Common Sense Immigration
I think I have mentioned, once or twice in the past, that I am quite fond of Peggy Noonan. As a writer she is an excellent role model - articulate, never overbearing.....a lady of full of common sense. Her column in today's Wall Street Journal tackles the issue of immigration in her usual rational style.
"I asked myself a question this week and realized the answer is "Only one." The question is: Have I ever known an immigrant to America who's lazy? I have lived on the East Coast all my life, mostly in New York, and immigrants both legal and illegal have been and are part of my daily life, from my childhood when they surrounded me to an adulthood in which they, well, surround me. And the only lazy one I knew was a young woman, 20, European, not mature enough to be fully herself, who actually wanted to be a good worker but found nightlife too alluring and hangovers too debilitating... Everyone else who comes here works hard, grindingly hard, and I admire them. But it's more than that, I love them and I'm rooting for them. When I see them in church (it is Filipino women who taught me the right posture for prayer; Central Americans helped teach me the Bible) I want to kiss their hands. I want to say, "Thank you." They have enriched my life, and our country's."
I'm in the same boat. As the great-great-great grand-daughter of a Mexican immigrant (who was here before todays border was drawn) I too have worked with immigrants from many nations and they too were hard working people who, like my father and his father before him, wanted to make life better for their children - make it so they would never "want". So with that said, you would think that we would be all for the Comprehensive Immigration Bill in front of the Senate today.
"Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it's being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill's Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay's pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you're not, you cur, you gun-totin' truckdriver's-hat-wearin' yahoo. It's all so complex, and you'd understand this if you weren't sort of dumb.
But it's not so complex. The past quarter-century an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants has crossed our borders. The flood is so great that no one--no one--can see or fully imagine all the many implications, all the country-changing facts of it. No one knows exactly what uncontrolled immigration is doing and will do to our country. "
The arrogance coming out of the supporters of this bill, including President Bush, is astonishing. However, if they really believed that this was a matter of not understanding the bill then why don't you try to explain it to us - rather than just jamming it down our throats.
"So what should we do?
We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we've eaten.
We should close our borders. We should do whatever it takes to close them tight and solid. Will that take the Army? Then send the Army. Does it mean building a wall? Then build a wall, but the wall must have doors, which can be opened a little or a lot down the road once we know where we are. Should all legal immigration stop? No. We should make a list of what our nation needs, such as engineers and nurses, and then admit a lot of engineers and nurses. We should take in what we need to survive and flourish. " (emphasis mine)
OK - so far so good, but what about the illegals.
"As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven't only joined a place of riches, it's a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they've joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed. We stopped Americanizing ourselves 40 years ago. We've got to start telling the story of our country again. "
It is also a place of responsibilities and one of the responsibilities that these immigrants need to be reminded of is the responsibility to integrate INTO our culture and not supplant our culture with the one you left behind. I am quite proud of my Latino heritage - something I still can't get my grandfather (who spent most of his life hiding his heritage due to racism) to understand. However, my Latino heritage does not mean that I am not also an American and as an American citizen, I am obliged to mingle my Latino heritage into the common American heritage, just as millions of immigrants from Ireland and Italy and France and Germany and Russia and on and on have done before me! It is my responsibility to adapt to the culture - just as I adapted to the German culture when I lived in Germany (more years ago than I care to admit). I spoke the language, I lived by their laws. I never demanded that they speak English to me...I learned to speak Swabbisch German!
Now here is the hard word for everyone who thinks we should just "deport them all".
"As to the eight or 10 or 12 or 14 million illegals who are here--how interesting that our government doesn't know the number--we should do nothing dramatic or fraught or unlike us. We should debate what to do, at length. Debate isn't bad. There's a lot to say. We can all join in. We should do nothing extreme, only things that are commonsensical.
Here is the truth: America has never deported millions of people, and America will never deport millions of people. It's not what we do. It's not who we are. It's not who we want to be. The American people would never accept evening news pictures of sobbing immigrants being torn from their homes and put on a bus. We wouldn't accept it because we have hearts, and as much as we try to see history in the abstract, we know history comes down to the particular, to the sobbing child in the bus. We don't round up and remove. Nor should we, tomorrow, on one of our whims, grant full legal status and a Cadillac car. We take it a day at a time. We wait and see what's happening. We do the small discrete things a nation can do to make the overall situation better. For instance: "You commit a violent crime? You are so out of here." And, "Here, let me help you learn English." (emphasis mine)
In the comment section over at Residual Forces, Nordeaster asked a question that we all need to ask of ourselves and of our government. "Is there a realistic option between amnesty and deportation? To put it another way, is there any solution that doesn’t involve the deportation of 12 million people that wouldn’t be considered amnesty?" Until we answer that question, I fear that there will be no compromise bill.
Oh and to those of you who say that these immigrants are only "doing the jobs that Americans won't do" Ms. Noonan has something for you to ponder.
"Let's find out if it's true that Americans won't stoop to any of the jobs illegals do. I don't think it is. Years ago I worked in a florist shop removing the thorns from roses. It was painful work and I was happy to do it, and I am very American. I was a badly paid waitress in the Holiday Inn on Route 3 in New Jersey.
The young will do a great deal, and not only the young. The dislike for Americans evinced by the Americans-won't-do-hard-work crowd is, simply, astonishing, and shameful. It says more about the soft and ignorant lives they lived in Kennebunkport and Greenwich than it does about the American people." (emphasis mine)
Not much more I can add to that.
"I asked myself a question this week and realized the answer is "Only one." The question is: Have I ever known an immigrant to America who's lazy? I have lived on the East Coast all my life, mostly in New York, and immigrants both legal and illegal have been and are part of my daily life, from my childhood when they surrounded me to an adulthood in which they, well, surround me. And the only lazy one I knew was a young woman, 20, European, not mature enough to be fully herself, who actually wanted to be a good worker but found nightlife too alluring and hangovers too debilitating... Everyone else who comes here works hard, grindingly hard, and I admire them. But it's more than that, I love them and I'm rooting for them. When I see them in church (it is Filipino women who taught me the right posture for prayer; Central Americans helped teach me the Bible) I want to kiss their hands. I want to say, "Thank you." They have enriched my life, and our country's."
I'm in the same boat. As the great-great-great grand-daughter of a Mexican immigrant (who was here before todays border was drawn) I too have worked with immigrants from many nations and they too were hard working people who, like my father and his father before him, wanted to make life better for their children - make it so they would never "want". So with that said, you would think that we would be all for the Comprehensive Immigration Bill in front of the Senate today.
"Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it's being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill's Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay's pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you're not, you cur, you gun-totin' truckdriver's-hat-wearin' yahoo. It's all so complex, and you'd understand this if you weren't sort of dumb.
But it's not so complex. The past quarter-century an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants has crossed our borders. The flood is so great that no one--no one--can see or fully imagine all the many implications, all the country-changing facts of it. No one knows exactly what uncontrolled immigration is doing and will do to our country. "
The arrogance coming out of the supporters of this bill, including President Bush, is astonishing. However, if they really believed that this was a matter of not understanding the bill then why don't you try to explain it to us - rather than just jamming it down our throats.
"So what should we do?
We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we've eaten.
We should close our borders. We should do whatever it takes to close them tight and solid. Will that take the Army? Then send the Army. Does it mean building a wall? Then build a wall, but the wall must have doors, which can be opened a little or a lot down the road once we know where we are. Should all legal immigration stop? No. We should make a list of what our nation needs, such as engineers and nurses, and then admit a lot of engineers and nurses. We should take in what we need to survive and flourish. " (emphasis mine)
OK - so far so good, but what about the illegals.
"As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven't only joined a place of riches, it's a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they've joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed. We stopped Americanizing ourselves 40 years ago. We've got to start telling the story of our country again. "
It is also a place of responsibilities and one of the responsibilities that these immigrants need to be reminded of is the responsibility to integrate INTO our culture and not supplant our culture with the one you left behind. I am quite proud of my Latino heritage - something I still can't get my grandfather (who spent most of his life hiding his heritage due to racism) to understand. However, my Latino heritage does not mean that I am not also an American and as an American citizen, I am obliged to mingle my Latino heritage into the common American heritage, just as millions of immigrants from Ireland and Italy and France and Germany and Russia and on and on have done before me! It is my responsibility to adapt to the culture - just as I adapted to the German culture when I lived in Germany (more years ago than I care to admit). I spoke the language, I lived by their laws. I never demanded that they speak English to me...I learned to speak Swabbisch German!
Now here is the hard word for everyone who thinks we should just "deport them all".
"As to the eight or 10 or 12 or 14 million illegals who are here--how interesting that our government doesn't know the number--we should do nothing dramatic or fraught or unlike us. We should debate what to do, at length. Debate isn't bad. There's a lot to say. We can all join in. We should do nothing extreme, only things that are commonsensical.
Here is the truth: America has never deported millions of people, and America will never deport millions of people. It's not what we do. It's not who we are. It's not who we want to be. The American people would never accept evening news pictures of sobbing immigrants being torn from their homes and put on a bus. We wouldn't accept it because we have hearts, and as much as we try to see history in the abstract, we know history comes down to the particular, to the sobbing child in the bus. We don't round up and remove. Nor should we, tomorrow, on one of our whims, grant full legal status and a Cadillac car. We take it a day at a time. We wait and see what's happening. We do the small discrete things a nation can do to make the overall situation better. For instance: "You commit a violent crime? You are so out of here." And, "Here, let me help you learn English." (emphasis mine)
In the comment section over at Residual Forces, Nordeaster asked a question that we all need to ask of ourselves and of our government. "Is there a realistic option between amnesty and deportation? To put it another way, is there any solution that doesn’t involve the deportation of 12 million people that wouldn’t be considered amnesty?" Until we answer that question, I fear that there will be no compromise bill.
Oh and to those of you who say that these immigrants are only "doing the jobs that Americans won't do" Ms. Noonan has something for you to ponder.
"Let's find out if it's true that Americans won't stoop to any of the jobs illegals do. I don't think it is. Years ago I worked in a florist shop removing the thorns from roses. It was painful work and I was happy to do it, and I am very American. I was a badly paid waitress in the Holiday Inn on Route 3 in New Jersey.
The young will do a great deal, and not only the young. The dislike for Americans evinced by the Americans-won't-do-hard-work crowd is, simply, astonishing, and shameful. It says more about the soft and ignorant lives they lived in Kennebunkport and Greenwich than it does about the American people." (emphasis mine)
Not much more I can add to that.
Labels: Illegal Immigration
posted by The Lady Logician at
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