02 April, 2006

Why the immigration bill sucks monkeys

Well the Queen of Randomness has heard much about the immigration debate and she's concluded that it sucks. The Queen is also concerned that so many progressives are supporting it. It is not racist to want to protect borders, although racism is the reason why so many wingnuts are supporting draconian crackdowns on illegals. Allowing guest worker visas and an expanded residency program for illegals is racist in itself - it will create a permanent underclass of mostly Hispanic immigrants who will work at the lowest paying jobs, have the worst access to education, be prone to exploitation from big business and have the worst odds of achieving the ever-elusive American dream.

America is already falling behind in domestic spending to improve its infrastructure, we give tax cuts while cutting aid to schools, student loans, and assistance to the neediest of our people. As a result, the rich are getting richer while the middle class is eroding, our educational standards are falling to the point where the origins of life are so difficult for people to grasp that they've given up and decided to instead say that anything difficult must have been created by some old dude sitting in the clouds. Other states are outpacing us in science, technology, mathematics, etc. We are destroying a developed state to make it into a developing one. Schools and hospitals are being built with our tax dollars in Iraq, yet they're not being built domestically. With this lag in development, how can we justify opening our borders to millions of persons without creating programs to make sure that they are productive and contribute to a developing economy.

If we want to be humane and progressive, we should instead push for greater international aid. Aid that isn't tied to corporate interests but that is interested in helping countries become developed and productive. If we want less illegal immigrants, we should give aid to Mexico and other states to build their infrastructure, to become strong so that their best political solution isn't to encourage their citizens to leave their state. Allowing greater access to immigration to those that come over illegally only reinforces states like Mexico which see immigration as a way to solve their problems, it only reinforces the gap between the rich and the poor and further institutionalises the corporate powers to the point where they become almost like feudal warlords.

Furthermore, allowing illegal immigrants greater access to the immigration process will have an impact on our already shrinking assistance to refugees. Will a person from Sudan who is fleeing the genocide there be denied a visa because it's been given to support Walmart's low wage policies? Will a woman fleeing the oppression of fundamentalists in the Middle East be denied refugee status because King George needs to gain points with voters?

Finally, the best reason to oppose King George's immigration reform is that King George has proposed it and anything that King George supports has proven to be an unqualified disaster. King George never acts without self-interest, he never acts with pure intentions and therefore there must be scrutiny to his proposals. The proposed reforms will not help Hispanics, they will not help the United States be a better state, they will further send our country into political and economic ruin while exploiting cheap foreign labour. What then? Will we start to illegally immigrate to countries that actually care about the survival of the state over short-term political points?

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