On a more serious note, illegal immigrants (and some legal immigrants) abandoned their jobs yesterday to go protest. Their goal: to bring the US economy to a screeching halt. Did it work? Heck no. Why? Because America will not be cowed by a group that is protesting illegally, and who should not even be in this country.
The main point here is immigration law. These protestors are out their spouting their "unless you're an Indian, you're an immigrant" nonsense. Guess what? I'm not an immigrant. I was born here to people who were born here who were born to people who were born here who were born to people who were born here...and on and on. My family has been in America for several generations. And guess what? The pilgrims on the Mayflower weren't illegal immigrants...because there was no immigration law. In fact, America as an established nation had no immigration law for quite some time, until the nation's leaders realized that if they didn't regulate immigration, we were going to have a problem. They realized that we need not only to know just who is coming into our country, but to turn some people away in the interests of the betterment of America. That's how the system works. Some people get in, but we can't take everyone. This is the danger of illegal immigration: we have no idea just who is coming into our nation. We don't know if they have a criminal history. We don't know if they're smuggling drugs in. We don't know if they're carrying some communicable disease. We have no way of knowing whether they're looking for work or looking for an opportunity to carry out a terrorist attack on the United States. This is why it's so essential that we close our border. This is why we have an immigration process. The fact that immigration to America was unrestricted, unmonitored, and unregulated at one point does not, by extension, mean that it's okay to ignore the laws that are in place now, just because you feel like it.
If Arizona wasn't a desert, I would want to live there. Why? Because their legislators are actually making sense. While the California State Assembly voted (along party lines - it's a liberal-dominated Assembly) to officially endorse the May 1 protest, Arizona lawmakers are talking about deploying the National Guard along their border to curb illegal immigration. I think this is a great idea. We already know that border enforcement works - every place along the border that has been monitored by the Minutemen has seen a reduction in illegal immigration. Does this mean that the Minutemen have been effective? Not necessarily, because they cannot patrol the entire border (and if they did, somebody would probably get shot by a drug trafficker). The illegal immigrants go around to avoid them. This is why it is so essential that if we fence in the border, we fence in the entire border - if we fence in the high-trafficked areas, then the traffic will move to where there is no fence.
The main problem is that people define their behavior as legal because they believe it should be legal...does that mean we should let bank robbers off the hook because they believe their behavior should be legal? What about rapists? What about child molestors? Where does this disregard for the law stop?
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