Replies

"If illegals don't vote, or at least mostly do not vote, and legal immigrants support Proposition 187, why did it kill the Republican party in California for over a decade? "

I don't pretend to be a specialist on California politics, but there are often many factors that influence issues.
There was a serious effort to fight the defeat of Bob Dornan in California as many people had solid reasons to believe illegals helped put his Hispanic Democrat liberal opponent in office.

It would seem to me that the liberal establishment is well-entrenched in California.

"I have to assume that legal immigrants have empathy for their people not yet here "

I disagree. If I paid whatever I had to pay, get on a waiting list, and fill out all the paperwork and do things by the book, why should I support some line-jumper? I don't think Americans of any ethnic group can be so easily pigeonholed on most issues, including illegal invaders.

"I have to admit, I have my own moral compass, which says that strict adherence to the law is often not the best course. I certainly find it hard to blame people who see jobs and opportunity over here, and little of it in their own country. I say that the people who take the initiative to come here are people who have the American "Can do, don't take no for an answer" spirit that I appreciate. "

If you don't like the law, you change it, you don;t break it, unless its an inherently immoral law. Protecting national borders and national identity is not immoral.

Some of the illegals fit the description you proposed - they come here to better themselves. Some do not. But I'm more interested in the best interests of American than the best interests of people with problems from other countries. If we used that criteria for allowing people in here the whole world would invade America.

"There are a lot of heroes in American movies and literature who behave exactly that way, flouting scores of rules, and we still root for them. I don't see illegals as any different from that."

I don't what heroes you are alluding to. But I don't see anything heroic about cultural and national suicide, which is where we are going if we don't control our borders.

"I might add that I live in the Pittsburgh, PA area, where there are vanishingly few illegals or even non-whites. Doesn't make a difference. "

I don't know how the laws in Pennsylvania work about indigent health care. If they function as they do in most states, you are paying medical coverage for illegals getting treatment in Philadelphia and other areas where they are more [prevalent. The money paid to hospitals to offset these costs come from tax dollars. Also, many hospitals are parts of systems - your hospital may be part of a system which has branches which DO serve a large illegal community.

"I think that because many of you focus on this problem to the exclusion of all others, the bureaucrats who run the hospitals and the schools just think this is a way they can get conservatives off their backs."

I don't think you can compare hospitals with schools. Schools are run by anti-American left-wing establishments which produce a poor product at a high cost.

Hospitals and medical care are driven by increasing costs of ever more sophisticated treatments and medications, and the costs of illegal aliens. Non-profit hospitals have been hit very badly by this. But despite all the problems, the American health coverage system is still the best in the world. Nobody goes to Honduras or Canada for medical treatment.

"To me, in order to be an invader, you have to have hostile intent. In order to deserve all the opproborium I see thrust on illegals, I would have to see genuine, hostile intent. "

The Goths had no hostile intent in invading Rome. They just wanted a piece of the action. I don't think hostile intent is necessary. A crime is a crime, regardless of intent. If you are driving intoxicated and kill someone, that may not have been your intent, but the results are the same.

Illegal aliens are straining our social support system, driving down American salaries, creating large ghettos of unassimilable individuals, demanding we and our government communicate with them in their language, and in other ways subverting American culture, and destroying the system which has so successfully assimilated so many legal immigrants in the past and in the present.

If you don't like the law, and you have no reasonable probability of changing it, then you're in trouble. I have no reasonable probability of changing the speed limits in my area, even though the nominal speed limits are about 1/3 or more lower than the real world speeds everyone drives at.

Thing is, if the cops don't like the law, and nobody in your area likes the law, then the law is not enforced and it pretty much vaporizes off the books.

That's what happened with the speed limits around here. They are on the books, but are not enforced. If they were, I think there would be a lot of mad people, and the city council would have to fire the police chief over it. Nobody wants to do that, and so the police chief doesn't enforce the law.

What's kinda funny is that it seems like the same thing is happening to immigration laws in California, and that's what makes you guys so angry. I like the illegals, so I had no problem with the law not being enforced while I lived in California. But you don't and that's probably why there is so much anger over this issue.

Am I right?

One thing that does intrigue me is that illegal aliens are much less resented (and receive far fewer government services) in Texas than in California. That seems to be a cultural difference between the two states that, frankly, favors Texas.

D