Today the NYTimes published yet another pro-illegal alien editorial
(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/opinion/22mon1.html?_r
=1&oref=slogin&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print)
[My comments in brackets, italicized.][Emphases mine.]
October 22, 2007
Editorial
Ain’t That America
Think of America’s greatest historical shames. Most have involved the singling out of groups of people for abuse. Name a distinguishing feature — skin color, religion, nationality, language — and it’s likely that people here have suffered unjustly for it, either through the freelance hatred of citizens or as a matter of official government policy.
[in Propaganda 101 you're taught to start with a Mom & apple pie statement everyone must agree with--then you juxtapose it with your propaganda point--as if just putting it next to something true makes it true too. Even if you advocate on behalf of illegal aliens you shouldn't accept such dishonesty. It degrades your cause.]
We are heading down this road again. The country needs to have a working immigration policy, one that corresponds to economic realities
[Um, the "economic reality" is that corporatists here and elsewhere use illegal immigrants to bust unions and drive down wages of native-born unskilled workers. I love the delicate way ideologues have of alluding to these dirty facts--and of "forgetting" the demonstrable decline in prevailing wages for unskilled labor in direct correlation with the availability of illegal alien labor.]
and is based on good sense and fairness.
["good sense" = only my side has any kind of reasonableness. If you don't agree you don't have good sense--you're stupid or bigoted or both. This is an example of loading the dice instead of giving the other side any credence, while at the same time pretending to argue fairly by using fair-sounding terms like "good sense." This is the kind of condescending rhetoric ideologues love, and they probably couldn't sum up the real arguments of the other side if you paid 'em.]
But it doesn’t. It has federal inertia and a rising immigrant tide
["tide" --ideologues use adjectives to discount the other side's points and magnify their own, whereas factual statements pin one down. In this case "tide" doesn't seem like a discounting, except that the numbers of illegals coming over the border would be more accurately described as a tsunami here in the southwest, where--to cite some check-up-on-able facts, these days the most-watched TV station in the nation's third-largest city only broadcasts in Spanish, and across America the proportion of Latinos has gone from under 2% in 1940 to 14% today.],
and a national mood of frustration and anxiety
[i.e., anybody who disagrees with me about immigration has mental problems--it couldn't be that those who oppose immigration have actual reasons to do so--they must be almost mentally ill. Otherwise they'd agree with me, since I am inerrant
that is slipping, as it has so many times before, into hatred and fear
[We are a society in which honest disagreement has been medicalized. "You who disagree with me aren't just wrong--you're sick in the head." This may have gotten started by the Soviet Union's Communists, who put numerous dissidents into insane asylums. And of course when you hurl so many insults at the people you're presumably trying to persuade, it shows that you aren't trying to persuade at all--just to rally your base. Here it's being done by self-described liberals. But Bush has been doing this for over six years straight. ].
Hostility for illegal immigrants falls disproportionately
["disproportionately"="Why aren't you equally upset about the five Estonians who are here illegally? You must be a racist! Racistracistracist!" Well duh--the vast majority of illegals are Mexicans. Add their Spanish-speaking Mesoamerican compatriots and you get perhaps 85% of illegals being Spanish-speaking, Latino peasants, mostly with the education level of a typical American high school dropout minus being able to speak English. I'm not seeing American TV and radio stations being replaced by ones that speak in Estonian rather than in America's common tongue. I'm not seeing America's vibrant multicultural society being replaced by monolithic Estonian ghettos. I'm not seeing Estonian gangbanger writing on walls and bridges etc. I'm not reading about Estonians ethnically "cleansing" neighborhoods of blacks. I'm not reading about Americans being killed by Estonian drunk drivers. And I'm not seeing Estonians flooding our emergency wards and schools on my dime. So yeah, I am more concerned with Latino illegal immigration than I am with Estonian, because I took statistics in college.
shorthand for on an entire population of people, documented or not
["undocumented" is goodspeak for "trespasser"],
who speak Spanish and are working-class or poor
[i.e., "You're racist! racist! racist! because you reeeely hate all those Mexicans. You're lying when you say you just oppose illegal immigrants. You oppose all Mexicans, illegal or not." Well, there's an element of truth in this. In 1940 Latinos comprised under 2% of the American population. Now they're 14%. And the bulk of that comes from several previous amnesties granted--each time for the last time--to earlier waves of illegal immigration, each promised to be the very last time, and from their children, who have established the educational record you'd expect from the children of uneducated peasants--an amazing level of high school dropouts and teen pregnancies, producing a multigenerational underclass, three quarters of whom demonstrate in their voting patterns more allegiance to Mexico than to their country of citizenship. I have never met or heard an immigration opposer who didn't welcome hardworking legal immigrants with enough education to actually contribute to our society, regardless of nation of origin. I'd welcome the Mercedes Benz Mexicans I knew when I lived in Mexico City. But of course they've got too sweet a deal to move here, since they've appropriated so much of Mexico's wealth to themselves and ruined Mexico's village society nationwide.].
By blinding the country to solutions, it has harmed us all.
The evidence can be seen in any state or town that has passed constitutionally dubious laws to deny undocumented immigrants the basics of living, like housing or the right to gather or to seek work. It’s in hot lines for citizens to turn in neighbors. It’s on talk radio and blogs. It’s on the campaign trail, where candidates are pressed to disown moderate positions.
["moderate= me; extremists=you...by definition." Nobody who opposes illegal immigration thinks the NYTimes editorial board is moderate on this issue. And over 3/4 of Americans oppose the positions taken by the NYTimes editorial board on this issue. So 3/4 of America is "extremist?" Oh really?]
And it can be heard nearly every night on CNN, in the nativist drumming of Lou Dobbs, for whom immigration is an obsessive cause.
[I watch Dobbs regularly, and on every single show he takes pains to point out his opposition to illegal immigration--and his enthusiasm for legal immigration. But this verifiable fact is an inconvenient truth for the NYTimes edit board. Nativist means you oppose any but your own ancestral culture. But Dobbs and most who oppose illegal immigration are fine with America's multicultural society--with its Anglo foundation, and with its rich evolving admixture of so many cultures and races. What we oppose is violations to the rule of law and the replacement of that rich multicultural society with huge monocultural Mexighettos across the Southwest.]
In New York, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed allowing illegal immigrants to earn driver’s licenses. It is a good, practical idea, designed to replace anonymous drivers with registered competent ones.
[Sure. We can practically eliminate crime--just legalize it. Bingo. Crime rate plummets! This line of reasoning rests on the unspoken premise that illegals should be legalized and we should simply accept 10-20 million illegals. And that "good and practical" is only good and practical if you accept that premise. So debate the premise--if you dare.]
In show after show, Mr. Dobbs has trained his biggest guns on Mr. Spitzer, branding him with puerile epithets like “spoiled, rich-kid brat”
[They're only puerile epithets if they're false, and you haven't proven that; and if you oppose name calling, why are you name-calling yourselves?]
and depicting his policy as some sort of sanctuary program for the 9/11 hijackers.
[This is puerile (to use the NYTime's own namecall) hypberbole. Dobbs never said anything of the sort--or even close.]
Someday there may be a calm debate, in Albany and nationally, about immigrant drivers. But with Mr. Dobbs at the megaphone, for now there is only histrionics and outrage.
[This editorial is nothing but histrionics and outrage. Physician, heal thyself.]
Let’s concede an indisputable point: people should not be in the country illegally. But forget about the border for a moment — let’s talk about the 12 million
[possibly true, but could be many millions more; nobody's actually counted them]
who are already here. What should be done about them?
A. Deport them all.
B. Find out who they are. Distinguish between criminals and people who just want to work. Get them on the books. Make them pay what they owe — not just the income, Social Security, sales and property taxes they already pay, but all their taxes, and a fine. Get a smooth legal flow of immigrants going, and then concentrate on catching and deporting bad people.
C. Catch the few you can, and harass and frighten the rest. Treat the entire group as a de facto class of criminals, and disrupt or shout down anyone or any plan seen as abetting their evildoing.
Forget A. Congress tried a version of B, but it was flattened by outrage.
And so here we are at C. It’s a policy that can’t work; it’s too small-bore, too petty, too narrow. And all the while it’s not working, it can only lead to the festering of hate. Americans are a practical and generous people, with a tolerant streak a mile wide. But there is a combustible strain of nativism in this country, and it takes only a handful of match tossers to ignite it.
[This is a classic example of false choice, also known as the straw man argument. I haven't heard of a single illegal immigration restrictionist advocating any of the above. What nearly all of us advocate is vigorously pursuing employers of illegals; requiring the Social Security Administration and the IRS to cooperate fully with ICE to make it impossible for illegals to work here on the books with fake IDs, as most of them do. We want is to turn off the magnet, actively hunt down felons (and if we come across other illegals while hunting felons or hitting companies that hire large numbers of illegals, so much the better), provide a free national biometric ID for everyone within our borders, deny illegals access to all social services except for emergency medical care, and overall make it harder for them to stay here than to self-deport themselves back to their homelands, from Mexico to Estonia or wherever. I've heard that after 9/11 the government made a concerted effort to deport illegal Moslem aliens, and when it did, 100s of times the numbers of those we caught deported themselves.]
The new demagogues are united in their zeal to uproot the illegal population. They do not discriminate between criminals and the much larger group of ambitious strivers.
[See my previous comment, This is another attempt to simplify the stance of those who oppose illegal immigration. Of course the felons top our list of don't-want-heres. Also from Propanda 101--demonize your opposition; call them mentally ill, vicious, racistracistracist. This from America's leading newspaper: gutter politics with lofty pretentions. This is even worse than the honest racialism of the Latino activists leading the reconquista of the Southwest.]
They champion misguided policies, like a mythically airtight border fence and a reckless campaign of home invasions.
["airtight border?" How about just having one that drug runners can't drive across with impunity? This hyperbole conceals yet another unspoken assertion: the rejection of national soverignity. A country that can't control who is and isn't there has failed one of its prime obligations to its citizens. Note that Israel's much-maligned fence has reduced Islamofascist murder incursions radically. Sometimes, Robert Frost notwithstanding, good fences do make good neighbors.]
And they summon the worst of America’s past by treating a hidden group of vulnerable people as an enemy to be hated and vanquished, not as part of a problem to be managed.
[Talk about unmitigated goodspeak. Vulnerable? How about the hundreds of thousands of criminal alien felons within our borders? The drug traffickers, the human traffickers, the gangbangers, the drunk drivers, the identity thieves, the con artists, the elder abusers, the muggers--the New York Times' language includes them among that "hidden group of vulnerable people." Talk about oversimplifying the issues. As for "to be hated and vanguished"...the NYTimes can't seem to distinguish between historic racist demagogues like Father Coughlin and the leaders of the American Bund--and today's illegal immigration opposers. This is 2007, not 1937, but the NYTimes can't seem to tell that. Neither Lou Dobbs nor I "hate" Mexicans. In my case, I speak Spanish, have lived in Mexico, vacation in Mexico, scuba dive in Mexico, and have no problems with the Latinos in my life. I often have chats with our mailman in Spanish, for example, and I'd be happy to have him and his family as neighbors. What I have a problem with is 10-20 million illegal immigrants who have radically altered the society of the Southwest, and the amnestyites who appear to be unconscious of what countries and cultures are and the value they have for their citizens. The see indiduals suffer and want to help them--but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Kind acts often have cruel consequences--and vice versa.
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