Illegal: Growing Up Unwanted in America

Someone Explain "Conservative" To Me

I am actually drawn by the theories of conservatism - pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and don't wait for the government to do everything for you.  If the religious right who want to dictate my morality and not my government's actions hadn't shanghaied the Republican Party, I might have hung around after the Reagan luster began to wear off when I emerged from high school.

But (and here is a big but), it's amazing how many people who call themselves conservative (we presume that they are using the term in its classical sense) are actually all about big government when it comes to their pet projects like "defense," ($480+ billion we don't have for a war no one can make sense of?  No problem!  Put it on my card!) and "illegal imimgration."  Here they are all about big government projects to build walls and pay for monster enforcement, even to the point of arresting and deporting 12 million people, a project so ambitious it makes prison-building contractors everywhere tingle.  Check out this self-proclaimed "less government is better" type spreading the same out-of-context rumors and silly arguments while simultaneously saying he's for smaller government.  Somebody wake me up, I'm having a nightmare.

Unfortunate Rhetoric

It's the same veiled bigotry that made it once acceptable to say that women were too hysterical to vote or blacks too ignorant to hold office - now it's immigrants with brown skin who are the target, and any factoid we can bring out of the murky woodwork to buttress the claim that immigrants (read: Hispanic, poor immigrants) are no good is fair to say.

Note this gem on Michelle Malkin's blog, by Heather McDonald:  Hispanics don't have family values.  Because apparently only licenses issued through government offices that most illegal immigrants are too afraid to frequent are the way to prove you are committed to your family.

The Rhetoric of Hate

Reasonable, good, honest people can disagree about our current policy on immigration, as well as on what to do about it.  Too often, though, a "tough stance on immigration" is merely a flimsy mask for one of the last remaining prejudices: that against illegal immigrants (read: light brown, low-skilled, Spanish-speaking immigrants).

A perfect example of this is the rant of author Daniel Sheehy.  The first quote from him in an article from The Standard Speaker reads simply, "America is being erased."  The article is peppered with quotes about the non-whiteness of Los Angeles and, my personal favorite, "You think what types of people are crossing over, too. There are murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, and lots of other predators."

So there you have it, a bit more crassly put (but not much) than by the more polished national news pundits.  The big fear is that America as we know it is being erased.  Read between the lines: the lily-white, status-quo, apple pie America is being erased.  Because America as a nation will not be erased any time soon.  It is simply the Donna Reed/Father Knows Best America that is being erased.

And the truth is America is being erased all the time.  When slaves were freed, the America that then existed was erased a bit.  When women got the vote, that erased a part of America.  When the Civil Rights Act passed, there went another part of America, erased.  When the internet came and altered how we get our information, a bit of America was erased.  Change happens all the time.

The question is: why is a changing America a bad thing?  Isn't that what this great experiment all about?  Rather than live in a homogenous society, our forefathers and mothers had the great vision to believe that the best of everyone could come here and build a great land.  Could letting in hard-working, family-loving people be such a bad move?

When you read rants like this, make no mistake about it: you are hearing the plantation owner talking about the laziness of slaves, the segregationist talking about why blacks are too uneducated to run their own businesses, or early 20th century men talk about why women are too hysterical to get the vote.  It's the same kind of bigotry, with the fancy new 21st century hook of security and terrorism to enthrall the masses.