GUEST POST: from-- What Is This "Crime," Really?
BY Orson Scott Card
10-year-old ill girl, who has lived in the U.S. since an infant, arrested by ICE at a hospital where she just had surgery. She was taken to a detention center:-(
"Since the only crime most of these people are committing is simply being here without permission, we would give them a reasonable way to get that permission without losing everything else in order to get it."
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"A fifteen-year-old boy...has been yearning for his driver's license for a long time.
But today all thoughts of waiting for his license are out the window, because his little sister cut herself and he can't stop the bleeding. His parents aren't home.
So David puts his sister in the car and, holding a towel on the wound to apply pressure, he drives the car one-handed out onto the road and goes as fast as the car can go, heading for the nearest medical emergency center.
...a state trooper sees him driving too fast and pulls him over. David tries to explain that he's only driving illegally in order to save his sister's life, but the trooper doesn't listen.
He drags David out of the car and handcuffs him and yells at him...
David..."My sister is bleeding to death! Let me get her to the hospital!"
But it's as if the trooper is deaf to anything David has to say."
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"I'm sick at heart about the number of Americans, including friends of mine who should know better, who are proud of being exactly like that state trooper, when it comes to the question of illegal immigrants.
"They have no right to be here in the first place. If we give these people amnesty and let them stay and apply for citizenship, we only encourage more illegal immigration in the future. Besides, they use up our welfare and add to our school costs without paying taxes!"
In vain do the immigrants try to explain that their families were desperately poor, doomed to continue to live on the edge of starvation, and the only hope was America ... which wouldn't let them in.
Why can't we look at what these people are actually doing? Why can't we see the bleeding child in the passenger seat, and realize that most of these illegal immigrants are doing precisely what you or I would do in the same circumstances?
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So what is this vile crime of "illegal immigration" that requires us to throw out hard-working people...?
It consists of crossing over an arbitrary line that somebody drew in the dirt a century and a half ago. On one side of the line, poverty, hopelessness, a social system that keeps you living as a peasant, keeps your children uneducated and doomed to the same miserable life you have -- or worse.
On the other side of the line, plenty of jobs that are going begging because nobody who lives on that side is desperate enough to work all day for a wage so low. But the wage is enormous to you. It would save your family's lives, give you hope for your children...
Wouldn't you take any risk to get across that line?
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We Americans, what exactly did we do to earn our prosperity, our freedom? Well, for most of us, what we did was: be born.
Yeah, we work for our living and pay our taxes and all that, but you know what? I haven't seen many native-born American citizens who work as hard as the Mexican-born people I see working in minimum-wage jobs in laundries and yard services and intermittent subcontracting projects and other semi-skilled and unskilled positions.
I have no idea which (if any) of the people I see doing this work are legals and which are illegals -- but that's my point. Latin American immigrants, as a group, are hard-working, family-centered, God-fearing people who contribute mightily to our economy.
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"But they come here and commit crimes and live off of our welfare system!"
Wait a minute. Who is "they"? All of the illegal immigrants?
Only a certain percentage of them. But when we round up illegal immigrants, do we make the slightest effort to distinguish between those who commit crimes here, those who scam the system to get welfare, and those who are working hard and living by all the rules?
No. We send them all home. There is, under present law, no special treatment for illegal immigrants who, during their time in the U.S., work hard and don't take anything from anybody without paying for it.
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And yet most of the illegal immigrants commit no crimes, but instead live frugally and work hard. In fact, I dare say that many illegal immigrants work harder and obey our social rules more faithfully than a good many citizens whose right to live within our borders is unquestioned.
And if all you can say to that is, "It doesn't matter, send them all home, give them no hope of citizenship because we don't want to reward people for breaking the law to enter our country," then here's my answer to you:
Let's apply that standard across the board. No mercy. No extenuating circumstances. No sense of punishment that is proportionate to the crime. Let's handle traffic court that way.
The penalty for breaking any traffic law, from now on, is: revocation of your license and confiscation of your car. Period...Driving 70 in a 65 zone on the freeway? No license, no car.
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No mercy, no exceptions, no consideration for the differences between traffic offenders.
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"But it wouldn't be fair!" you reply.
That's right. It wouldn't be fair. Yet that's exactly the same level of fairness that I hear an awful lot of Americans demanding in order to curtail the problem of illegal immigration.
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The only thing that makes illegal immigration a problem is that it's illegal. If we simply opened our southern border the way all our borders were open in the 1800s, then would there be any continuing burden?
Most of these immigrants would still work hard, only now they would have their families with them and the money would not drain away to Mexico. Those who prospered would pay income taxes. So economically, there would be an improvement.
Some would freeload off the system...There is no major immigrant group that has not spawned its criminals. Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Russian Jews...
And yet we would have regarded it as a great injustice to throw out all the immigrants from each of these groups, just because some of them committed crimes. In this country, we have a long tradition of punishing only the individual who does wrong, not his entire ethnic group.
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So what, exactly, would be the cost to us of an open-door immigration policy? What evidence do we have that the immigrants who would flood across our boundaries would be any worse than the waves of Irish, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Japanese, or British immigrants?
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By one perfectly rational reading of history, the whole southwestern quarter of the United States actually consists of unjustly conquered territory in which the native inhabitants -- the legal citizens -- were torn apart from their fellow citizens to the south, and our immigration policy consists of denying Mexicans the right to access lands that were historically theirs, and where former Mexican citizens who were involuntarily annexed to the U.S. were long oppressed and discriminated against.
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There is no historical basis for any American to claim the moral high ground when talking about Mexican immigration to the United States.
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Since the only crime most of these people are committing is simply being here without permission, we would give them a reasonable way to get that permission without losing everything else in order to get it.
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Why in the world do we regard that as a crime?"
by Orson Scott Card
Go to his website to read the rest of his important essay:
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-06-25-1.html
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Especially, we need to give the Dreamers--little kids and infants brought here many years ago--the chance to stay here and become citizens.
There ought to be NO MORE tragic debacles of justice such as ICE, recently, arresting a 10-year-old ill girl after her surgery and taking her to a deportation center, even though she has lived in the U.S. since being brought here as an infant!
NO MORE splitting up of hard-working families as uncompassionately happened this last month in Michigan and Illinois. In the one case a hard-working professor who has lived in the U.S. for over 30 years, was arrested after dropping his kids off at school:-(
Consider Card's wise words of wisdom which strongly counter all the other narrow, self-centered Christian nationalism of 'U.S. First, First...'
In the Light,
Daniel Wilcox
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