Time to Stop Being Stupid About Immigration

It is at the door that we invite our friends to come in and our enemies to stay out.

 

We're watching a tragedy taking place in Afghanistan, a place where we have shed American blood for 20 years. People I love have died over there in what this administration threatens to make meaningless the cause they gave their lives for. Just a bad, the nation and the people we tried to help are being abandoned by this Administration and left to be tortured and murdered by the Taliban. Sadly we here mostly two responses among the chattering classes. (1) Profound silence and more than a little patting themselves on the back.What they're so proud of, I can't figure out. (2) Let 'em die, we should never have been there in the first place, an attitude I find utterly incomprehensible.

This confirms my belief that the devil has agents on both sides of the political debate and has had for some time. That a conservative Christian could even think that, because Biden is a senile old communist, we should just say tough luck to the translators, suppliers, teachers, families, kids and everyone who relied on us during the conflict and let the Taliban conduct a massive general slaughter just like the Communists in Vietnam did. The media and the left didn't say much about the Vietnamese Communists murdering 2 million people that cooperated with the US during the Vietnam war. And Republicans sat back and barely made a peep themselves, other than to take in a ton of refugees that managed to escape by boat or by bribing corrupt American officials.

American soldiers answer the call to fight evil - again!

Disappointingly, many of my more hard core conservative friends say, well, it's not our worry. We shouldn't have been there in the first place. Or because government officials "did it wrong", we should just get out because it wasn't done right. As if that will somehow fix things? Do you people have some kind of time machine where you can go back and correct the mistakes our Democrat friends made and somehow that will bring back the millions of dead. Germans were slaughtering Jews in 1941. Japanese were slaughtering Chinese in 1941. Were we supposed to stand by and let evil march roughshod over the world. We did the right thing then. We should do it now. If we want to abandon Afghanistan, we should at least offer a way out for those there who believed in us.

I'm kind of a fix what you can kind of guy. Sure Biden made mistakes in how he managed the pullout, especially in abandoning the country to the Taliban in the middle of their fighting season and by telling them when, where, and how we would pull out. Did our new progressive overlords forget the people who trusted us in Afghanistan - some kind of a big oops? No. I just think they don't give a damn about anyone but themselves. Progressives have this stunning ability to ignore their own inhumanity to people who trusted us. They do not learn from history. Cause and effect mystifies them. If the ideology doesn't work, it's just because someone else did it wrong. Then they go back to focus instead on navel gazing and power accumulation. It's an incredibly myopic way to look at the world. My thought is to shame them. Throw their own words back in their face. Make them face their duplicitous double standard.

Sadly, some on the supposedly conservative "Christian" side have the same ability to ignore the consequences of what we propose to do and focus instead on counting coup against the evil liberals.

It's like the border crisis. The left wants to open the borders, let the tired, the poor and huddled masses (along with the drug mules, terrorists and sex traffickers) come across unimpeded in hopes of manipulating them to one day vote Democrat. That's why they object to voter ID and election fraud prevention laws. On the other side, we get so focused on keeping out the potential Democrat voters and job-stealers (along with the drug mules, terrorists and sex traffickers) that we want to throw them all back into the horrific places they come from. 

 

Irish and Chinese railroad workers were mistreated by myopic Americans
who were fearful that immigrants would take jobs that they really didn't want.
That said, they got the job done anyway, despite the abuse.

We, conservatives, too often forget what immigration waves have done for this country in the past. Every single American's ancestors came here from somewhere else. Immigration, for however hard you argue for your opinion, is not a black or white issue. Let 'em all in or throw them all out? Incredibly, there's not much in the way of solutions offered that are not all one or the other. Me, I think we should both slam the borders shut AND open the border's doors to lots of legal immigration.

 

What I think we should do is set up English classes and American citizenship classes in embassies all over Central and South America to prepare people to come to America. We lock the border down tight to keep out the ne'er do wells. Then, we create a generous guest worker program and welcome in workers willing to learn English and about American history, culture and law. We sign them up to pay taxes, to complete the citizenship process and help them learn things like money management (banks are thrilled to teach classes in that kind of thing). We protect these refugee workers through the department of Labor and OSHA so there is no profit for corporations, agri-business, crooked politicians and others to abuse these laborers by sticking them in colonias without water, electricity and sewer services and paying them a pittance in cash and food stamps to keep them in virtual slavery.

Make refugees legal and we'll get millions of hard-working people who hate communism and corrupt government; family folk who value life, love free markets and will work very hard to establish businesses. Most will more nearly embrace Republican values than otherwise. And a rising tide, after all, does indeed lift all boats. They will build homes and buy homes. They will raise and process food and buy food. They will make things and buy things we make. They will provide services and buy services. The economy and the job market is not a zero sum game, though some of my conservative friends seem to forget that.

The reason the left opposes this type of program and votes down guest worker programs every time they come up, is that such people with this value set don't generally vote Democrat. Just check out the Cuban American community in Florida and see how they vote - solidly for Trump last time despite the election fraud. Biden is catching and sending back Cubans escaping from Cuba right now. They aren't reliably going to vote Democrat. He'd rather have the poor and ignorant and unprotected who are forced to work terrible jobs for slave wages who can be intimidated by ICE if they get rambunctious or don't vote the right way. And besides, by sending back Cuban refugees he can punish the Cuban American immigrants already here for voting for Trump.

On the far right we also have our share of idiots who want to build a wall completely around the US without any doors in it at all and try to preserve everything like it is. That's stupid. An economy that doesn't grow, a nation that fails to produce new workers soon begins to fail. European population numbers are shrinking and Euro-business is pulling workers from the Middle East to fill in the dwindling pool of workers. It's a perfect example of what happens when you let your population dwindle without considering who you want to invite to come to fill in the worker shortage. Multi-ethnic cultures can work very well if the cultures share similar values.

 

I used to go to the North Texas Irish Festival
every year. I once performed there during my
abortive career as a folk singer.

I grew up in Texas where our Hispanic community is an economic powerhouse - at least those who came here legally or grew up in Texas. Our food is Tex-Mex. Many of us speak Tex-Mex or are bilingual. We share a common history. Did you know there were Latinos who fought and died at the Alamo and marched with Sam Houston. I know some of their descendants. It was a mixed race mulatto girl Texican who distracted Santa Anna while Houston was busy attacking his Army. They wrote a song about her - The Yellow Rose of Texas. Lots of Texas counties are named for Hispanic heroes of the Texas revolt. In Texas we have every sort of ethnic festival you can imagine. We have Hispanic celebrations like Cinco de Mayo. Juneteenth started in Texas. We have Polish, Czech, German, Celtic, African, Vietnamese, Irish, Native American and festivals celebrating every sort of fruit and vegetable you can imagine. We have rodeos, tractor pulls and rattlesnake roundups. We can live together peaceably if the ideologues will just let us.

By confusing border control with border closing, we're all wasting an opportunity to import hundreds of thousands of legal immigrant free-market capitalist, hard-working, pro-life, pro-family Christians. But don't get me wrong, though.Let's neither open the floodgates, nor dam the river up completely. Let's instead respond intelligently to the pressure from Latin America that is driving out their best people. We always get the good ones in these pressured migrations if we're careful. We also get some of the bad ones if we don't watch what we're doing, but with today's criminal databases, it's a lot more likely we'll catch the rotten apples. Asians and Irish immigrants built the railways. Greeks and Italians built wonderful communities and businesses. We just should have done a better job of screening out the mafiosos, though. Scandinavians and Poles built vast farms and ranches, meat-packing and food processing industries. The Scots brought a wave of engineers, metal-working industries, financial businesses and banking. The French sent waves of Huguenot shop-keepers and merchants. British refugees brought us sailors, and traders, farmers and lawyers. German refugees brought craftsmen and manufacturing skills.The west coast has vibrant Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Samoan, Ukrainian, and Russian communities. 

 

The Cinco de Mayo parade in Alpine, Texas. Now Cinco de Mayo festivals
serve up some amazing food. Don't wanna miss 'em if there's one you can get to.

A lady from Ukraine I met up here in Washington complained to me that she escaped the Soviet Union to get away from communism. She loves this country and its amazing freedoms. "Why are you fools trying so hard to become communist?" she asked, clearly frustrated with the progressive obtuseness of our Washington state government. But my friend is an example of the American phenomenon of attracting people who are as Everett Dirksen once said, "Yearning to be free." And they're hard-working to boot. We need such people. Heaven knows, we American parents have raised too many of the other sort to maintain a free and healthy economy.

Why are we not taking advantage of the opportunity to bleed off the best of Latin America and make Americans of them? I know what they'll do. They'll give the economy a kick in the pants. Many will build and operate their own America-based businesses with factories and agri-business down in Central and South America and help bring prosperity back to those blighted nations from which they came (and everyone can make a little money in trade at the same time). That's the beauty of capitalism. You let it run and everyone benefits, especially if you enforce your trade laws and don't elect politicians who will take bribes and protect just the big corporations the way a certain party has always done while accusing Republicans of what they themselves do. If we could hold power for long enough to bring in people who share conservative Christian values and teach them how much we are like each other, red states would become more powerful and Democrats would be extinct in no time.

The trouble is, Satan works both sides of the aisle and makes left wing and right wing extremists blind, stubborn and stupid. Jesus is going to have to come soon and snatch up the good folks from all over the world, scrub this planet clean and then set us all back down on the Earth made new and stand back and let humans do what humans were created to do - tend the garden, build, plant and tend to our homes and help each our neighbors. What a wonderful world that will be!

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something right for a change while we're here though.

© by Tom King