Illegal Immigrants and Political Correctness

One of my favorite daily sites is Tongue Tied. This is a blog that posts pretty much daily, pointing up the absurdities caused by too much political correctness all over the world.

Now don't get me wrong: I believe in manners, civility and politeness. It's how we keep from killing each other over simple attitude differences when dealing with strangers. But anything PC begins to rattle my cage just because I want people to say what they think. If I get my feelings hurt, well, it won't kill me. It's an opportunity to reevaluate my values and my (quite possibly overinflated) ego.

So naturally I reacted egocentrically to this item. Look, I am the granddaughter of immigrants. Legal, legit immigrants. Working people. And I have played and worked with immigrants, including illegal ones. They have my sympathy when they come here to better themselves. But they are still illegal. My good friend E is an immigration lawyer in NYC, who spends her life working to legalize illegal immigrants. They are legion, and by and large, they are all able to find work and do what's necessary to become legal, and eventually even US citizens. God bless them and love them and help them in their endeavors. But what about the ones who come up to birth their kids here and collect benefits? Come on, this is just wrong: savvy, conniving and wrong.

Listen. We have had family members collecting benefits. But we have earned those benefits to get us past difficult times. Prepaid by ourselves, in other words. And we may need them again some day. So I don't want our benefits piddled away on people who came here deliberately and specifically to collect them. (By the way, that goes for those people coming here to NYS specifically to collect disability and other benefits that may be harder to collect in their own state.)

So it doesn't break my heart if some politically incorrect humor is targeted to them. It's the very least we should do: we should pack them up and ship them back. And that's what the INS does. We shouldn't hinder them; we should help them. And humor biased against illegal immigrants does just that. It's vulgar, and it's impolite, but aliens who break our laws are not entitled to our usual civil liberties.

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Little Pond