Illegal immigration supporters stoop to a new low

I have watched the debate surrounding Senator Mike Delph's immigration bill with interest this session.  For decades the combination of non-U.S. citizens entering and remaining in this country illegally, businesses and consumers benefitting from the cheap labor of said illegals, and the federal government's lack of will to enforce our immigration laws has brought us to the illegal immigration problems we currently have in our state and accross the nation.  While lawful immigration of foreign nationals into the melting pot of american society is a prized american tradition, our nation is on its way to rejecting that tradition for a wild-west style immigration policy in which illegal activity is protected while those who abide by the law are punished.

Often-times the debate in Indiana on this issue has been overheated, with opponents of Senator Delph's bill accusing supporters of racist motivations or worse.  The intellectual pursuit towards sound public policy for our state has often been over-shadowed by the emotional rhetoric of some opponents.

Today's article in the Indianapolis Star is a good example of this overheated, emotional rhetoric.  Here is an excerpt:

Indiana lawmakers who support a crackdown on illegal immigration may be risking their own salvation, according to a local minister.

"Heaven has secure borders, too," warned the Rev. Mark Powell, a Disciples of Christ minister whose social justice group wants to kill Sen. Mike Delph's bill that would punish businesses that hire illegal immigrants.

...Powell joined a handful of Protestant ministers at a Statehouse news conference Thursday -- sprinkled with biblical quotes and directives from Jesus -- that inserted religion into the debate over a pair of sister immigration bills passed by the House and the Senate. Both bills are still alive and waiting for assignment to a conference committee, where differences can be worked out.

"God today has put the soul of Indiana to the test," Powell said. "Christ is clear in the Gospel: Love your neighbor."

...Powell said he represented more than the Disciples Justice Action Network, a group that advocates for social justice, abortion-rights legislation and gay and lesbian rights.

My question for Mr. Powell is: Which neighbor do we love?  Let's take a realistic look at the situation.  Granted, many illegal immigrants do not continue to break the law once they settle in Indiana, are hard working and, if they had entered the country legally, would be model citizens.  However, we do have a group of individuals who broke the law to get here.  Some continue to break other laws, though many do not.  Many use government funded services that they do not adequately contribute towards, such as: the education system, healthcare, the criminal justice system and welfare to name a few.

Do you force your neighbor who is a legal citizen to live in greater danger because of the minority of illegals who we cannot account for, yet continue to break the laws?  Do you force your neighbor who is a legal citizen to pay for the government services used by the illegal immigrants who don't pay their fair share into the system?  Let's take a sober look at the issue before our bleeding hearts drain all the blood from our brain.

Comments

[Chris Douglas]

As Veritas Rex is a religious site by nature, I comment from that perspective.

Your comments strikes me as coming from a nationalist perspective, but not one that is at all Christian. Somehow, I just don't imagine Jesus Christ throwing up a wall to keep desperately poor people from attaining the work they need to feed their families or support their parents. Rather, I think of Him much more likely to have an open door policy and urge us to divest ourselves so as to support them in any of their wants.

Mind you, I am not doing that, and it is in this way that I do feel that I fall short of a Christian ideal. But I'm also not the one insisting that my narrow perspective of Christian ideals prevail in our civil society. You are.

And so for you to post in this manner on this site seems to me to reflect a recurring theme... bolstering a conservative outlook by adapting the Christian Faith to conform to it, rather than bolstering the Christian Faith by adapting your conservative outlook to conform to its ideals.

[Kenn Gividen]

Chris,

I admit it's been a while since I read the gospels front to back. Nonetheless I can think of no occasion when Jesus specifically addressed the issue of Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande en masse to imbibe in the benefits of America's generous entitle programs. (Which, by the way, should there be another President Clinton will become more generous.)

I am, however, frustrated with the two faces of liberalism.

The one spews vindictive rage at those who protest socialized medicine. The other welcomes Mexicans fleeing Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social.

The one complains of under-insured Americans. The other welcomes uninsured Mexicans.

One face warns against over population. The other welcomes open boarders.

One says abortion has not affected our economy. The other wants to import immigrants to replace workers aborted 18> years ago.

Back to the Bible.

The one principle that argues against illegal immigration: "Thou shalt not steal."

[Bil Browning]

>>My question for Mr. Powell is: Which neighbor do we love?

Wow, Ryan. Let's change that around so it actually fits:

My question for Jesus is: Which neighbor do we love? I have a feeling, he'd say "All of them." After all, if being law abiding is the test, Jesus probably wouldn't have hung around with prostitutes and thieves nor would you be able to call Christ himself you neighbor since he broke quite a few laws himself.

To nod to Kenn's nonsense though - No, you are correct. Christ didn't mention Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande. Neither did he mention homosexuality, but that's stopped IFI from acting like he did.

This suggests to me that IFI isn't as worried about being Godly as much as repeating standard Republican talking points.

[Cheree]

I don't think Jesus would have you harm your next door neighbor in order to help your neighbor across the street.

If he did, the good Samaritan could have taken the man beaten by robbers to the innkeeper and dumped the full responsibility on the innkeeper. Instead, the Samaritan did the right thing. He helped his neighbor from across the street, the robbery victim, and took care of him. When he had to leave the victim in the care of the inkeeper for a while, he paid the inkeeper, his next door neighbor, in full.

By obeying immigration laws, we help both neighbors. A good Samaritan can sponsor an immigrant and take financial responsibility for him so he does not become a burden on his other neighbors. It's not the easiest thing to do, but it is the right and fair thing.

Besides, illegal immigration into the USA is not the only answer to poverty and joblessness in other countries! What ever happened to foreign missionaries? Obviously, all of the world's poor cannot possibly come to our welfare state. The answer is to help them where they live.

[Ed Fox]

1) Crossing the border illegally is a hallowed American tradition. Look up "Sooner".

2) Most of us have broken laws. Most of us have not been deported nor even thrown in jail. There are consequences for breaking laws, sometimes, if you are caught and do not have a very good lawyer. The consequences need to be proportional. As a practical matter, they need to be enforceable.

3) "Help thy neighbor" does not mean your neighbor in a gated community. Far from indicating "one of ours", in Jesus' time and culture, it was a distanced relationship, not one of our kin, tribe, people.

4) The assumption that "if they would only stand in line and obey the law they could come in" is invalid. I have heard Mitch McConnell say that the solution is to increase the quotas on highly skilled workers and PhD's. There is some shortage of highly skilled worker quotas, and 911 did not help, but the 20 million illegals are not rocket scientists, and there is no substantial quota for them.

5) Not all the employers of illegal aliens are large corporations. Many are Congressmen and Senators.

6) Labor unions (liberals) are often against such immigration.

7) Many conservative employers are in favor.

8) This is a complicated problem, with important national security and economic implications, and most politicians, on both sides, are demagoguing simplistic answers.

9) Saying that, while most such immigrants are law abiding, we need to get rid of all of them because of a few hardened criminals is throwing out the baby with the bath water. It denies even the semblance of due process.

10) As long as one side says that we have no right to control our borders, and the other says that we must promptly remove 20 million, or so, people who live and work here, we will have no solution and the consequences, personal and national will be dire.

[Cheree]

I don't think comparing speeding to illegal immigration is a very good analogy for a crime that is a felony.

You act like illegal immigration is a harmless crime with no victims. Are we not harmed by identity theft, bribery, false documents, tax evasion and the like? Not to mention the general sense of lawlessness...that each person can pick and choose which laws they will ignore and which ones they will obey?

If I'm guilty of speeding and get a ticket, I'm not going to hire a lawyer to get me off the hook. I'm going to pay the fine! I know what the consequences of breaking the law are and I'm prepared to pay them. You won't find me marching in the streets of some foreign country demanding my rights and then hiring the ACLU to sue when the host country doesn't grant them.

[Chris Douglas]

Kenn & Cheree, with regard to the "thou shalt not steal" part, if I'm not mistaken when my family crossed the Cumberland Gap and entered Kentucky before the revolution, Britain has made anything west of the Appalachian mountains off limits. With the greater part of the West settled first by American Pioneers ignoring the laws, let alone various national policies involving seizing or coercing land from the Native population, it's hard with a straight face to condemn others doing the same thing. With America for well over a century now employing illegal immigrant labor for its needs, and having long before been settled by the same, albeit European in derivation, you two sound like Claude Raines in Casablanca saying you are shocked SHOCKED to find illegal immigration going on.

[Stacey]

Christ Jesus is a God of love, but He is also a God of justice.

Any by the way, they can co-exist. Wanting to abide by a rule of law and enforcement of those laws does not make you unloving. It's unfair to characterize people that way.

Everyone agrees our society cannot afford to continue with rampant illegal immigration. Now we all need to work together to come up with a solution...preferably without name-calling on either side.

[Stacey]

I think people with different perspectives on this issue all have valid points. That's why it's such a complicated issue.

I agree with Ed's last point that we're all going to have to be willing to compromise in order to find a workable solution.

I am deeply concerned about this issue, and I'm growing tired of the biting rhetoric on both sides while the problem continues to grow.

[Chris Douglas]

Stacey, I don't think everyone agrees we cannot afford to continue. In my opinion, nobody cared about this issue at all until about two years ago when some ambitious politicos began drumming it up.

I don't know about you, but even as I noticed all the Mexican immigrants doing gardening in the office parks, it didn't bother me in the least. The landscaping never looked better, because the fact is that previously such fine landscaping wasn't being accomplished. The immigrant labor truly was performing work that otherwise would not be getting done. All that landscaping in the past has just been low-maintenance lawns or concrete, so far as I recall.

We don't have any more problem today than we have ever had. And the fact that we have not had a terrorist attack since 911 indicates that borders are not that great of a security issue, either.

[Chris Douglas]

By the way, Stacey, there is higher justice than abiding by the law. My great ancestors here in Indiana felt so. They ignored the law that decreed that a slave born in a southern state was a slave until a master said otherwise, and they assisted slaves escaping north.

Most of the time, the law promotes justice; sometimes it is a source of injustice. Surely you feel that way with regard to abortion, do you not?

I don't think the Lord expects us to obey the law without thinking through its impact. In some instances, the law can be so egregiously wrong that to abide by it is morally unconscionable. Surely this would be our attitude towards the law in Europe as it came to apply to Jewish citizens in the last few centuries.

The website is not Indiana Barrister, a lawyer's site; it is VeritasRex, a site that I understand is determinedly Christian in nature. There are times when a higher conscience prevails. And so we must acknowledge that sometimes the law is unjust, and not confuse the enforcement of law with the enforcement of justice.

[Chris Douglas]

Indeed, consider who's violation of the law is more morally conscionable... I who set the cruise control typically 9 miles per hour precisely above the speed limit on the interstate (and still am among the slowest on the road) so that I might arrive ever so slightly sooner.... or the young man witnessing his family live in deprivation, without medicine or means for nutrition.. who risks his life to cross the desert and find work so that he can send his family money?

The latter is a violation of the law bred by necessity and even love and compassion. The former is bred merely by convenience.

[Kenn Gividen]

Cheree has an excellent site.

Have a look...

http://www.ifire.org/

[Cheree]

To Chris Douglas,

It's not clear to me whether your ancestors broke the law when they settled in KY. I don't see how that's relevant to what's happening today in the here and now. You seem to want to excuse illegal immigration based on examples of past unauthorized colonization. You seem to think it's hypocritical to want to follow the laws now because laws may have been broken in the past. I don't get that.

[Kenn Gividen]

Chris,

I'm not sure when your ancestors first wandered into the bluegrass state but prior to the Revolutionary War there were no more than a few dozen permanent settlers living in the area.

Interesting that there were no Indian settlements in Kentucky. Nonetheless, Ohio-based Shawnee Indians fought a proxy war for the British. Once defeated, the distant crown had no claim on Kentucky which was, at the time, a county of Virginia until achieving statehood in 1792. (There was a brief stint when Oregon was contested (1820 - 1842? - my memory is fuzzy).

Apparently you and I are here because our ancestors were among the thousands who made their way through the Cumberland Gap in the post-war years.

The analogy of our ancestors carving out their lives in uninhabited American land purchased from Indians who didn't even live there simply doesn't hold.

[Chris Douglas]

Nope, Kenn, speak for yourself.

Mine were among those few-dozen you mention. The house in which they lived is still standing. You'll see my direct Douglas ancestor as killed alongside Israel Boone in the Battle of Blue Lick, a skirmish/massacre of settlers by the British-led Indians. That settler's widow took her son, David Douglas, across into Indiana after the war.

(By the way, they crossed the Ohio by fairy and camped on the North bank. On the day of their departure from that encampment, a child fell under a wagon wheel and was killed. That was the first Douglas buried in Indiana, and his grave remained in place long enough for my grandfather to visit it before it was washed away.)

David Douglas carried with him a firm belief against slavery after witnessing a woman beaten by her master in Kentucky, or so he said. He founded churches across Southern Indiana as part of the New Light movement, and was an ardent abolitionist. His grave (he died in 1824) is in a small pioneer cemetery between farm fields near Flat Rock, the stones intact but fading in legibility. All our Douglas generations lie first there and then in a cemetery not far away.

It then is not difficult given that abolitionist history to understand why my protestant Great grandfather, Maurice Douglas, inculcated in a family tradition of tolerance, actively opposed the Ku Klux Klan as an Indiana Senator. Nor to understand how it is that least one of his children felt free to marry a Catholic at a time when Protestants who controlled the state as Klansman vigorously opposed Catholics and immigrants.

Nor perhaps is it difficult to understand how a family with such a strong tradition of tolerance was one in which a man could find himself gay and yet fully embraced, with no need to fly away to find acceptance. Nor perhaps is it difficult to understand why a son of that family finds nothing noble or new in people who object to a tide of immigration.

As has been said in other posts, there is indeed nothing new under the sun.

[Chris Douglas]

By the way, Kenn.... the Indians included many nomadic tribes. To say that the land had no "Indian Settlements" is meaningless in assessing our actions.

The history of European occupation of North America is conquest, without much shred of the piousness with which we currently claim the land to be our own as if it always has been. Early white Hoosiers drove the Native Inhabitants of Indiana out... indeed formally forced them to leave.

[Kurt Luidhardt]

It's good to see such vigorous debate here on VR, which is our goal.

There seems to be a number of contradicting matters.

1. Can we blame Mexicans who come from poverty and a country largely lawless and destitute for trying to get here? No.

2. Can we continue to simply allow the status quo? No. This encourages disregard for the rule of law, which is largely based on our respect for it. If, at any time, a majority (or sizable minority) no longer has respect for the rule of law we are doomed.

Chris, I must disagree that this is a new issue drummed up by politicians. As a veteran of political campaigns, I began to see this issue bubbling up in town hall meetings in remote places in Indiana almost 10 years ago. First as a sentiment from mostly union households who felt their jobs were in jeopardy.

I also think it hypocritical for an illegal immigrant to come here illegally, make good use of our public services, and then march through the streets about our "injustice."

It also seems to me that we have a deal with those who come here. We welcome you with open arms. All we ask is that you come legally through means we've established so that you can be assimilated into our culture and properly documented like the rest of us. If that process is unwieldy or unreasonable then it needs to be updated. In addition, I don't know that we are obligated to allow everyone to enter- even if they are without criminal record. Reasonable limits are good policy.

Mr. Powell's implication that opponents of illegal immigration should be reminded that "heaven has secure borders too" is language much stronger than we (or our allies) have used on this blog and elsewhere.

So, we'll have to seek a compromise. I think McCain/Kennedy would have been a good compromise with reasonable attempts to secure our borders first.

[Chris Douglas]

I agree that the attempts to compromise are worthy.

I do not agree with the "we need to close our borders" by erecting a huge fence, which seems contrary to the NAFTA ideals of a free trade zone in North America. I also do not agree with the attempt to punish immigrants who are here, rather than assist them in a transition to legal channels. Under similar circumstances, Reagan approved amnesty, which is why we say we only have 11,000,000, when those who came illegally actually number far more than that. It's just that they are now legal, tax-paying, and as law-abiding as everyone else.

[Kenn Gividen]

Chris,

You have an interesting family history.

"Early white Hoosiers drove the Native Inhabitants of Indiana out..."

I'm still here -- as are my kin with Indian heritage.

[Deport Kentuckians; Build the fence now]

I support the fence. Jeffersonville is awash in Kentuckians taking our good barge building jobs. I say we load those bluegrass grazers up on the Belle of Louisville and take them back to Paducah where they belong. Deport all Kentuckians now!

[Chris Douglas]

Kenn, while there are exceptions as you note, and indeed my family as well is said to have some Indian blood, you have changed your story to make a poor point. (You said your family came over the Cumberland Gap after the revolution...)

But for the most part, the following from Conner Prairie.org is a better representation of reality:

"Indian removal was a high priority of the Indiana state government as well. From the earliest dealings of Harrison through the final exclusion of the 1830s, the state leadership was entrapped by the factions for internal improvements and expansion of settlements. In April 1831, Indian Agent John Tipton reported to Secretary of War John Eaton that "this is the most favorable time to remove these Indians (5-6,000 Miamis and Potawatomies)... if you commence before they plant their corn, which will be in June. A large majority of the people in Indiana are in favor of the removal of these Indians)" (Tipton Papers, 2:399-401). Likewise, Gov. Noah Noble stated that it was essential "to the future growth and prosperity of Indiana, that the Indian title to the lands within her borders should be speedily extinguished" (Noble Messages, December 7, 1831, p. 65). The attitude governing the entire Indian removal was one of expressing the common belief that this land was inherently reserved for white civilization. As Noble said, "it is universally admitted that the earth was designed for improvement and tillage, and the right of civilized communities to enter upon and appropriate to such purposes, any lands that may be occasionally occupied or claimed as hunting grounds by uncultivated savages, is sanctioned by the laws of nature and of nations" (Noble Messages, December 4, 1832, p. 139-140). Within eight years, Noble and other advocates of Indian removal succeeded in clearing the "white man's rightful lands."

[Kenn Gividen]

Thank you Chris, for that fine post
I'm glad to see you care the most
about the natives forced to flee
and make their home at Wounded Knee.

But for the record let me state
that one more wrong won't set things straight.
Displacing folks was wrong back then?
I dare to say it's wrong again!

Are you quite sure that you're not wrong
When you suggest that all had gone?
(One moment while I check the the mirror
Just as I thought: Yep! I'm still here!)

Back to the topic of this thread:
It's not about the ones who fled.
Some you can fool, but never all:
This chat's about the current law!