At this dangerous point for our republic, I am certainly not going to attack
Marco Rubio, a
senator I admire as much as anybody, but I still want to point out that for a party (the Democrats) whose only "arguments" include demonizing conservatives and covering them with ad hominems (reactionary, hateful, racist, etc, etc, etc), Republicans need to go Gingrich-style and punch back —
twice as hard, as Instapundit would say.
Indeed,
the Florida senator is going too soft on the Democrats when he talks about
the reality that there are 11 million human beings in this country today that are undocumented. That's not something that anybody is happy about, that is not something that anybody wanted to see happen. But it is what has happened (1:24)
On the contrary: Having poor illegals, along with an unsurmountable voter base, is
exactly what
key members of the far left are happy about and
exactly what they have been wanting for decades.
Now Marco Rubio may know this, and may only be playing for a Spanish audience (bravo on repeating everything en Español), but just for the record, I want to point out that even the fact of calling illegal aliens "undocumented workers" is turning them into poor honest well-meaning defenseless victims and thus falling into the Democrat (the victimitis party's) playbook.
The Democrats win by being allowed to set the very premises.
The way for the Republicans to start winning is to start challenging those premises — when (and if) they are wrong, misleading, and, of course, deliberate deceptions.
As
I have written before,
it so happens that every illegal alien in the United States is documented; every illegal alien in the United States does have papers.
Mexican papers.
(Well, sometimes, they have Honduran papers, or Guatemalan papers, or Belizean papers, or Filipino papers, or some other papers, but let's keep using Mexico as an illustrative example…)
If
a foreigner, say an American, were to head to Mexico, for however short
(a vacation) or however long a period (to work there) — and whether he
entered the country legally or not (!) — he still, guess what, has
papers. He has his American papers! Offhand, he has his driver's
license, various IDs, and/or his passport…
True, a number of the Mexican and Central American illegals, many of
them paupers, may not physically have papers in their pockets to
produce, as is the case with many of their respective countrymen, but
still, offhand, the "undocumented" immigrants retain as many (or as few) papers, and rights, as any other citizen of their own country before they emigrated, legally or otherwise.
Everybody has the right to papers, but everybody does not have the right to American papers!
What
is there to be outraged about here? The equivalent is true for
Americans, and for other Westerners — for instance the Yanqui Gringo
mentioned above, who does not have the right (or an automatic right) to Mexican
papers. Just as I, a foreigner living in Paris, do not have right —
certainly, not an automatic right — to French papers and do not have the
right to vote in French elections (it is not a right I would want — no
offense intended — and I would never castigate the French for failing to
give it to me or to any other foreigner)…
If I had the
time, we could enter a discussion regarding the difference between
natural rights (which every individual on Earth has) and civic rights
(or citizen rights, which depend on the country you are — legally —
living in, whatever part of the globe that country is located in), but I
don't, so I will just suggest you read the books of Harry Jaffa…
To return to Mexico, nothing in Mexican law presupposes that our
American expatriate be given, say, a job (or that he have the freedom to
choose any job he wants) in Mexico or that, say, he vote in Mexican
elections. Indeed, reports on Mexico's own problem with illegal aliens (Central Americans that cross over that
nation's Southern border) point out to quite a few problems in that
country (the one allegedly martyred by white American racists), far
worse than anything in the United States, with Amnesty International calling "the abuse of migrants in Mexico a major human rights crisis".
Indeed, as JammieWearingFool puts it (gracias por el Professor Reynolds),
No wonder they're all moving to the Nazi-like, fascistic, police-state of Arizona.
Now, if any Mexicans, say the citizens of the estado de
Chihuahua, want American papers, there is a simple solution: I suggest
that they ask that the state be annexed by the United States. (Don't be
so quick to issue a snort. I'm sure quite a few Mexicans would be more
than willing to see that happen…)
Update: Referring to el Presidente de México, Rich Galen points out the double standards:
Felipe
Calderón is whining about the way we are treating immigrants in the
U.S. because they may be asked to produce documents proving they are
here legally, while immigrants in his very own country are being
kidnapped, robbed, raped, and murdered by the tens of thousands.
Update: Don Miguel adds as follows:
How
about this: my father was born and grew up in Mexico. About 10 to 15
years ago Mexico passed a law allowing children of expatriates born in
other countries to apply for citizenship. I was interested in this
because it would then allow me to buy beachfront property in Mexico
(foreigners cannot directly buy property within a few km of the beach or
border legally). So I went to the closest consulate with my father's
birth certificate and they told me basically to get lost since my
father was considered by them to be a "gringo." Regardless of what the law said I wasn’t the “right” type of person for them. So even though I technically met the requirements of the law, there’s no way they would process my application.
That comment leads Pat Patterson to write:
I
had heard some stories like the one Don Miguel related and to be
honest thought they were either old wive's tales or simple
misunderstandings.
Until one of my neighbors thought
it would be a good idea for his children to have dual citizenship but
was turned away at the consulate in Santa Ana for 'technical reasons'
even though he had only recently become an American citizen. His delay
oddly enough was because he had been an officer in the Mexican Air
Force and the investigation took longer because the Mexican government
wouldn't release his service record for years. It seems that the rule
of thumb is that college educated American citizens of Mexican origin
will either not be approved or delayed while working class Americans of
Mexican origin will be approved asap.
Update: Mark Steyn:
…the
coastal frothers denouncing Arizona as the Third Reich or, at best,
apartheid South Africa, seem entirely relaxed about the ludicrous and
embarrassing sight [in Quincy, Illinois,] of peaceful protesters being
menaced by camp storm troopers from either a dinner-theater space opera
or uniforms night at Mr. Newsom's re-election campaign.
Update: Ann Coulter:
The New York Times'
Linda Greenhouse recently compared the Arizona law to Hitler's
policies toward the Jews. You remember how Jews were constantly
sneaking across the border into Nazi Germany?
