Friday, May 18, 2007

Immigration Reform, Sure it is...


Well, I am in an uproar! What is going on in the Republican party?

[Here is a picture of the bill, not yet completed. It's almost 1000 pages! Yikes! What a waste of time and paper! (I don't think that looks like recylced paper-any environmentalists up in arms?)]

First, the Congress is going to jam down our throats, without following any of the Senate procedures, something called Comprehensive Immigration Reform. What it does is grant legal status to illegal immigrants. So, it doesn't grant citizenship, but it provides for a short-cut to citizenship!

What about all the other people who have immigrated through the proper channels? What about the persons who have waited in the lines and hired the lawyers and went through the monster INS? They are being, dare I say it, disenfranchised! This bill tells them that they wasted their time and money following our laws! Furthermore, this bill CHEAPENS those of us who are already citizens. American Citizenship is open to EVERYONE, as long as they go through the proper procedures. Why don't they fix the procedures?

And really! What about our own laws? Do we even care that everyone on Capital Hill seems to think that it's okay to break laws? I DO!!!! What the devil? Who are the Republicans talking to? Surely they are not talking to the base.

Newt Gingrich said (I'm paraphrasing), we are allowing people to become citizens, persons who have first broke our laws. I'm asking, if these people already have no disregard for the law, why are we letting them in????!!!!! They will probably continue to have little to no care for our laws. Our prisons will be stuffed (which I think they already are). Now, that is not to say that all illegals are vagrants, but you see my point. You can not be a subjective rule breaker! The law can not work that way. A law not enforced has no power and loses all effectiveness.





1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm not really familiar with the bill, but I do have an interest in it, especially since there are a lot of migrant workers here in Oakland. I agree that we shouldn't just throw out our normal process of becoming citizens, and certainly I think we need to do more to prevent more illegal immigrants from coming in.

But, the fact remains that these people are here, some of them have been here for longer than we've been alive, and they are the backbone of a lot of our blue collar labor. If we force them out, costs for a lot of what we take for granted will increase given that minimum pay will go up. And, who is to say that the American people even want these jobs? Higher costs aren't the end of the world, but we have to consider their importance in a numer of industries.

Probably the biggest thing to consider is that they are foreigners in the land, and God speaks very harshly to his people who mistreat foreigners, regardless of how they came to be. Just look at what happened to Israel as a result.

So, I think we have to look at this issue really carefully to know how to honor and respect these people as those made in God's image without making a mockery of our legal system.