Blast From the Past

Back when I lived in places other than South Bend, one of my favorite blogs was GreenInk. For reasons I do not know, the blog went silent in October 2008 and nothing has been posted there since. It's a shame because the fellow who authored this blog was very insightful and, often, quite humorous.

One of my favorite posts, "Easy immigration reform — legalize it" is shown below in its entirety. Hopefully, GreenInk will one day rise again!

The Mexican Consulate’s road show rolled through Eugene over the weekend, handing out the controversial matricula consular cards to a few dozen people who are, in all likelihood, illegal immigrants. People without green cards or other legal papers use the matricula to get a drivers license and open bank accounts.

Big deal.

Predictably, a handful of protesters were on hand as well. You can see their comments and pictures from the event by going to orblogs.com and surfing through the usual suspects — Vonski, Gullyborg, etc.

(I at least give the locals credit for not acting like bigots, but sticking to their message about illegal immigration being, well, illegal, which is a fine argument that does absolutely nothing to address the real issues.)

Politicians love this sort of event, of course, because they can play to their closet-racist base while proclaiming they just want to uphold the law. Well, they should change the law!

Make it legal to enter this country. End the dangerous desert crossings, the lucrative human trafficking trade and the stupid Minuteman vigilante border patrol. End the INS sweeps and the paperwork hassles for employers. Stop making people afraid to pay their taxes or send their kids to school. Legalize immigration and let workers demand good pay and benefits instead of taking whatever they can get, afraid to assert their rights to fair wages and fair treatments.

Morally, putting limits on immigration is wrong. Who gave anyone the right to say where someone else can and cannot live? What right do Americans, whose ancestors pillaged, plundered, murdered and stole their way across the continent, have to draw lines on the map and say, “this is ours, now go home”? What right does ANY government have to control people in this way?

When did America become a big country club, where we go out of our way to tell everyone how great we are and then tell them they can’t get in without a membership? Screw that. I say, if someone wants to come here, let them. Actually, “let” is the wrong word, because nobody has an inherent right to tell anyone else where they can go.

“But they are breaking the law,” people keep saying to me. Well, the law is wrong and deserves to be broken. People need to get over the idea that just because something is illegal, it’s morally wrong. No it’s not. There were a lot of perfectly legitimate laws passed in Nazi Germany back in the 1930s that no sane person would argue should have been obeyed.

If a law is clearly unjust — if it seeks to impoverish, discriminate or otherwise harm people — it should be ignored until it is repealed.

Think about it this way. You live in a small town. Most of the jobs are in a single large factory. It burns to the ground and the company decides not to rebuild. You have a family to support, so you drive to the city up the road to find work. But when you arrive, there are cops at the entrance to the city who refuse you entry because you don’t already live there. It seems the city council passed the law shortly after the factory in your town was burned.

What would you do? Go home?

The answer is simple. It’s called freedom, something Americans used to value above all else.