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On January 28, 2012 the Washington Post ran a snide editorial in which it referred to the idea of self-deportation (as proposed by candidate Romney) as a solution to the problem of millions of illegal aliens as a "fantasy." You can read their screed HERE. Since NAFBPO knows that self-deportation does, in fact, take place when things are made tough for illegal aliens we responded to the Post with a suggested guest editorial. As we expected, they chose not to run it, but here it is for your consideration. |
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TO: The Washington Post
Let us adapt a phrase you used in a January 28 editorial. Even by the debased standard of modern journalism you get it wrong when you dismiss the idea that self-deportation is a useful approach to dealing with illegal aliens in the United States. Furthermore, you insult millions of American workers when you regurgitate the canard that illegal aliens do work Americans won't do. Our guess is that in the elite fantasyland you inhabit you have never known anyone who lived, for example, in a trailer and drove a 10 year-old car. And it obviously never occurs to you that there are kids who need a job to pay for another semester at the local community college. They don't have the luxury of driving their BMWs to the country club to hang around the pool before heading back to daddy-paid tuition at Princeton. Or perhaps, being socially conscious, they volunteer for Habitat for Humanity while they live on the proceeds of their trust fund. If so, good for them, but let's not get them mixed up with kids and parents who have to earn with their sweat everything they have. But never mind your elite cultural blindness; let's get to the realities of how to deal with millions of illegal aliens. First, confess this, for it is demonstrably true: amnesty (call it what you will - the aliens recognize it by any name) is not an option. It was tried in 1986 and it failed miserably in its goal of controlling illegal immigration. To the contrary, it is directly responsible for the situation we face now. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese, on whose watch the 1986 amnesty took place, later characterized it as the biggest mistake that administration ever made. He was right. And by the way, the number who gained status under it was twice what was predicted and most of that through fraud. We can reasonably expect the same again, with numbers four times larger. You dismiss without evidence the idea that self-deportation can work, yet recent events show that it does. In fact, apologists for illegal immigrants bemoan the number of illegal aliens who leave states that pass laws making life difficult for them. Oklahoma. Arizona. Georgia. Alabama. Observers in those states all say that illegal aliens leave in droves when their life is made inconvenient. That they leave when jobs dry up is also proven by the number who departed for home when our economy declined - and who, by the way, remain abroad waiting for it to improve And finally, the immigration system is not "broken." It is rusty and clogged with the detritus of decades of special interest and feel-good and ethnic-pandering legislation, but it can be made functional with adjustments. Our immigration laws should first, serve the national interest, and that does not include guaranteeing a surplus of labor to keep wages low. Then, to the extent we can afford it, we may indulge in the warm, fuzzy idea of family reunification but we should not sacrifice national treasure to that concept. So, the question still exists. Does the Washington Post have a useful solution or will it just continue taking unsupported pot shots at ideas that make amnesty unnecessary? |
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