It's not slavery, when WE pay the bills. It is theft, and corruption, by those utilizing illegal labor, from those who play by the rules, pay their taxes, and stupidly vote for their facilitators to remain in office.
Posted on 03/31/2006 3:41:14 AM PST by pageonetoo
As Congress battles over immigration, the consequences are likely to be far greater than the details of border walls or green cards. The most important political outcome may turn out to be the message that Republicans send about the kind of the party they are and hope to be.
To wit, do Republicans want to continue in the Reagan tradition of American optimism and faith in assimilation that sends a message of inclusiveness to all races? Or will they take another one of their historical detours into a cramped, exclusionary policy that tells millions of new immigrants, and especially Hispanics, that they belong somewhere else?...
...The immediate danger is that Republicans will ignore their longer-term interests by passing a punitive, and poll-driven, anti-immigration bill this election year. Any bill that merely harasses immigrants and employers, and stacks more cops on the border, may win cheers in the right-wing blogosphere. However, it will do nothing to address the economic incentives that will continue to exist for poor migrants to come to America to feed their families. And it will make permanent enemies of millions of Hispanics, without doing anything to draw illegals out of the shadows and help them assimilate into the mainstream of American culture and citizenship.
This is not Ronald Reagan's view of America as a "shining city on a hill." It is the chauvinist conservatism usually associated with the European right. How Republicans conduct and conclude their immigration debate will show the country which kind of "conservative" party they want to be.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
If you do, you must have been sick on the Gospel of John day.
Honesty and integrity alone should shame you into not trying to drag Jesus into this discussion on your side with a bogus reading of this passage.
I trusted him because I'm not in law enforcement, there's no reason for him to show me employment documents. That has nothing to do with my religion. I'm still in the dark as to what you meant. My guess, it was nothing rational.
What kind of talking point is this? What does being part of a "wealth creating business" have to do with being opposed to an invasion of our country. If you "profit-above-all-else" types had your way, there wouldn't be any borders at all.
Why don't they say what they really want? They want slavery re-instituted in the United States. Afterall, weren't blacks brougtht over to do the jobs Americans didn't want to do: work the fields, clean the houses and be nannies for their children?
German and Italian Americans are white, and were thus indistinguishable from other white Americans, at a time when whites were almost 90% of the U.S. population. The ones who were detained were mostly those foreign born Germans and Italians who had publicly expressed sympathy for Hitler or Mussolini. At a time when there were few East Asians in America, Japanese were an ethnically distinct population. A higher proportion of Japanese were loyal to their mother country when compared with the German and Italian populations. Additionally, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, there was a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment, since they, and not the Germans or Italians, had attacked American soil in a sneak attack. Had the Japanese not been confined, there may have been massive lynchings, with mobs possibly attacking Chinese-Americans as well.
In your imagination, of course it does. But, as you know, John's gospel is focused on Jesus' theology of Himself as the Son of God. One aspect of this is the Good Shepherd.
He is specifically referring to the Pharisees here as "false" shepherds, who attempt to usurp His mission with their legalism and false claims. He uses the imagery of a thief sneaking over a wall to illustrate that the Pharisees cannot be true shepherds as they cannot claim to be the fulfillment of the prophecies, which prophecies allow Jesus to "enter by the sheepfold gate."
To say that this also refers to illegal immigrants is a stretch, and would not have been understood by anyone who heard Jesus' words here.
But, you are free to believe whatever you want.
Jesus was using sheep pens as a metaphor. As he is the great shepherd, it is his pen and anyone who tries to gain admittance without going through him is a thief and a robber specifically when it comes to the matter of getting into heaven... While general principles from the story may be applied to the immigration problem, that was not the issue he was dealing with directly.
Regarding Ruth, that's more of a philosophical approach to the problem...which addresses the issue from the perspective of what sort of an attitude a legal immigrant to a land should have - especially when contrasted to this nonsense we're seeing with Mexican flags flying on our soil.
Good point. Nice knife twist. :)
Three things:
1. In your entire remarks you seem to forget that they we are talking about ILLEGAL ALIENS.
2. Anyone who passes your easy 'no disease, willing to work, obey the law' criteria can come? A billion of them?
3. Your forbears were not only not illegal aliens, they didn't march en masse through the streets carrying hostile communist signs and waving the banner of a foreign state.
LOL...you are one confused dude...and increasingly grasping at straws.
Perhaps I put too much faith in the power and appeal of American Materialism, but it has worked to assimilate other generations of immigrants; I see no particular reason for it not to work again.
Who shouldn't, for the most part, be considered illegal, IMO.
2. Anyone who passes your easy 'no disease, willing to work, obey the law' criteria can come? A billion of them?
Sure.
3. Your forbears were not only not illegal aliens, they didn't march en masse through the streets carrying hostile communist signs and waving the banner of a foreign state.
One of my grandfathers was a socialist lathe operator. If he didn't actually carry left-wing signs through the streets, he probably at least threatened to at one time or another. Lots of European immigrants did. And while he didn't exactly enter as an illegal alien, he did lie about his age -- though that was more to escape the Latvian (or Lithuanian -- I forget which; he was born in one and fled the other) draft than any other reason.
But his stepson became a Republican straight out of Brooklyn (beating his casual acquaintance Norman Podhoretz to it by a few decades) and his step-grandson is me.
Well, suffice it to say that I think it's nutty to think that the illegals should just all presto-chango be legal, or that we can handle a billion illegal or legal immigrants and still have a country.
Take care.
It wouldn't happen though. One billion people is about one-sixth of the world's population. Few, if any nations, are going to be able to take one-sixth of their human resources leaving without their economy being seriously damaged.
If there was the threat of 1 billion people coming to America, the nations about to lose people would change, most likely to become more like America in order to keep their population.
It's not slavery, when WE pay the bills. It is theft, and corruption, by those utilizing illegal labor, from those who play by the rules, pay their taxes, and stupidly vote for their facilitators to remain in office.
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