Posted on 06/05/2005 8:19:23 AM PDT by austinite
If an Islamofascisti terrorist enters from Canada, will the Mexicans be blamed as well???? In that event, should we keep out of the US people like Sittnick's wife just because she came from Canada? How do you propose to enforce strict resistance to border crossings? At what expense to our military and its obligations in the wars? Remember that border control also requires coastline control. Where do the necessary personnel come from, assuming you can concoct and enact a constitutional plan to seal off our country? Where does the money come from? Higher taxes or spending cuts? Do we sit still for civilian patrols and take responsibility if they injure or kill people in their zeal?
What about Sittnick's wise observation that the fence that keeps illegals out can also be used to keep us in? Is it not axiomatic that the freedom to leave is among the most important rights for those who do not give total trust to government?
As we each type, there are more Hispanics in the USA already than African Americans. How do you seal the borders while avoiding permanent alienation of Hispanics already here including an estimated 10 million unamnestied "illegals?" Do you want Hispanic votes for conservative causes and candidates? If not, why not?
Do you deny that Hispanic immigrants are more likely to be social conservatives than are the ancestral six-generation "Republican" types like Senators Jeffords and Chaffee??? Or the folks down at the polo club, the yacht club, the Junior League?
I trust that these questions posed to many of differing opinions offend no one of good will and faclitate discussion.
Are you a professional comedian? That one had me LOL! I mean on top of everything else we have to worry about offending criminals. You're too much ! ROTFLOL
Holmes was talking about "retarded" people, that is, those who are severely mentally handicapped. He was not talking about southerners.
Sheesh.
See Conrad Black's book: The War Against the Poor, which, though Black is not a conservative, was sold by the Conservative Book Club. Wittingly or unwittingly, you are backing Holmes's eugenicist play. Please read the book. No sheesh about it.
I do note that you did not see fit to answer any of the specific questions posed. I guess that tells everyone what we need to know. You are leaving the impression that you think alienating the Mexicans is some sort of positive good.
You are pretty funny. The Holmes decision came in a lawsuit that was testing legislation from the VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE.
"By 1924, approximately 3,000 people had been involuntarily sterilized in America; the vast majority (2,500) in California. That year Virginia passed a Eugenical Sterilization Act based on Laughlin’s Model Law. It was adopted as part of a cost-saving strategy to relieve the tax burden in a state where public facilities for the "insane" and "feebleminded" had experienced rapid growth. The law was also written to protect physicians who performed sterilizing operations from malpractice lawsuits. Virginia’s law asserted that "heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy and crime…" It focused on "defective persons" whose reproduction represented "a menace to society.""
http://tinyurl.com/c8bxp
Sheesh!
My point was not about assumptions.
It came across to me that your point was that those who make the wrong assumption about the people they do business with (that is, those who assume that they're legal when in fact they're illegal) should be punished. I disagree with that.
And when you assume, well, you've heard that one before and it's completely true.
Any time I make an assumption? I make assumptions all the time, and so, I gather, do you. It's pretty much impossible for anyone to avoid doing it.
Locking it down does not deport anyone. Not one.
Not by itself, and I didn't say it did. I said it makes deportation more effective, and will therefore make it far more likely to happen.
No, that's what you want it to mean, because it saves you from having to make an actual argument. You've spent the last few posts doing nothing but making unfounded accusations against a group of people whose only thing in common is agreement on a particular issue. You can always find ZPG-types among those opposed to illegal immigration, just as you can always find flaming communists among those who want to erase the border altogether. That kind of thing isn't argument; it's just ad hominem.
Hard as this may be for you to accept, "cultural stability" can actually mean "cultural stability". Amazing, but true.
Hispanic citizens are generally in favor of securing the border, because many of them resent being lumped in with the illegals (not that you would do such a thing).
Frankly, it seems to me that the conservative Hispanics already here, going through the LEGAL process, would be perfectly happy to have the USA enforce its existing immigration laws.
I sense a contradiction in terms if one on the one hand declares that the Hispanics who are here are "law-abiding conservative, culturally compatible" types and on the OTHER hand declaring that they would be offended by simple enforcement of the law.
Actually I am glad the Mexican Americans you speak of are good people. I hope they are in this country legally. If here legally more power to then, vote Republican and vote often(you said you are from Illinois) But, if not then they are criminals. If you personally know or harbor illegals or hire them to work for you are also a criminal.
Borders mean something. Get real.
You apparently missed my point about Michael Moore and Ward Chamberlain. You pulled a quote by Holmes as though to say "He wrote this at about the same time. It's the kind of thinking behind the immigration laws." But it looks a lot like a non-sequitur. You don't think as others think now, why not be fairer to earlier generations?
You also ducked my point about the 1960s. In the 1920s one could make a strong case for limiting immigration to give the country a chance to assimilate those who had already arrived. And one could make a case later for changing the system to make it fairer to people who had been excluded under the 1924 Act. That was done in the 1940s and 1950s, and could have continued. But what we got instead was a more radical change based on charges of racism and bigotry, that scrapped important limits, and let immigration get out of control.
If you argue that there was something emotional and prejudiced about the 1924 Act, I'd have to agree. But I'd say the same thing for the 1965 Act as well. There was much naivete -- consider Senator Kennedy's feeble predictions -- and a certain smug satisfaction at sticking it to the old WASPs that really should have been avoided.
I'd have to agree as well that the 1924 Act was not the best we could have gotten. There was no point in keeping unfulfilled quotas for Britain when worthy people from other places wanted to come in. Some sort of limit on immigration was justified then, though. The country needed a "time out" so as not to fall apart into hostile ethnic tribes. And it wasn't on the face of things unreasonable to grant a preference to those who people assumed would fit in better. There were serious faults with that law, but the 1965 Act was no triumph of enlightened statecraft, either.
It is only in the Anglo-American world that racial obsessions rule. Describe for me the last Latin American race riot. The Latin Americans have Caucasian ancestry, black ancestry, Moorish ancestry and mostly Native American ancestry. They have long since intermarried and race is no longer a controversy among them.
Are you for real? There has been much ill-feeling between Blacks and Whites, or Mestizos and Indians in Latin America. Obviously they didn't have the kind of absolute color bar that existed in much of the US until a few decades ago. But in many countries there's a deep gulf between native Indian populations in the countryside and the White or mestizo cities. One reason why Mexican Indians are coming here now is because they sense that Mexican elites don't want them to be anything more than a servile population. Check out this recent article.
Latin America may not have "race riots." It does have insurrections and civil wars in which the sides are often drawn up on racial lines. Look at Chiapas, for example. India, Africa, and the Middle East have had plenty of "communal violence" which amount to much the same thing as our race riots did. I think you may be blinded by the American experience, and the idea that once we shed the strict color line, everyone will get along. But societies without legally-enforced segregation based on skin color have had racial, ethnic, and religious violence and persecution.
North Americans may look at Mexico or Brazil or Peru and assume that because people of different colors intermarry that they all get along. Sadly that's not the case. Some groups are on the top, some on the bottom. Being on top or on the bottom matters a lot there (perhaps because they don't have those "social benefits" you talk about). And feelings can get quite embittered, and result in violence. It would be nice to think that racial antipathies were all the fault of the WASPs, but it's just not true.
I really doubt that we are going to agree on this stuff but I will make this final statement in response. The Brits have the charming notion that they are some sort of special race apart from mankind. Some even imagine that they are the descendants of the 10 lost tribes of Israel: See Randy Weaver, the Worldwide Church of God and its offshoots (Herbert W. Armstrong). There are some wacky cults out there with perfectly nice people attached at the hip to rank poppycock. One such cult is certainly centered on the myth of English racial superiority.
I am a Roman Catholic. History is history. Facts are facts. The British, on the occasion of Henry VIII's desire to dump his legitimate wife of 20+ years, Catherine of Aragon, for the unpardonable "crime" of failing to bear to him a survivable male heir, split out of the Roman Catholic Church, which would not convenience Henry's dynastic (and other baser) desires by annulling his marriage to Catherine on grounds which he himself denied (non-consummation of her prior marriage to his deceased brother Arthur which, had it been consummated would have caused his marriage to Catherine to be incestuous in Church law). St. Thomas More was beheaded for not arguing this ludicrous fiction of Henry's imagination in service of his desire to "marry" Anne Boleyn who may well have been Henry's own illegitimate daughter (according to his contemporary biographer Nicholas Sandler).
Unlike those Europeans who remained with Catholicism, the British were crippled by the feeling that British ancestry was some sort of qualification. Their church is "The Church of England" and some may indulge the idea of being the "Anglo-Catholic" church or the Catholic church of England or whatever but they are not Catholic and have not legitimate apostolic succession and therefore cannot confer the sacrament of Holy Orders (ordaining of actual priests). The word "catholic" (small c) means "universal" and has been set firmly against the mythical notion of racial "superiority" of this or that ethnic group or that from the beginning. That is why there is not RACIAL strife in Catholic countries. Intermarriage is no big deal. The strife in your linked article from Front Page in Chiapas, Mexico, describes a tribal political movement of Marxism against less Marxist forces in Mexico, claims that "Catholic" revolutionaries are moving against established authorities, etc. Catholics do NOT adhere to PRI, a communist party known for executing Catholic martyrs such as Miguel Pro, SJ (1927) for merely saying Mass in violation of law in Mexico City.
Miguel Pro was no Marxist.
I am not responsible for contemporaries like Michael Moore or like Ward Churchill since I revile them and their thoughts. I also revile Margaret Sanger and Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant and their racist and eugenicist ilk and Katherine Hepburn who, along with her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Hepburn, were cronies and sycophants of Sanger. It is ideas that matter and have consequences, whenever they were expressed. One person's ideas are NOT NECESSARILY as good as another's, regardless of when expressed or by whom. Ideas stand or fall on their own merits or lack thereof.
Ask Americans schooled in British "facts" when the first permanent settlements were made here and most will reference Jamestown in 1609 or so. Actually, never minding the considerably older Franciscan missions of the Spanish West Coast, there is also Saint Augustine in Spanish Florida, all 16th century predecessors of Jamestown. Those were not British so they did not count, you see?
Your other linked article brings us the stunning news that Theodore "Ted the Swimmer" Kennedy lied as to the changes in the immigration laws in 1965. I am shocked, shocked!!!!! His baptism not withstanding, Mr. Kennedy is a member of the sect of anti-Catholic hedonism, baby-killing and sex of whatever sort with whomever without state interference and of a "right to privacy" to protect him from state inquiry into the death by drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne. He is no Catholic and we have not even discussed his voting record as a Senator.
How familiar are you with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.? I did not miss the point at all. Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., was a full throated, left-wing, High WASP bigot and elitist. That had nothing to do directly with Congress nor with the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish Immigration Act of 1924 nor with the anti-Catholic national mania for prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Nonetheless, those anti-immigration acts and alcohol prohibition acts are as stated. Hence, I am fair to earlier generations. As my mother used to say, and possibly your mother too, there are good people and bad people in all kinds.
Senator Kennedy may have been naive. More likely, he and his fellow liberals lied. Ted the Swimmer is probably a bit bashful. It is a good thing that Latinos are crossing into the USA. They are refreshing our nation as did previous generations of immigrants.
As to race riots, there are a couple who attend the Churches that my family attends. The husband is a Russian ethnic whose family was dubbed with a very Irish name when his ancestors arrived here long ago. His wife is German. The fact that they have an Irish surname does not mean that the hostility between their family and mine is racial much less a riot. We just don't like each other and we avoid contact. They are as Catholic as are we. We even agree on most matters political but do not like each other. So what?
Finally, the notion that some rural tribesman in Chiapas may convert to Islam is not particularly important. There are plenty of Muslims in Canada and no one is getting hysterical over the possibility of Islamofascisti coming across our porous northern border where they are far more likely to enter.
Conservatives will certainly rue the day when they even gave border obsession a hearing much less allied with it. Hopefully the damage to legitimate movement objectives may be undone.
That may not be a satisfactory set of responses to your taste, but it is my story and I am sticking to it.
How scrupulous are you on your income tax returns, exceeding posted speed limits and a wide variety of other laws? You would not want to be a "criminal." Puhleeeeeeeeze!!!!!!!!
"Harbor illegals?????" Comrade police officer: there are people here who have no papers! Seize them before the republic is destroyed!!!!! If I "know illegals," I am a criminal?????? What balderdash!!!!! I practiced criminal law for 25+ years. You are full of baloney. Assuming as I do not that merely "knowing illegals" were a crime, a government quite uninterested in arresting people coming north for a better life are not about to arrest citizens on such flimsy BS.
I am sorry that you apparently feel that someone guaranteed you that you would be living all your life in a nation or state or town that resembled the nation or state or town of your youth in terms of ethnic makeup, but, if anyone did, they lacked the authority to do so.
Get used to the idea that there are going to be a LOT more Mexicans in the USA. Good for them. We can get along with them whether you think so or not. And we are going to get along with them.
I asked you and anyone else caring to answer to respond to a set of questions, the answers to which will mark you as real or as engaged in fantasy. The questions have not been answered and understandably so.
Clicking your ruby red heels together three times and really, REALLLLLLLY wanting something untrue to be true will not make it true. Mexicans have been coming here for a verrrrrry long time. They are coming here today. They will be coming here tomorrow. I believe that there is absolutely nothing legal that you and those who agree with you can do about it. You don't want to hear that or disprove the assertion.
Fine, let your steam build until it blows you up but the fact that you are angry commands nothing from those who disagree with you.
BTW, I come from utterly Republican Northwest rural Illinois which is more GOP than Chicago is Demonrat. We get along with Mexicans here. I don't have the slightest interest in how they arrived or when or in "checking their papers" to satisfy the obsessively narrow-minded. Get over the fact that your priorities are not those of many others.
Ok, if you want to trivialize the criminal hiring of illegals go ahead, at your own peril. If you can't grasp the magnitude of the undercurrent on this issue, please get a grip. In my lifetime I have never seen a disconnect like this before- between you a me this is serious. I think you are on the wrong side of this one.
This one goes to the core of what it means to be a U.S. citizen.
If by "cultural stability" one means that Judaeo-Christians are to be admitted in preference to other cultural groups, then that's a good thing...although one would not necessarily EXCLUDE 'other' cultural groups.
That is precisely the argument made by PJBuchanan waaaayyyy back in 1984--for good reason.
bttt
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