It’s truly a sad day when good, honest, hard working people have to fear arbitrarily being arrested simply because they are not lily white, but it seems that it has come to that. It seems that the stupidity of our immigration policies is only exceeded by the stupidity and, I might add, the unconstitutionality of our immigration enforcement policies.
Just this morning a good friend of mine admitted to my wife and I that he was afraid of immigration officials coming to his home or stopping him on the street and arresting him. We told him “For God’s sake, make photo copies of your documents and keep the copies with you, on your person, at all times”. Not that this is any guarantee any longer as you frequently hear stories of native born citizens being arrested by immigration officials.
The immigration and enforcement policies of our country are especially galling when you consider
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- they are policies of hate, intolerance and bigotry
- we need immigrants (I will make the case for this in a subsequent post)
- the crime rate among immigrants (legal and illegal) is far less than that of native born citizens1
- immigrants are are not the cause of job losses in our country (I will make this case in a later post also) and
- the behavior of those who make and enforce those policies is far less honorable than the behavior of the immigrants.
What right do we have to claim that immigrants aren’t entitled to come here? This land only belongs to European immigrants who came here in the last 400 years because they stole it from the indigenous peoples who originally settled on the land some 14,000 years ago.
What right do we have to claim a Christian heritage when, according to all biblical accounts, Jesus of Nazareth would never have treated immigrants in the manner we treat them?
The immigration and enforcement policies of our government are not only bigoted they are stupid, counterproductive and harmful to our nation’s welfare, reputation and honor. We need to completely reform our immigration policies, but to do that, we must first rid ourselves of the officials who make those policies and then find and elect people to public office who can and will legislate immigration policies that are sensible, humane and benefit all Americans and immigrants alike.
1 Last year, the CATO Institute published the results of a study showing that the total crime rate of undocumented immigrants is less than half that of native born Americans and that the crime rate of legal immigrants is about one tenth that of native born Americans.