Guns and Butter Blog

Today WaPo tries to disparage people who are against illegal immigration by doing a "cute" story about a Minuteman activist who visited the Washington, D.C. area. The piece is dripping with condescension; it surrounds her every move during the visit to the area with various ethnic-immigrant types providing services and products in order to imply:

1. The Minuteman activist is against all immigrants.
2. She is against non-whites.
3. She is a hypocrite since she patronizes the non-white, presumably immigrant sellers.

And so on.

Wonkette, that paragon of intelligence and probity (yes, that was sarcasm) chimes in with a helpful, deep, meaningful rejoinder: Look Out, Crazy Xenophobe! There's One Right Behind You!

What's sly about this article is that it relies on the common perception of the Minutemen as weird, quixotic nuts (often with guns) and then ad hominem attacks what they espouse -- curbing illegal immigration. Yeah, and Hitler championed building national highways (the famous Autobahn), so I guess we should be against building interstate highways, right?

The point is, it really does not matter what kind of people the Minutemen are. I don't know if they are kooks or sincere, concerned citizens. What does matter is that we do have a significant illegal immigration and border insecurity issues in this country.

And it's not just nativist or white supremacist types who are worried about the issue. Many "ethnic" citizens or naturalized Americans are concerned about it too. It turns out, in fact, Wonkette's supposed "xenophobe" was once a foreigner too! She is a naturalized American (maybe Wonkette didn't read the whole article and just rushed to get her "clever" caption online as quickly as possible).

I am also a naturalized American. I am not "white." I tried my best to become a citizen as quickly as legally possible. In other words, I was an immigrant too. But I did everything LEGALLY and waited for hours in a queue outside the immigration (formerly INS, now BCIS) office. I waited days, weeks, months and years go by as the federal bureaucracy processed my applications, and as I paid my fees, answered questions, sat for interviews and passed the citizenship test.

And I am stridently against ILLEGAL immigration, as are many other LEGAL immigrants, naturalized citizens and "ethnic" Americans. Here are the reasons why:

1. Outsiders cannot join our society by violating our laws first as, literally, the first step into the country. It is legally wrong, morally reprehensible and sets a highly destructive precedent by destroying the respect for the rule of law, upon which this country is based. No amount of economic benefit brought by illegal immigration is going to outweigh the destruction of the respect for the rule of law in the long run.

2. Illegal immigration creates an underground society, culture and economy that bisects the society and frays its civic fabric. We cannot exist as a coherent civil society when our society is divided into legals and illegals.

3. Even if most illegal immigrants just want to work and send money home, networks of illegal residents unfortunately and inevitably become conduits of trafficking in people (including sexual slaves), narcotics and other illicit goods. Crime also increases, because illegal immigrant communities make good targets for criminal predators (since illegal generally won't go to the police to report crimes).

4. Illegal immigration is a security threat. We have not had a publicly known penetration of our porous borders by Islamic terrorists yet, but since terrorists flow to weak points in our defense as water flows from high to low ground, they are bound to try... and succeed eventually. Border security is paramount to protecting the United States from further terrorist attacks.

5. Illegal immigration is grossly unfair to legal immigrants who waited, paid and jumped enormous Kafka-esque hoops to do everything "by the book." They are the kind of people we want as our new citizens, not those who simply do what is expedient and illegal.

LEGAL immigration is a wonderful thing. It keeps our country young (literally), revitalizes our society and economy and sustains our melting pot. But we must draw a strong distinction between LEGAL immigration and ILLEGAL immigration, because the two have vastly different consequences. The former leads to assimilation, which is good for our society. The latter leads to the societal ills I describe above.

Many Americans of good conscience and tolerance for ethnic groups and cultures other than their own share opposition against illegal immigration because of these problems. Many of them are, like me, "ethnic" immigrants themselves. They are not racists, they are not kooks, they are certainly not "xenophobes." They are, simply, concerned American citizens who fear for the society their children will inherit.

And no amount of sly ad hominem attacks from the mainstream media and not-so-clever-by-half derision of "xenophobe" by a chirpy, brainless vixen are going to change that reality.