And it probably puts me in the nightmare category when fundies try to pick a fight we me. They never seem to realise that when I give them chapter and verse as reference, that I know the book. It leads them into painf questions, which they usually can't answer.

Me, I can thread the needles. There's a lot of fine reasoning (some of it utter nonsense) in the Catholic faith, a lot of justifying contradictions, and making some sense out of them. A lot of that was used to make things which seem (or are) in contradiction of the words of the text acceptable.

I can live with that sort of ambiguity, and conflict. My moral compass is full of shades of grey. Those who live in a Manichean world... well it hurts their little brains to try and reconcile the things they do, with what they say they believe.

But I don't really care. I can be a real asshole and take a certain pleasure in using the faith they have constructed to beat them up; because I think them to be pharisees and pricks, deserving of more scorn than I will heap on them, and living the only reward they are likely to get; by wallowing in the public piety of their self-righteousness.

TK