Posted on 06/12/2007 8:18:05 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Rush Limbaugh has been expecting liberals to start "whining" about the $5000 fine undocumented immigrants will have to pay to gain citizenship under the new immigration bill, but most liberals have been too busy chortling about the immigration-induced split in the GOP to make their own case against the bill. So let a mighty whine rise over the land: Undocumented workers shouldn't be fined; they should get a hefty bonus!
All right, they committed a "crime"--the international equivalent of breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a much worse crime, like robbery or rape. What have the immigrants been doing once they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical trainers in our health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists for elite private nursery schools?
In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.
The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The touching belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many others, that offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring straight from the soil onto one's plate.
Native-born workers share in this invisibility, but it's far worse in the case of immigrant workers, who are often, for all practical purposes, nameless. In the recent book There's No José Here: Following the Lives of Mexican Immigrants, Gabriel Thompson cites a construction company manager who says things like, "I've got to get myself a couple of Josés for this job if we're going to have that roof patched up by Saturday." Forget the Juans, Diegos, and Eduardos - they're all interchangeable "Josés."
Hence no doubt the ease with which some prominent immigrant-bashers forget their own personal reliance on immigrant labor, like Nevada's Governor Jim Gibbons, who, it turns out, once employed an undocumented nanny. And as the Boston Globe revealed late last year, Mitt Romney's lawn in suburban Boston was maintained by illegal immigrants from Guatemala.
The only question is how much we owe our undocumented immigrant workers. First, those who do not remain to enjoy the benefits of old age in America will have to be reimbursed for their contributions to Medicare and Social Security, and here I quote the website of the San Diego ACLU:
Undocumented immigrants annually pay an estimated $7 billion more than they take out into Social Security, and $1.5 billion more into Medicare.... A study by the National Academy of Sciences also found that tax payments generated by immigrants outweighed any costs associated with services used by immigrants.
Second, someone is going to have to calculate what is owed to "illegals" for wages withheld by unscrupulous employers: The homeowner who tells his or her domestic worker that the wage is actually several hundred dollars a month less than she had been promised, and that the homeowner will be "holding" it for her. Or the landscaping service that stiffs its undocumented workers for their labor. Who's the "illegal" here?
Third, there's the massive compensation owed to undocumented immigrants for preventable injuries on the job. In her book Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, Jennifer Gordon reports such gruesome cases as a Honduran who died from inhaling paint while sanding yachts in Long Island and a Guatemalan worker whose boss intentionally burned him with hot pans of oil for not washing dishes fast enough. "Death rates for Latino workers," Gordon reports, "have risen over the past decade even as workplace fatality rates for non-Latinos have fallen."
When our debt to America's undocumented workers is eventually tallied, I'm confident that it will be well in excess of the $5000 fine the immigration bill proposes. There is still the issue of the original "crime." If someone breaks into my property for the purpose of trashing and looting, I would be hell-bent on restitution. But if they break in for the purpose of cleaning it--scrubbing the bathroom, mowing the lawn--then, in my way of thinking anyway, the debt goes in the other direction.
“We owe them nothing. We owe ourselves their expulsion from our home”
RGR - Kick @ss and take names - and demand our reps follow the law or get a new job.
The Eisenhower solution worked with what? 1/5th of the border patrol we now have!
UNLEASH THE BORDER PATROL!
Zero, zip, nada, and nothign, not nexessarily in that order.
Phew... smells like fish around here.
We owe them a bus ticket back home, and charge the Mexican government for the cost.
Their kids get free dental care through the schools! I have to pay for my kids’ dental care. They get free lunches and breakfasts, EVEN DURING SCHOOL VACATIONS. How do I know all this? My Olde English name can be Hispanic looking (with an accent on the silent E) and we have received packets from the local schools, all written in Spanish, telling us what we have been approved for. Which our income would disqualify us for, but surely there are some like us who don’t qualify but still collect.
Ehrenreich is currently an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She also serves on the NORML Board of Directors. And she writes for one of those news magazines no one reads any more. In short, a pot smoking socialist who writes the kind of crap the Nation publishes, which is why no one reads it, either, except for socialist college professors.
“They’ve been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.”
ALL OF WHICH have traditionally summer and/or entry-level jobs FOR OUR OWN AMERICAN-CITIZEN kids......these jobs were essential for the development of the work ethic and everything else rooted in a good and well-developed work-ethic that has served America so very well for more than 2 centuries!
An English language version of that movie on laser disc will get you $200,000 on the open market and a visit from the FCC.
I wish there were some way of making Lefties live the vapid utopian elitist lies they make up for the rest of us. I wish it with all my heart. There's no better punishment for a Lefty than to make them live the hell they concoct for people they deem lesser than themselves.
Ask yourself what you owe that poor burglar who broke into your home last night. He had worked so conscientiously, going through three rooms from top to bottom, before you awoke to catch him in the act. SURELY he deserves at least that wide screen TV and that one piece of jewelry. Come on. That was hours of effort. Show some humanity.
This one’s a doozy!
Vile hypocrisy.
On the one hand, socialists argue that an individual owes income taxes on the income he makes, because the individual who worked to earn that income is obligated to "give back" to society in exchange for society having made it possible for him to have earned the income in the first place.
Now, out of the other side their mouths, they argue that society owes the members of one of their favored groups for having done useful work (for which those individuals have already earned an income based on the market's valuation of their contributions.)
So which is it? Does society owe you something for the work you do--above and beyond the wage or other payment you have agreed to accept, or do you owe society for the privilege of having been able to work to earn an income?
I hear you. It’s enough to turn my stomach.
All right, they committed a “crime”—the international equivalent of breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a much worse crime, like robbery or rape.
Hey Barb! How about felonies? That is what document fraud is...a felony. How about plain old theft? Everytime they send their children to school, use the emergency room, cash in WIC or food stamps, go home to their subsidized housing, they are stealing straight from an American Taxpayer’s pocket.
I consider those to be crimes.
Maybe we can maybe we can’t deport 12,000,000 but we can deport that Chavez loving rag, The Nation.
I think we should deport them to Cuba where they can get a free rice cooker and free health care. ‘Cause I have big heart. And then they wont be here.
We could deport them to Chavez Land but I don’t think they get free stuff there.
Well, if they are going to quote such reputable, upstanding groups like the ACLU, maybe I will have to reconsider...
After thinking it over, I would agree to letting the crimmigrants stay if we can deport the ACLU.
Celine Dion couldn't have said it better.
...and the NAACP.
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