Victims And Votes
Obama presses for immigration reform – latimes.com.
As if. Someone should explain why it’s ok in our modern enlightened time to be subject to a virtual and literal strip search at the nation’s airports, suffer the inconvenience and annoyance of surly screeners and yet we are supposed to worry about the civil rights of people who aren’t even citizens of the country. The opposition to the just passed immigration bill in Arizona is illogical and amounts to the usual liberal scaremongering. The images offered are of women and children being terrorized by jack booted troopers ready to corral them into cattle trucks. The reality is, violent criminals have become bolder in their activities in that state and the legitimate citizens are concerned that the blazing arizona sunsets so famous there, may actually be gunfire and burning buildings.
Let’s get a grip here; if you are a citizen and you are asked for identification, you show it, have a nice day. If you fail to produce it, well then you should be worried. You should not be breaking the laws of a sovereign country by being there illegally. Have these people who are bleating about civil rights never been through a grilling at airport customs? Unless you actually are a Muslim extremist, they treat you like one by lobbing probing questions probably derived from minutes of intense training. After which, you then have the choice of being felt up from head to toe (without dinner first!) or to be x-rayed in the new video booths. None of this seems to bother the ardent civil libertarians who would rather yelp about how the rights of possible non citizens are being trampled upon.
If not obvious to observers of this little tempest, this is not about the rights of anyone. History has shown that the people least interested in the rights of any particular victim group are the very liberals who complain most loudly about them. If there were no advantage in courting the Hispanic vote in the U.S., liberals wouldn’t care if illegals were being rounded up by backhoes. Politicians are keenly aware that to curry favour with the Hispanic voting block is key to winning many political ridings. I’ll bet there are more civil indignities being committed against legitimate citizen air travellers every day in the U.S. through customs screening than a month of illegal “harassment” in Arizona. The only trouble is, air travellers do not constitute an homogeneous voting group, so they get no sympathetic news coverage nor elicit any Presidential outrage.
Here’s an idea, when the state police in Arizona manage to identify those that are illegal in their sweeps, why not send them to New York or Washington instead of turning them back to Mexico? The illegals get to see the country and maybe get employment in the big cities. New York and Washington DC get a huge pool of new and cheap labor. Arizona becomes less overrun with illegals and liberals can go to work on some other useful cause such as fat kids or making holidays a basic human right. Seems like a win win solution to me.