Monday, March 27, 2006

Cognitive dissonance, bad editing, or pissing on my shoes and telling me it’s raining?

Crazy Foreigners
While reading a story entitled "Groundswell of Protests Back Illegal Immigrants" in Monday's New York Times, I came across this nugget, spread across two pages. First, the last paragraph on page one:
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that of more than 11 million illegal immigrants, 78 percent are from Mexico or other Latin American countries. Many have children and other relatives who are United States citizens. Under the House measure, family members of illegal immigrants — as well as clergy members, social workers and lawyers — would risk up to five years in prison if they helped an illegal immigrant remain in the United States.
OK, fine, sez me - that sounds harsh. I've read and heard news stories making it clear that the authors of the legislation have no intention of criminalizing the actions of anyone simply "helping" an illegal immigrant to stay in the US, but I can understand why the Catholic Church, the illegals' families, and other aid organizations would be jumpy about the matter. So I clicked on to see page two, and its first paragraph looked like this:
(Page 2 of 2)

"Imagine turning more than 11 million people into criminals, and anyone who helps them," said Angela Sanbrano, executive director of the Central American Resource Center of Los Angeles, one of the organizers of Saturday's rally there. "It's outrageous. We needed to send a strong and clear message to Congress and to President Bush that the immigrant community will not allow the criminalization of our people — and it needed to be very strong because of the anti-immigrant environment that we are experiencing in Congress."
With no disrespect to immigrants, and no actual malice toward illegal immigrants, I find myself wondering what part of illegal does Angela Sanbrano not understand?

Those 11 million folks she's worried about are already criminals. Whether they should be or not is an issue best left to another forum, but could we drop the charade that they're not already criminals? And if the issue is immigrants' rights, the matter is pretty simple, according to present laws - as illegal immigrants they have a right to be treated fairly, humanely, and then to be transported back to wherever they came from at the earliest feasible date, absent some mitigating factor, of which there are none related to Mexican immigrants. Shitty government isn't one of the exceptions, you see.

Those that wish to have open borders, with free entry for all, can make excellent points in favor of their positions, as can those against. I find, however, that the arguments of those against purely open borders are more believable on at least one level - they don't generally seem to start their arguments with a bald-faced misstatement of fact.

Where the Times fits into all this is actually moot - the placement of the visual head-fake is probably just an accident. But anyone who read just the first page and moved on might not notice the duplicity of the arguments in favor of what is, today, still a clearly illegal activity. That would be unfortunate, and runs the risk of simply kicking the can down the road rather than addressing the issue once and for all.

For what it might be worth, if the government were to decide to lock the borders tight and properly and then to offer a one-time amnesty to all who've been so fortunate to evade the law to-date, I'd be fine with that, unlike some (many?) to the right of me on the political polarization scale.

Doing one without the other, however, would just be another act of stupidity, and doing neither would be just as bad.


Posted by Patton on 03/27/06 at 01:47 AM
Crazy Foreigners • Permalink