Immigrants, legal and illegal, are here because we need them. We invited them, and our communities and businesses suffer when we suddenly rescind that invitation.

Immigrants don’t commit more crime. Just the opposite, as born out by reseach from people of all political stripes.

Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs. They’re doing the jobs we don’t want (poultry processing plants) or the jobs we don’t have to patience to attain (doctors). When they’re deported en masse, US towns suffer. In fact, one Tennessee town fought back against ICE.

“Oh, but we want legal immigration.”

Do you?

Or do you realize that your votes are making this impossible? Even on issues such as giving legal status to people brought here as children, something the vast majority of Americans want?

In fairness, neither party has made a serious effort to solve the problem and make legal immigration easier. But the Trump administration, led by Stephen Miller, made it more difficult to let people in. (See readings below.)

And they ramped up the cruelty toward desperate people.

That includes refugees. Somehow, the people who take the Bible more literally than anyone else have no trouble turning away people in need. We sent them back to face death and abuse.

If you think refugees need to be thoroughly vetted, fine. I’ve seen it first-hand, and I can tell you —they already are. But you’re welcome to suggest improvements.

You’re NOT welcome to tell Americans they can’t see their families any more. And you’re NOT welcome to deny basic human decency to people fleeing for their lives. And you’re not accurate to call yourself “Christian” when you flee from your obligation to love your neighbors.

Instead of humane policy, Trump offered up the ultimate in virtue signaling, something far more expensive than the virtue signaling we see from the woker-than-thou progressives on Twitter. He offered up The Wall, sadly without David Gilmour’s guitar. The Wall is ineffective, drug smuggling comes through ports of entry, people can tunnel under it or climb over it, we’re disrupting Native American burial sites and the ecosystem around the border, and it’s being paid for not by Mexico but out of the Pentagon’s budget.

You’re welcome to say Democrats have pretty bad on this issue as well. You have a point, actually. And one prominent voice on humane immigration reform is the previous Republican president, George W. Bush.

So whether your local Congresscritters have an “R” or “D” by their names, you can give them a call and tell them to do better.

FURTHER READING

OLDER READING

This is how our economy functions

This is who we are

Immigrants are falsely demonized

Trying to “close the border” backfires

We can do better to solve problems

LATEST READING

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s