May Day

It’s May Day and many large cities are playing host to demonstrations once again. Illegal aliens and their supporters are demanding citizenship in this country. Some have signs that say “No Human Is Illegal”. They are right about that. Being human isn’t illegal. We don’t have a bunch of illegal people on the Earth or in the country. But those humans can be in this country illegally.

I hear different arguments. They’re here anyway, we should just make them legal. If that’s so then we should do some others too. Teenagers will drink anyway, we should just make it legal. People smoke pot anyway, we should just make it legal (these arguments have been seriously put forth). From there it can go further with just about any behavior.

Deporting illegal aliens will split up families. The reasoning behind this is that anchor babies are legal citizens of the U.S. by birth. They say that you can’t deport U.S. citizens and if you deport the parents, they’ll have to leave the children here because you can’t deport U.S. citizens and that will split up the families…. (I purposefully repeated the “can’t deport U.S. citizens” line to show the circular reasoning here). What seems to be forgotten here is that these children are also citizens of their parent’s home countries by reason of their parent’s citizenship. If the parents are from Mexico, then the children are also Mexican citizens. The kids can go with their parents to Mexico. Sure, the child has a right to stay in the U.S. as a citizen, but the child’s parents are responsible for the child. The child can not take care of himself or herself. The child is not legally able to hold a job or sign a contract for rent or a vehicle. The U.S. Government is NOT responsible for the children of illegal aliens even if that child is nominally a citizen of the U.S. The U.S. Government did not invite the parents to this country to have children here.

Take your children home to your home country. The child will be welcomed back when he or she is 18 years old, a legal adult, who can take care of himself or herself. Family reunification in the parents’ home country. By the way, U.S. citizenship of a child is not a bar to entry to the country of the parents’ citizenship (which the child shares) as far as I am aware.

Children, even those born here to legal citizens of the U.S. don’t have all the citizenship rights of adults until they attain adulthood anyway. The drinking age is even higher. The U.S. has mandatory schooling from 1st through 10th grade. A child can drop out of school at age 16. Children can’t drive until they are at least 16 and some states place restrictions on their driving until age 18. If a child (under age 18) commits a crime, their name will not be made public, unless they are charged as an adult. Children have limitations placed on where and when they can work and when they can be out of doors after certain hours. Exceptions are made, but generally children have fewer or lesser rights than adults. One can’t vote until age 18. One can’t procure one’s own passport (without parental approval) until age 18.

Yesterday I heard someone say that illegal aliens need jobs (at the government funded job center in Seattle) so they’ll stay off welfare. Illegal aliens aren’t supposed to be on welfare in the first place.

Undocumented immigrants Illegal aliens do jobs that Americans won’t do. False. Illegal aliens do work that Americans won’t do for $2 an hour. After raids in Colorado, the companies that had been paying low wages to illegal aliens needed new employees. They offered wages at minimum or slightly higher. There were far more applicants than positions available. American applicants. These companies that hire illegal aliens have to be held accountable. They have to be fined at the very least. I would fine them a year’s wages at the prevailing wage for Americans for each illegally employed alien.

Sure, it’s difficult to come here legally. Sure, it takes time to earn your citizenship. Lots of people do it however. Citizenship for these people is worth the effort required to attain it. Now we have masses of people at these demonstrations demanding that those who came here illegally just be given what other people have worked, and worked hard, for.

Illegal alien criminals need to be deported. One felony strike, two misdemeanor strikes. We don’t need any more criminals in this country thank you very much. We have enough of our own without importing them. California is going through a prison space crisis. Many illegal aliens are in jail and not for the first time. They’ve been there before. That should never happen. Jail them, have them serve their sentences, deport them. Slash recidivism drastically.

Our schools are overwhelmed, especially in the poorest districts. The schools don’t need more money, they need fewer students. When you can’t speak to the other mothers at the bus stop, there’s a problem.

Hanover, Illinois just passed an referendum that English is the official language. They are not going to provide materials in Spanish anymore. They said it costs too much to print everything twice. This makes sense to me.

My first wedding was in Germany when I was in the Army. Civil ceremonies are the only legal weddings in Germany. Most couples have two weddings, the civil ceremony and then, the next day or week or whenever, a church wedding. In order to get married I had to have my paperwork translated from English to German. This service was not provided to me, although they did have a list of acceptable translators that I could hire. I also had to hire a translator for the ceremony itself. I hired a woman who came to the wedding and translated the clerk’s words into English and our words into German.

That should be the same here. Every official piece of paper I get from school is in English and Spanish. They generally save a little money by printing on both sides of the sheet, but someone still had to translate and type the Spanish version and the cost of toner is doubled even if you only use one sheet of paper. It’s up to the foreign language speaker to get translations made. Either bring someone you know with you to translate or hire someone. Don’t expect the service for free. Most of those whose first language is not Spanish do that anyway.

I wrote about this incident before: At kindergarten testing a woman was asked if she needed a bilingual aide. She said, “We are from Romania, we speak English!” I really don’t think that a Romanian bilingual aide would have been available anyway.

Just being here isn’t a crime. Another canard. That may be, but add not paying taxes, fraud in getting services, identity theft, driving without licenses, etc, etc. Certainly many here illegally are otherwise law abiding, but being here illegally can necessitate other illegal acts in order to earn money, get services, live somewhere, etc.

When cities decide to crack down on occupancy codes the immediate outcry is “they’re targeting Hispanics!” That’s only true because that particular group is most often found living several families in a three bedroom home. That particular group is most often violating occupancy codes. There are health and safety reasons for those codes. Sixteen to twenty people living in a home with one bathroom isn’t very sanitary. What if there’s a fire? How could that many get out safely? People aren’t supposed to sleep in basements that don’t have escape windows/doors. The house could fall in on them especially if the only way out is a staircase.

Last year the paper quoted a girl here in town as saying she was going downtown to the May Day protest even though she was supposed to be working at the local McDonald’s as saying “What are they going to do? Fire me?”. I hope they did fire her.

We have laws here and we can’t pick and choose. Except for San Francisco Mayor Gavin “If I don’t like a law, I’ll ignore it” Newsome. He didn’t think it was fair that gays couldn’t marry so he decided to flout state law and declare that it was okay there. Now he’s flouting federal immigration law. All so called sanctuary cities and counties should immediately lose all federal funds unless and until they follow the law. If you don’t like the law you have to get the law changed, not just ignore it. Hey, I don’t like the laws against robbery and burglary. I think that I should be able to walk into any store and take what I want without paying. Can’t do it. Neither should these sanctuary cities, counties, and mayors.

I’ve been picking away on this post all afternoon, working on it amongst my other chores (work I do for my household for “free”, work “that Americans won’t do”, cleaning the bathroom, cleaning the cat box, yard work…)

mm-5