delicious

A week ago thousands of illegal immigrants set out to protest proposed changes to laws in the United States that would affect the status and chances for future nationalization of any illegal immigrant currently residing in the country. The idea was to walk off the job, withdraw kids from school and refuse to purchase any goods or services to show their effect on the nation’s economy. Most of these jobs pertain to factories, meat packing plants, construction, hotels and restaurants. While advocacy groups love to refer to these positions as “jobs Americans won’t do”, all sense leads me to see that these are jobs that Americans won’t do for the near-slave wage paid to the illegal immigrants currently working them.

The point I think needs to be clarified. The issue in question here isn’t about race or nationality. No one culture is being singled out by this proposed legislation. We’re talking about illegal aliens, not mere “immigrants.” If legal immigrants stopped working for a day, we would be without the services of physicians, nurses, computer programmers, writers, actors, musicians, and quite a few airline pilots… as well as most of the upper management of Google. To this country’s economy a day without legal immigrants would be utter devestation, but that won’t ever happen because legal immigrants are American citizens whose rights are, for the time being, protected by the laws of the United States.

Not everything pertaining to this subject is necessarily on the negative. Some somewhat positive statistics of potential changes to the US economy if there really were no illegal aliens:

• Hospital emergency rooms across the southwest would have about 20% fewer patients, and there would be 183,000 fewer people in Colorado without health insurance.
• OBGYN wards in Denver would have 24% fewer deliveries and Los Angeles’s maternity-ward deliveries would drop by 40% and maternity billings to Medi-Cal would drop by 66%.
• Youth gangs would see their membership drop by 50% in many states, and in Phoenix, child-molestation cases would drop by 34% and auto theft by 40%.
• Our highway patrol and county sheriffs would have far fewer DUI arrests and there would be a dramatic decline in rollovers of vanloads of illegal aliens on I-70 and other highways.

Another thing I don’t understand is when the term “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” became sysnonymous with “illegal Mexican”. The above statistics, while being true for the most part, are certainly slanted on a Mexican/Latin bias. My attempt to find similar statistics for non-Mexican illegal immigrants is still without end.

In this country we have thousands of illegal residents from pretty much every corner of the globe who get into the country from any number of legal reasons ranging from student and temporary worker visas to the routine summer vacation. When the time comes to leave they just decide to stick around. We don’t think anything of it because these people are generally more educated, work more white collar jobs and, lets face it, the look and usually talk more like us. While I would hope matters such as these could be dealt with in a calm and rational manner, ignorance and racism have a way of getting their foot in any open door.

While my personal ideals are constantly evolving I can’t help but see amnesty for illegal immagrants not so much wrong as it is unfair. It’s a slap in the face to everyone who legally entered the country over the past 160 years. Why enter the country legally, take the tests, pay the fees to do it the right way when you can just do things the easy way, then play the race card and scare a bunch of election-year senators into giving you the equivalence for free? In a perfect world there would be no borders, no passports and no person would be illegal, but until then there’s a legal way and an illegal way to do things. I think a lot of our laws are insane, but should I choose to break one, I’m not going to play the victim shoud I get caught.

Certainly there was a noticable level of inconvenience on May 1st, but nothing even close to the levels of economic devestation that were being forecast. The funniest part of it all, the immigration-enforcement agency responsible for locating and deporting illegal aliens also took the day off. They didn’t call it a boycott, of course, it’s just (non)business as usual.

It’s also worth noting that I’ve already been deemed racist and fascist for daring to be pissed of for getting screwed when the new kid at work (a self-proclaimed angry Mexican) no-showed last Monday and discussing the potential good in a nation witout illegal immigrants.