The Dallas Morning News editorial board blog is being overwhelmed by comments, almost all of them furious, at the paper for naming the Illegal Immigrant as Texan of the Year. It's clear that the readers are ignoring all the information and argumentation in the essay discussing why illegal immigration is bad for Texas and the US. The point of the essay was not to argue in favor of illegal immigration, but rather to present both sides of this red-hot issue as fairly as possibly, and to conclude by saying that this issue is an urgent and direct challenge that the country can't put off dealing with.
If you have an interest in this issue, I really hope you'll read the essay and decide for yourself if it was fair and balanced. Had it come across as advocating for my personal beliefs on the immigration issue, I would have failed as an editorial writer. Anyway, this is the quality of many of the posts we're getting from readers on our site:
Posted by DH @ 11:23 PM Sun, Dec 30, 2007J. Herrod stated: "What is your plan to rounding up 12 million people and deporting them back to Mexico or where ever they came from? Tell us the plan, with specifics..."
Well, J. H., Hitler and his cronies sent a huge number of people (over 6 million) away in rail cars in record time. I'm not advocating the 1940s going on again, but I am saying it is very logistically possible to deport people en masse (humanely), especially these days with advanced intelligence.
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Rawlins brings up a point that I think is important for Rod (and all of us) to acknowledge.
Rod and his family live in a diverse neighborhood. They've made certain choices to insulate their kids (which is a good thing), but they are hardly isolating themselves from society -- including illegal immigrants.
Rod is not a Know-Nothing, much as he might sometimes think I think he is. I know he has principled objections to illegal immigration -- frankly, many of which I share. I think our bigger differences are on what to do with the people now here rather than in trying to find a way to close the border.
But I do get very angry about the issue. And here's why.
The last time people in America got that angry against another specific group of people -- who happened to be of a different ethnic group -- was in the 1950s and 1960s in Southern states. (And certain Northern areas too, of course.) It was said then that brutal discrimination against "those people" should be allowed. The phrase "our way of life is at stake" was frequently used then as well.
Rod is principled. But many of the people who say they support him (in his regular guise, of course -- they hate him in his nom de plume representing fellow editors) are fueled by irrational rage and hatred, as the DMN comments sadly demonstrate.
This is a huge conundrum -- and one both crunchy cons and crunchy libs by myself need to wrestle with. Crunchy cons need to figure out how to separate themselves from their prejudiced leeches on this issue.
And crunchy libs like me need to try to separate from their understandable emotional reaction, and realize compromise on the illegal immigration issue involves going a way toward the (principled, not prejudiced) crunchy con position.
No matter some of the sick bile spewed by faux crunchy cons.
"The last time people in America got that angry against another specific group of people -- who happened to be of a different ethnic group -- was in the 1950s and 1960s in Southern states. (And certain Northern areas too, of course.) It was said then that brutal discrimination against "those people" should be allowed. The phrase "our way of life is at stake" was frequently used then as well."
What I draw from that is that the Cavalier plantation owners never should have dragged Africans to this country in chains to be slave labor. Likewise I think it's unwise for todays business interests to be luring in illegal Mexicans for cheap labor.
meh:
That may be. (I'm actually inclined to agree with that, in fact -- though of course some of the "business interests" are just average folks like us picking illegal immigrants up at Home Depot or the 7-11 for yardwork or housekeeping.)
But no one recommended that African-Americans be deported back to Africa, either. And, technically, they were "illegal" too, at least by racist Southern standards ...
But no one recommended that African-Americans be deported back to Africa, either.
Actually, it was an idea that ruminated from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s or 1930s. The needs for sharecroppers to grow cotton and bottom rung manual labor in the industrial cities were too large, though, and it was also considered far too expensive and dangerous. Black people have stayed a remarkably consistent 14% of the US population since prior to the Civil War.
The last great expulsion from the US was of about 2 million Latinos during the Great Depression. About half of them were technically US citizens, but 14th Amendment violations were more pervasive and sanctioned to a substantially greater degree then.
The simple fact is that, historically, large non-citizen populations are political and economic destabilizing forces. The only solution compatible with civilization has been to admit them to citizenship. But the less civilized side in the conflict always resorts to trying out all the uncivilized alternatives first.
Jillian:
I meant that the post-Civil War strife hadn't gathered into a Minuteman-type movement from the outside. (The KKK would much rather have exterminated the freedmen and -women, or at least scared them into submission, instead of forcing them into the return boats bringing in European immigrants -- who they didn't much like either ...)
Certainly Marcus Garvey and others advocated emigration positively as an option on behalf of African-Americans.
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