Illegal Immigration

"The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept." ~ William Shakespeare

I just finished listening to Lores Rizkalla's radio show on streaming audio from Radio KRLA out of Los Angeles. Lores is a long time blogger buddy of mine who has risen above the rest of us poor saps toiling in utter obscurity to get her own radio program, and it is really gaining popularity.

This morning, one of her guests was David Horowitz, Conservative (who used to be Liberal) author of "Dangerous Professors" or "The 101 most Dangerous Academics in America", but the topic that dominated the first hour of her show was the topic about illegal immigration.

I want to go on record here to say that I am not against immigration per se. I am against illegal immigration. Well, I don't suppose that makes me any different than the majority of Americans. Except you start to wonder when you discover that 500,000 people marched in protest of the introduction of a bill that would further restrict illegal immigration in L.A., and then I say to myself, "What is wrong with this picture?"

Listen: I take my son over to Frederick, Maryland (home of Hood College, where they just elected the nations first female Homecoming King, but that's a subject for another post) on occasion so he can go skateboarding in the skate park they have over there, which is situated in a very nice public park that has a lot of amenities, like the aforementioned skatepark, soccer fields, picnic shelter houses, basketball courts, and two outdoor street hockey rinks, wherein Hispanics (I use the term Hispanics because I don't really know if they are all Mexicans or if they are from various Latin American countries) from all over town gather to play a kind of outdoor indoor soccer game.

When I tire of watching my son try various skateboard tricks (did I mention he's very good?), sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, I often wander over to the hockey rinks and watch the soccer games. Over time, I have had many opportunities to speak to some of the participants. They speak and understand little English, but my Spanish comprehension is usually good enough to facilitate some semblance of conversation.

What I have found are some very nice people. They are hard working, hard playing, industrious, decent, friendly, law-abiding people who just happen to be from another country. This, in and of itself, doesn't make them bad people. I don't know if they are illegal or not and I haven't asked. Nor should I, if I want to keep enjoying the games.

Point 1: Whether they are nice, decent, hard working, law-abiding good people is irrelevant if they are illegal. All illegal immigrants should be deported. The very designation, "illegal" makes them criminals. I would truly hate to see my new-found friends be deported, but if they are illegal, they must go.

Point 2: This illegal immigrant problem wouldn't be nearly as bad as it has become if (a) it wasn't so damn difficult to get into this country legally, and (b) if El Presidente Vincente Fox wouldn't encourage them to jump the border.



Point 3: There is no way we can control whether someone from a middle eastern country (read Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Whatever) saunters across our southern and northern borders(don't forget Canada) carrying a parcel that contains something that will cause massive amounts of destruction both to infrastructure and humans.

Solutions?

1: Reform and refine the process of legal immigration. Some who want to immigrate here legally wait years, sometimes decades, for the go ahead to enter legally. There simply is no need for all this red tape. If we can streamline the process to where it only takes a few weeks, or better yet, a few days to approve an entry visa or whatever, how many prospective immigrants would opt to do it the legal way? Especially if...

2. We go ahead and spend the funds necessary to actually build a real wall across the borders, and man them with real people with real guns and real authority and real technology to track and arrest the illegals who still, after all these precautions, manage to sneak across anyway. I find it rather insane that we can find one cow in an obscure, nondescript field somewhere in Wyoming that has mad cow disease, but we can't find millions of illegal immigrants living right under our collective noses.

OK. We know why neither Democrats or Republicans don't seem to want to take the lead in implementing better methods of protecting our borders. So the only thing we can do from where we sit in our homes is to contact our representatives in Congress up to and including the President and demand some action. Any action.

Our votes count. Let's make sure they understand that