I’ve been put in the uncomfortable position lately. See, I wholly agree with the idea of protecting our borders. America needs to keep illegal immigrants from coming into the country. Undocumented workers artificially bring down our standard of living and our minimum wage through their circumvention of the system.
Undocumented people living in America do not contribute their statistics to the whole. They skew the big picture. The inability to properly quantify American living standards is severely detrimental to our ability to construct informed public policy.
I am therefore on the side of others who feel that we need to fortify our borders to keep people from entering the United States without first signing the guest book.
Although no one wants to come out and say it, we are only talking about Mexican and South American illegals. No one cares about the endless supplies of Polish immigrants coming in through Chicago or Irish immigrants through Massachusetts or multi-ethnic masses taking refuge in New York. Big cities can handle multiculturalism far better than the nativists living in rural America, where brown people stand out more.
This is where I am placed between what I know logically is best for America, keeping illegals out, and the unclean feeling of having to stand on the same side of the aisle with the racists.
Let’s take this little example from my local paper concerning the character of South Americans:
The Communist influence taking hold in South America, with support from Hollywood activists in our own country, should bring alarm to every citizen.
This is not an argument against illegal immigration. This is an attack on South America in general. This rhetoric violates the scope of the argument. We have to keep them out, the author contends, because South American’s (and Hollywood) are communists.
Then there are Conservative columnists who make equally spurious points. Take this piece by Paul Greenberg:
If we were really serious about keeping track of folks in this country in these post-9/11 times, we’d be issuing national identification cards to the whole population, but of course any solution so comprehensive, or so rational, would violate every taboo of our still frontier culture.
Anyone who invokes 9/ll as a reason to prevent illegals from entering the country employes argumentum ad bacculum, the “appeal to fear” logical fallacy. As I replied in a letter to the editor
Invoking the specter of 9/11 to argue for securing our boarders not only plays on American terrorism concerns, a logical fallacy known as “Appeal to Fear,” but also lacks relevancy to the debate. Of the 19 hijackers, all but three were here legally. Building a wall around the United States would have done nothing to prevent the attacks. Don’t we have enough racial strife in this country without your associating the fear of terrorism with our country’s immigrants?
Many of these authors and pundits would express shock if you called them racist, but their language betrays their ignorance, and racism is purely a form of ignorance. Bill O’Reilly has called illegals “wetbacks”. Michael Savage wondered, “Will our brown brethren, who are so nationalistic and so anti-gringo and anti-Anglo, be as enlightened as the European-American is? I don’t think so.” Of course, Rush Limbaugh said, “A Chavez is a Chavez. We’ve Always Had Problems with Them”
I’ve covered the “Them” argument before in my Reductionism article, where I defeated it with a simple mathematical proof: show one individual not in the set of “THEM.” So in response, I again wrote my editor on 05 MAY 2006, with the following:
I would like to bring someone to your reader’s attention, Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez.
At the age of 14, Mr. Gutierrez entered the United States illegally, where he was arrested by the Border Patrol. Being an orphaned minor, he was granted amnesty and turned over to California’s welfare system. From there, he earned a High School Diploma from the Public School system and had his medical needs taken care of by the public health system. He then got a green card and joined the Marines to save for college, planning to eventually become an architect.
On the outskirts of Umm Qasr in the first hours of the first day of the Iraq Invasion, he became the first of over 2,300 American’s to die serving their country in our current Iraq War. There were 31,000 non-citizens serving in our active military as of April, 2003.
Lance Cpl. Gutierrez died defending our freedoms, including the freedom to call illegals like him communists, gangsters, drug dealers, and terrorists. He died defending our right to call him a freeloader on the American taxpayer. He died fighting for a country which had yet to recognize him as one of its own.
Mr. Gutierrez was a Patriot, a Hero, and an Illegal Immigrant.
He died for you. Please remember and respect that.
I guess we haven’t always had problems with “Them,” have we?
So the majority of Americans who reject building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico can take some solace that people like me might not get our way; after all, everyone else who agrees with me on this point seems to only do so out of racist xenophobia.
Here are my other letters to the editor on this topic:
On 14 APR 2006:
While I agree whole-heartedly with the point you made that preventing illegal immigrants from entering the country is a chief concern, your recent editorial employed two rhetorical devices that were offensive and bordered on racism.
Invoking the specter of 9/11 to argue for securing our boarders not only plays on American terrorism concerns, a logical fallacy known as “Appeal to Fear,” but also lacks relevancy to the debate. Of the 19 hijackers, all but three were here legally. Building a wall around the United States would have done nothing to prevent the attacks. Don’t we have enough racial strife in this country without your associating the fear of terrorism with our country’s immigrants?
You also referred to it as “irony” that a small minority of protestors were waving the Mexican flag at a demonstration opposing the criminalization of undocumented workers. Do you similarly find Southerners baring the Confederate flag while supporting the Right to Bare Arms ironic? These are not symbols of treason to the people waving them, but of cultural pride. Do you think it fair to use someone’s cultural pride to question their patriotism?
I find American flags ironic when they are placed on gas-guzzling SUV’s, but I also know making a personal attack out of it won’t further the cause of conservation. The same principle applies to your editorial.
Elizabeth City’s Hispanic community has regularly impressed me with their hard work and good stewardship of their homes. I realize it was not your intent to demonize them with your editorial, but they are the innocent victims of your rhetoric. Let’s remember that these are the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” just as our own ancestors were before them, unless you are a Native American, and we should watch our rhetoric to maintain a respectful tone towards them.
On 10 MAY 2006:
Ignorance and racism go hand in hand. Paul Greenberg, unfortunately, is a profoundly ignorant man. We are a nation in dire straits if we let his kind dictate what is and isn’t American culture to the rest of us.
Greenberg wants us to believe the focus of his concern is illegal immigration. He might have convinced us of that by actually addressing the issue instead of wasting two columns attacking Mexican flags and a recent Spanish translation of the American National Anthem.
President Bush agrees, and recently told reporters he thought the national anthem “ought to be sung in English;” however, he was quite fond of singing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish in pivotal states during his 2000 presidential run. Does that make him a flip-flopper or a hypocrite?
There are 389 versions of the Star Spangled Banner. One Spanish translation, “La Bandera de las Estrellas,” dated 1919, can be found in the Library of Congress. A recent Harris poll found 61% of Americans don’t know the words in English, but Greenberg is more outraged at a small minority of people expressing their love for America in the language they grew up with. This is like saying deaf people are un-American for singing the National Anthem in sign language.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has noted there are rap, country, and classical versions of our National Anthem, and I agree with the insightful observation she made regarding this: “The individualization of the American national anthem is quite under way… what we need to focus on is an immigration policy that is comprehensive, and that recognizes our laws and recognizes our humanity.”
Maybe Paul Greenberg could take some time away from his pointless diatribes against Hispanic-American expressions of patriotism long enough to constructively contribute a little column space this pressing issue?
Another Letter I wrote concerning residents complaining about the “Star Spangled Banner” being sung in Spanish:
Star Spangled Banner is Spanish is Patriotic
Ignorance and racism go hand in hand. Paul Greenberg, unfortunately, is a profoundly ignorant man. We are a nation in dire straits if we let his kind dictate what is and isn’t American culture to the rest of us.
Greenberg wants us to believe the focus of his concern is illegal immigration. He might have convinced us of that by actually addressing the issue instead of wasting two columns attacking Mexican flags and a recent Spanish translation of the American National Anthem.
President Bush agrees, and recently told reporters he thought the national anthem “ought to be sung in English;” however, he was quite fond of singing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish in pivotal states during his 2000 presidential run. Does that make him a flip-flopper or a hypocrite?
There are 389 versions of the Star Spangled Banner. One Spanish translation, “La Bandera de las Estrellas,” dated 1919, can be found in the Library of Congress. A recent Harris poll found 61% of Americans don’t know the words in English, but Greenberg is more outraged at a small minority of people expressing their love for America in the language they grew up with. This is like saying deaf people are un-American for singing the National Anthem in sign language.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has noted there are rap, country, and classical versions of our National Anthem, and I agree with the insightful observation she made regarding this: “The individualization of the American national anthem is quite under way… what we need to focus on is an immigration policy that is comprehensive, and that recognizes our laws and recognizes our humanity.”
Maybe Paul Greenberg could take some time away from his pointless diatribes against Hispanic-American expressions of patriotism long enough to constructively contribute a little column space this pressing issue?