As anyone who has ever noticed my Signature knows, I am a fervent supporter of enforcing and even ramping up existing Immigration Laws and closing loopholes that entice&solicit foreign nationals to break those laws.
And because I and millions of other American Citizens believe this to be a major US problem, we are accused of being xenophobes and even racists based on nothing but a political position.
I'm well aware that the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants are Central and South American Latinos but why does the left insist on believing that race is the basis of our position?
I assure you that for the great majority of us, this position is rooted in nothing more than support for the law of the land and the US Constitution regardless of the nationality or skin color of the offenders.
Although; I'm sure there are those among us who are indeed motivated by racism, xenophobia and just plain ole hate but I also know that this group is a tiny insignificant minority in 21st Century America.
So why can't the liberal and lefty community just accept this reality and stop with the incessant accusations of "racist" and "xenophobe" and realize that our positions on this issue are simply at odds? :blink: ?
Because it's frequently not that simple. Hard-line right anti-immigration policy often shows an ignorance of immigration reality, and also, well, straight-up racism. It just does. :shrug:
I mean, explain to me why else my legal, permanent resident Argentinian friend was basically chased out of a shooting range because the white people there didn't like "the Mexican" shooting with them? Explain to me why all of those people seem to believe Latinos are just a bunch of violent psychos, when the reality is that they're actually less crime-prone than white people are?
And on the ignorance issue, look... I'm an immigrant, ok? More specifically, I'm an immigrant living in a country that is also currently going through an anti-immigrant sentiment.
I have to keep myself constantly updated -- as in every couple weeks -- to keep myself legal, because **** is constantly changing. Constantly. It's so much work that some months, it would qualify as a full-time job. Fortunately I am educated enough and wealthy enough that I can afford to be constantly re-adjusting my status to conform to the ever-changing immigration landscape, and the total whimsy of whomever I'm dealing with that day (anyone who's an immigrant knows that there's the letter of the law, and then there's the asshole at the embassy that you just happen to be dealing with on any given day, and often times the two have nothing to do with each other).
It is entirely possible to not even know whether you're legal or not, it gets so insane. I actually don't know what my exact status is at the moment, and I will probably need to hire a lawyer to figure it out for me. I know I'm legal, but with how much everything's changed even since 2014, I don't know what category of settlement I fall into, which I need to figure out in order to do my PR paperwork, and nothing in the government literature is giving me a straight answer.
I am a highly educated and privileged person with an extensive background in research, who is also a native speaker of the language of the country I immigrated to, and even I haven't been able to figure out what the **** my status is right now. A person with half my education who's still learning English doesn't have a ****ing chance. That's how crazy being an immigrant is. Ok?
The reality is that being an immigrant is insanely difficult, and also subjects you to a lot of constant abuse. The reality is that it's so confusing that you might not even know what your status is sometimes. The reality is that, especially in America, a lot of people think they're legal who aren't if they were immigrated as young children. The reality is, it's just a lot more complicated than "those evil Mexicans raping everyone and selling all the drugs." Most immigrants, both legal and not, are trying their best to navigate a system that is intentionally trying to kick them out, even if they have done their best to follow the law, as the vast majority of them do.