TheAgitator.com
Bless Their Hearts
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008The more removed he is from his time in office, the more I like Dick Armey.
15 Responses to “Bless Their Hearts”
Leave a Reply
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs 2.5 License.
VP Armey? Or will that make the GOP ticket too geographically unbalanced?
chsw
[...] (HT: The Agitator) [...]
Well put by Armey…great job of making a pro-immigration case that actually plays to empathy as well as economics.
Well said – we need more of this.
That was a rational and truly defining statement from a guy unencumbered by the Republican apparatus. I think he is representative of a lot of the GOP, sans the religious right obviously.
I see these people taking care of their babies and my heart goes out to them. I work in a public hospital. I don’t blame them for getting free healthcare, we’re the dumbasses giving it away. I don’t blame them for crossing an unguarded border. I’d do worse if it meant doing for my kids.
Armey was pro-immigration when he was in office, but back then the only policy issues on the table were H1B visas and INS reform. Look back on his last years in Congress and you’ll find lots of things to like: no earmarks, he was the only politician who achieved a roll back of parts of the patriot act (look up “operation tips”), and he left office just as poor as when he started.
(begin sarcasm) Those crooks and robbers just want to feed their babies. If it’s three in the morning and they see a house with a lock on the door, but hte window is open, they’re just going to climb through and take rob you blind to send it home. Bless Their hearts. (send sarcasm)
I like Armey, but c’mon. The examle didn’t fit.
So coming to America to work long hours at hard labor for low wages in voluntarily agreement with an employer is akin to breaking into someone’s house and stealing all their stuff? Really?
How much of your well-being have you lost to illegal immigrants? I live in a neighborhood full of them, mostly from El Salvador. And frankly, I find them pretty inspiring. They work hard. They’re friendly and polite. They’re family-oriented. And they put up with a lot of shit from ignorant people who don’t make them feel welcome.
Armey nails it. Too bad he’s not in the GOP leadership anymore.
My wife has a green card application pending and it has been nothing short of a clusterf*ck every step of the way. We thought we had applied in time to have a temporary work permit kick in before her student visa expired (120 days, based on USCIS’s own estimates it should have taken no more than 90) and we are now a month and counting past that time without so much as an explanation for the holdup. When we finally got someone on the phone the best they could do is refer the case up the chain and tell us to wait another 30-45 days for an answer.
So my wife, an educated (PhD) native English speaker (Canadian) married to an American for >2 years and legally in the country for 7, having paid the ~$1300 in various fees to do the application for permanent residency, is currently stuck in a legal void where she cannot legally work and cannot leave the country, and with no reasonable expectation of when this will be resolved.
Fortunately I make enough to cover us both (though not indefinitely.)
This is what *legal* immigrants go through. I cannot even fathom what it must be like to try to navigate this process as someone with limited education, means, and command of English, and with a family in tow.
In that situation, I’m pretty sure I’d jump the line, too.
The religious right seems to be split over this one. My church (where the official belief is that the earth was created 6000 years ago and drinking alcohol is sinful) has a pro-immigrant stance from the pulpit. I’ve noticed that the far-right tends to be vehemently against immigration, particularly the illegal kind, and Dick Armey actually mentions that at the end of his speech above (the “unsettling” comment). Far-right ideology is incompatible with Christianity. Period.
B has learned first hand that bureaucracies make terrible service providers. The fact that it is more difficult than it should be to get a visa is no excuse to come here illegally.
Actually privatizing every service provided by the government should be our goal. The government should only provide oversight of the service organizations, keeping civil service out.
Radley, no matter how you would like it, we can not have open borders for any immigrant that wants to come to the US. We need to limit the flow of immigration to prevent our infrastructure and economy from being overwhelmed. Maybe the analogy to stealing is a little extreme, but its not that far off base.
Residency in this country, the right to live here, is something of value that is possessed collectively by the citizens of this country. When someone chooses to come here illegally they steal this right, imposing themselves upon us without our approval.
Maybe a better analogy would be a vagrant squatting on your property. He only takes a little space you don’t happen to be using, but he makes messes you have to cleanup and maybe causes some occasional damage. Is this squatter stealing from you ? Damn right he is.
So implying that illegal immigrants aren’t taking anything of value that they shouldn’t be, isn’t true either.
Also, I don’t bye the ‘for the children’ line of crap. Everyone coming to this country is coming here to make their own life better. I don’t have any sympathy for someone just because they made a hard life for the children they chose to bring into this world.
AS–Your analogy really only holds if the property in question is unimaginably huge and you already share it with 290 million other people.
And if the right to residency is something that we “collectively possess” (whatever that means), and its value to us as individuals is diminished the more people that claim it (which seems to be what you are implying) then why not tax Americans for every child they produce? Surely a newborn is a bigger strain on the economy and social infrastructure (at least for the first 18 years or so) than a grown man or woman that arrives ready to work, consume, and pay taxes.
Can you give *one* concrete example of how immigrants–specifically–are diminishing your quality of life?
B,
If you concede the population of illegal immigrants is on the order of 20 million, the analogy is close enough to be accurate. The absolute size of the property and total number of people are not relevant to the analogy. The fact that illegal immigration doesn’t directly effect everyone in the country is not a valid argument.
First of all, we are talking about illegal immigrants. Legal controlled immigration is not an issue.
The vast majority of illegal immigrants don’t even have a high school education, therefore they are mostly unskilled or semiskilled workers. Minimum wage or bottom of the wage scale, so most probably won’t pay any income tax. Granted they still pay sales tax, but the point is, as a group they’re already not pulling their weight when it comes to government services or taxes.
They contain more than the average number of criminals. Even if you exclude illegal immigration and any ancillary crimes. So they contribute to an increase in the crime rate.
In some parts of the country, as in California where I used to live, they have caused an uncontrolled spike in the population that some of the local cities have not been able to deal with. This causes a decreased quality of life in these areas. The excess population strains public services such as county hospitals in these areas causing the quality of service to decline. The already deplorable schools get even worse since these schools have a hard time keeping up with the student overload and the excessive amount of students with English as a second language. The low wage jobs are flooded with applicants, good for employers, not so good for legal residence who are looking for such jobs. Illegal immigrants are more willing to take a lower wage due to their situation therefore, along with their numbers, they put downward pressure on the semiskilled labor wage.
All of the problems stem from an unnatural and uncontrolled increase in the population of unskilled or semiskilled workers and their families.
The influx of illegal immigrants directly and significantly effected overpopulation in Southern California. This in turn was a major factor in increased pricing of houses and rental property due to a housing shortage caused by overpopulation. You might say the market will build more houses. Not feasible, this area is completely built out for miles. Relatively few new housing projects occur within 30 miles of the Valley where I worked, and you have to go 60 miles to see something significant.
Since I don’t live with an extended family, I had to move 60 miles from where I worked to find housing that I could afford. This I blame on the overpopulation caused by illegal immigration. So yes I feel my quality of life was effected by illegal immigrants.
Are these examples concrete enough for you? Not all of them effected me directly, but a few did.
Wow. Never thought I’d applaud Dick Armey. Nicely done. Can we have some more GOPers like that please?