A Hypothetical Question on "Illegal" Immigration

I put this little hypothetical situation on Facebook the other day, and it has generated some lively discussion.  If you haven't friended me on FB yet, feel free to do so! 

Who does the American taxpayer more harm: 1) the guy from Mexico or Canada who is in the U.S. without a permission slip from Obama, who is working away mowing yards, hanging sheetrock, or pouring concrete for about $25,000 per year, and who is paying money into Social Security that he'll never be able to collect, OR, 2) the machinist or engineer at General Dynamics being paid $60,000 per year, directly by the taxpayers, to make aircraft we don't need?

(General Dynamics is a manufacturer of munitions and armaments for the military-industrial complex.) 

 

Would you pledge allegiance to The Tzar?

A Facebook friend that I've never met, Mr. David Singhiser, has been throwing down some excellent posts and rants about the military, pledging allegiance, immigration, and loyalty to The State.

(The catalyst for all this has been disagreement in his family about a relative going to work in the U.S. Marines.) 

Check this out.  Pure, undiluted greatness....

For those few family members who are still friends and followers: When Little Grandma's grandparents accepted going to Russia in the early 19th century, they were promised certain rights and privileges such as: keeping their own language (What? They were not compelled to learn Russian?), sending their children to their own schools, going to their own churches, and their young men were free from conscription and fighting in the Tzar's wars.

Let's be clear. They prospered. I have seen pictures of the Milljos and Singeisens. They were well off. They were well off! They owned vineyards and other property.

However, when a later Tzar took back those rights and privileges, Little Grandma and her family and community left for America. I doubt that any of them questioned their commitment to freedom. None accused them of their lack of patriotism, their lack of loyalty to the Tzar and the royal family.

That was a non-issue. It was freedom that was important. It was obvious, freedom was more important, not a Tzar, not a government, not a country that "gave" them prosperity. They earned it, and the Imperial Russian Government decided to confiscate property and send their young men to war.

Wasn't the Russian government within its rights? Shouldn't the Swiss and German colonialists be obligated to pay their dues? But in the eyes of the colonialists, the Tzar broke the promise.

Freedom could be found elsewhere. Liberty was what was important, more than prosperity, more than a false loyalty to a bankrupt and lying government, more than even a place.

Well my dear family, the US government broke it's promises. It took Eddie and Bill (Little Grandma's sons during WWI) and Lawrence during WWII and Bill during the Korean War (her grandsons).

Government officials have lied to us, spied on us, confiscated out wealth and prosperity. We owe them nothing.

Her generation however, understood freedom. Freedom was more important than a government or a nation.

When the government became oppressive, she and her community left. Simple, not easy, but simple; they left, ….for Freedom!

We owe these government officials no loyalty, only our contempt. If we are true to our heritage, we follow liberty, no matter where it is in the world. We are not serfs; we are not slaves. We bow to no one. We do not send our children into war to fight for a government and an elite. We are better than that.

How sad.

Most of you have lost this message, if you ever knew it. How sad you chose to be loyal to a government that lied to you. How sad you chose land - DIRT - over freedom. I am sorry you fell for the propaganda. I am sorry that some of you have even encouraged a family member to march into war.

You are victims of the propaganda as well. I too fell for the propaganda, but I woke up. I continue to wake up.

I wish you would too.

I wish you loved freedom more than a place, more than a state, more than a government.  

The U.S. Government's Employment Verification Website Is Down !!

The E-Verify website is closed because of the Federal government shutdown.  
 

Employers in the U.S. are forced to use this system when hiring, mostly to ensure that people are "legal". 

Why does it matter so much where someone's Mom was located when her water broke? The older I get, the more I see this vile website as an instrument of racism. Or am I mistaken in not believing that the lines of latitude and longitude beneath a uterus should define a person for life?  

(And check out these politically correct contortions from the site: "This diverse workforce contributes greatly to the vibrancy and strength of our economy, but that same strength also attracts unauthorized employment.") 

Any bureaucratic drone who is proud of stopping "unauthorized employment" should be laid off permanently. And then sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, to live out the rest of his life as an "unauthorized" non-person in one of the countries that his co-workers have screwed up. 

End of rant. 

Adrian Murray on Immigration

My friend Adrian Murray....

Tea Party Patriot....

9-12 leader....

and great, great guy....,

keeps knocking them out of the park, but only on Facebook.  That's why I can't just link to his stuff. 

Here he goes with something on immigration:

Line up a dozen Republican politicians seeking public office, ask them what their answer is to the 12 million or more illegal immigrants in America and in remarkable display of political courage, they’ll dodge the question. The answer is usually something along the lines of: “We can’t address that issue until we fix the border. Once the border is fixed/sealed/guarded/mined/booby-trapped we can work on solutions to those already here.” You may even be treated to the phrase, “Path to citizenship.”

We’ve been hearing this for fifty years. Likely, we’ll hear it for another fifty. Like so many issues, if we didn’t have an illegal immigrant problem, politicians would have to invent one. (This piece is not meant to unfairly single out Republicans. It’s just that the Democrats would gladly apologize to Gaia and hand the country back to the Seminoles and the Apaches, so there’s just no point in dragging their ideas into the mix.)

Fortunately for most of us, our ancestors came to America long before numbskulls ruled the roost. Can you imagine what it would have been like 100 or 150 years ago if the solutions to immigration being talked about now were official policy then? For much of America’s first century the borders were wide open. No one had identification or passports or had to undergo retina scans and full body cavity searches to get into the country. They either walked across the border or down a gangplank. Voila. New Americans.

But what if, when the great waves of migration began from Europe in the 19th century, the existing American population, descendant mainly from English and German stock, had the same mentality we have today? Would calls have gone out to seal the ports to protect American sovereignty? Would politicians demand that a navy be built to intercept passenger ships on the high seas and turn them back to their country of origin? Would candidates for office run on platforms of rounding up the new arrivals and shipping them back to Europe? “Just look at them, these wretches who inhabit the filthy tenements of Manhattan, with their strange languages and even stranger customs. They won’t even assimilate, choosing instead to stay with their own kind creating their own communities like Chinatown, Greek Town, Little Italy. Look at them: there are Poles and Slavs and Gypsies and Italians and Jews. Jews! They’re not even Christians, for the love of Pete. And have you seen what the filthy Irish have done to Boston? Completely overrun it they have, with their pale little redheaded children and their Catholic priests and nuns. But we can’t deal with the ones that are here until we find a way to seal off the Atlantic coast.”

Ah, to transport 21st century politicians back to 1880. And leave them there.

Of course, we do not have to guess what our forebears did in regards to new immigrants to America. It’s part of America’s history. To put it succinctly, they welcomed them. They embraced them. They made them citizens. By 1892 the waves of immigrants grew so intense the federal government opened Ellis Island in New York to process the new arrivals. Over the next 62 years, some 12 million new Americans passed through its doors and went on to build the greatest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world.

So what’s the problem today?

Answer that question by asking another one: Since the great migration today is by land from the south rather than by sea from the east, where is the Ellis Island of the southern border? Are these people welcome or not?

Wrap your mind around that for a while and you’ll see that we do not have a serious immigration policy in this country. We have a political football which both sides like to kick back and forth because it allows them to play their political bases like human yoyos. The problem will never get resolved until we cultivate politicians with some spine.

There’s a certain word that begins with “A” which no politician would dare propose concerning the millions of undocumented immigrants already here, even though it is precisely the same prescription used by our forebears who, when faced with a similar issue, used their heads and did what was right, not what was politically expedient.

They welcomed the new arrivals and created the means for them to become citizens.
 
(Go here to get a copy of Adrian's book "Common Ground America", and check out the political program he's trying to establish.  He's also got some good ideas about spreading the Texas holiday "Juneteenth" to the rest of the nation.)
 
For better or worse, Obama has almost made illegal immigration a non-issue.  Keeping illegal immigrants out of the United States is now about as difficult as keeping illegal immigrants out of North Korea.   
 

This is what happens when the government decides to get tough on the Mexican onion-pickers who are taking American jobs

Are you irritated by people who were born outside of the lines of latitude and longitude that you think of as your own? 
If someone was born on the oppositite side of an insignificant river from you, do you support laws to keep them from working on "your" side of the river? 
Do you want to get tough on our nation's onion-pickers, blueberry harvesters (and my forklift drivers) because their mothers birthed them in places that maps paint in a different color from your place? 
Do you want to keep Mexicans from doing jobs that you personally would try to avoid? 
In short, are you an asshole? 

I believe that the governor of Georgia can answer "yes" to all of these questions.

 
Here's Jay Bookman:

After enactment of House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
The resulting manpower shortage has forced state farmers to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.
Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal was forced to order a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

Well, if the Massey-Ferguson, Case, Kubota and Ford tractor dealers ever convince some government bureaucrat to outlaw John Deere tractors, we're going to have a tractor shortage.  If the bureaucrat is surprised by the "unexpected" shortage, you shouldn't be surprised - they generally have the density of cinderblocks.

(Go here for a glorious compilation of headlines using the word "unexpected" bureaucratic misunderstandings of cause and effect.)

So what solution did Governor Deal propose for those having to deal with his crisis? 

“The agriculture industry is the number one economic engine in Georgia and it is my sincere hope to find viable and law-abiding solutions to the current problem our farmers face,” Deal said in announcing the findings. In the meantime, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia.

I propose that Governor Deal try out a few of those 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers in his own workforce, and let us all know how that works out for him.  1,500 of them were probably locked up because of his anti-marijuana laws.  Trying to solve the farmers' labor problem with the victims of his Drug War problem is nothing but a recipe for another problem. 
If you're going to harvest crops like onions and blueberries, you have to be in incredibly good shape. 

Governor Deal would probably get better result by putting the ex-cons to work in the Georgia Department Of Motor Vehicles or the Georgia Highway Patrol.  Ex-cons, at least the ones who work for me, are usually very polite. 
Here's where Jay Bookman goes off the rails:

It’s hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would create an entirely different set of problems. If they raise wages by a third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough immigration laws. That’s one of the major disadvantages of trying to implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.

Bookman is deeply and profoundly wrong.  That's not a bug, it's a feature. 

New York legalized gay'n'lesbian marriage yesterday.  Because of its Southern Baptist infestation, Georgia is unlikely to do so anytime soon.  New York companies wanting to hire talented workers who just happen to be born gay or lesbian now have an advantage over Georgia companies.  The solution is for Georgia to get rid of its handicaps, not inflict similar disadvantages over New York. 

Texas doesn't have immigration laws as "tough" as those in Georgia.  Texans wanting to hire talented Canadians or Albanians now have an advantage over their Georgia counterparts.
 
Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, seems to be mentally stable.  Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, doesn't.  Indiana now has that advantage over Texas. 

Giving states the ability to try things out and experiment with different policies is a good thing.  When voters see that their policies have unintended consequences, they can change those policies. But without a "control group" in another state, they can't see the differences. 

Bookman gets back on track in his last few paragraphs.  His last sentence is brilliant:

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.


In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren’t secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don’t think that’s likely.

We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.

Ok, that's all for today.  I have a crew of 30 bad-assed Mexicans to keep busy.  They are great, great people.  Georgia's loss is my gain. 

The picture of the Mexican migrant workers stealing American cucumber-picking jobs came from here.   The map showing the arbitrary lines and coastal borders where immigrants aren't welcome came from here.   The "No Deal" pic came from this Facebook page.   My boss who wants me to work on this beautiful Saturday morning came from Juarez Mexico. 

Why I don't like foreigners

There are lots and lots of reasons to dislike foreigners, immigrants, and people who aren't like us. 
Look what we're having to put up with, courtesy of WGN in Chicago:

An elderly couple says Cook County sheriff’s police on a drug raid smashed into their Southwest Side house late Thursday night, terrorizing them before admitting they had the wrong house.

With her husband already asleep, 84-year-old Anna Jakymek was just turning out the lights when she heard loud noises at the back and front doors about 11:30 p.m.

Ok, let's start there.  What kind of name for an American is Jakymek?  Americans should be named Smith, Jones, or Patterson.  

Her initial thought was that her 89-year old husband had fallen out of bed, but she realized something else was happening when she looked into the front room.
“I see maybe 20 guys come in and see the door knocked open,” she said…
Son Andrew said the most potent drug in the home is aspirin.

Right.  With a name that sounds like something from a bad brewpub?  Jakymek?  I'm not buying it. 

“They don’t smoke, drink or even watch TV. They believe in America,” he said.
He added that his father, Andrij, suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease and has terminal cancer.
“He won’t even take pain medicine,” he said…

Andrij ??  Andrij ?? Someone named Andrij isn't rolling up a fat one every night?  Gimme a break.

His mother, he said, called him after the raid at the request of the supervising sergeant on the scene. When he got there, he said he was told the officers had raided the wrong home.

“When I arrived the officer explained they had misinformation, but said his job was over, and he was leaving. They left a copy of the warrant, but he absolved himself of any responsibility for the raid or the damage,” Andrew Jakymec said.

Don't these freakin' foreigners know that there's a drug war going on?  And that we're in a constant battle to save people from....themselves? 
Can Andrew Jakymec pull his Eastern European head out of his rear end long enough to see the truth?  We need to preserve the monopolies of the Mexican Drug Lords and the Afghan Opium Poppy farmers. 
Every once in a while, somebody's gonna get hit with friendly fire.  Don't try playing the victim card just because you have a funny name.
We're in a drug war.  Love it or leave it.  

He estimated the damage to broken doors, locks and windows at up to $3,000.
“Everything was violently opened. Cabinets were ripped open, clothes and sheets were everywhere, and pieces of wood where the doors were rammed were all over the place,” he said.

Radley Balko is claiming that the Jakymeks came here in the 1960's from the Ukraine.  Something about escaping Soviet oppression. 
Well, if they're going to be bitching and moaning every time our police bust up the wrong house looking for small amounts of marijuana, they can take their asses back to Russia. 
How are we going to justify building a border fence without a drug war, Mr. Radley Balko? 
How can we "save and create" jobs for border patrol guards unless we continue our twin policies of drug prohibition and sharia law? 
Do you think we can continue fighting in Afghanistan for the next century without giving our enemies a monopoly on opium products?  Why, if we were to end prohibition, the Taliban would go broke in a month.  Then who would we fight?  
Now that I've had time to think about it, what kind of name is Balko?  It doesn't sound Texan.   

Remember: Foreigners bad.  Drug war good.