That bottom headline reads, Why the GOP demonizes 'illegals'
With illegals in quotation marks, as if they are only "illegal" because someone says they're illegal,not because they are illegal.
And that is the whole bloody point! We have immigration rules in place. If you come in legally, you're an immigrant, if you come in illegally, you are an illegal. You are not an "undocumented" worker, you are an illegal immigrant who should be deported!
Let us not forget that if you are an illegal immigrant in Mexico - from Guatemala or some other country.... you're deported toot sweet and even tout suite, or put in jail. But we try to deport Mexican illegals and the Mexican president calls us racist, etc.
It's just....sad, that it's been allowed to get to this point.
ANd much of the blame must go to our government - because there are businesses that use these illegals and have done for decades, because they can pay them pennies. Meanwhile, our own unemployed live off welfare, because they aren't going to do any back-breaking work picking crops. Why should they? They don't have to.
Here's the complete article. (It's actually from the Daily Beasst)
I turned on the Republican presidential debate last week and learned something. In today’s GOP, the correct term for a human being who crosses the U.S. border without a visa in search of a brutally difficult, poorly paid job that few native-born Americans wish to do but on which our national economy depends is “illegal.”
Not “illegal immigrant” or even “illegal alien,” which implies that the people cooking our food and making our beds arrived here by spaceship. But merely “illegal.” Maybe in the general election, when Mitt Romney goes trolling for votes in the Southwest, he’ll soften up and merely dehumanize America’s most vulnerable people via adjective. But when you’re battling Rick Perry and Herman Cain, adjectives aren’t good enough. You need the noun.
“Illegal” is the latest in a long line of euphemisms that politicians use to signal their antipathy to a reviled racial or ethnic group, in this case, Latinos. No, no, you say, this has nothing to do with animosity toward Hispanics; it’s about protecting the border and obeying the law. Really? Then why don’t we call the CEOs of the companies that hire illegal immigrants “illegals”? Our last three presidents all violated America’s drug laws. The current Treasury secretary violated America’s tax laws. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay recently was convicted of money laundering. I look forward to hearing Mitt Romney and Fox News refer to them as “illegals” too.
People from non-stigmatized ethnic groups don’t get called “illegals” no matter what they do. When I grew up in Boston in the 1980s, the city was filled with Irish workers with forged immigration papers. But since Irish politicians ran the city, those workers were treated gingerly. In the mid-1990s, after the first World Trade Center bombing prompted a federal crackdown on illegal immigrants, agents from what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service swooped into Boston and deported 243 undocumented workers from the Dominican Republic and another 16 from tiny Cape Verde. As for the Irish, as Boston Magazine noted in 2008, the INS agents managed to find only four. Had a newscaster in the Boston of my youth called the undocumented Irish “illegals,” he would have been fired.
It’s tempting to dismiss “illegals” as another poll-tested, cotton-candy word that no one takes seriously. After all, if Americans really believed that illegality defined undocumented workers—that they were lawless and dangerous at their core—would millions of families entrust them with the care of their kids?
On the other hand, it’s just possible that the rhetorical dehumanization of millions of Latinos may have something to do with the big spike in anti-Latino hate crimes over the last decade. In 2010, for instance, a Phoenix man named Gary Kelley shot his neighbor, Juan Verela, after yelling “Go back to Mexico or die!” No word yet on whether Kelley is an “illegal” as defined by Mitt Romney.
I was pleased to see that this author had 3,000 comments on this article, most of them pointing out that illegals are called illegal because you know...they're illegal?
The author does have a point, of course. We have so many illegals in this country because htere are big businesses that give them jobs, who our politicians don't want to annoy. But yes - any business that knowingly hires an illegal alien should receive a prohibitive fine.
They can't find anyone to work for as low wages as the illegals will take? Send the welfare rolls to them. Let those [who are actually able-bodied] guys get a good job, or work picking crops... Workfare, not welfare.
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