Why Are Immigration Laws the Only Ones They Won’t Enforce?by
Vin Suprynowicz I’ve been thinking about Don Imus. The irreverent New York radio talker was fired last month for saying, in the course of some casual on-air banter, that Rutgers University’s winning women’s basketball team included some "nappy-headed ho’s." Did this overgrown teen-ager (hold your tears; Imus and rival Howard Stern have made millions channeling our inner potty jokes) really believe those women athletes were whores? Of course not. Imus, now past 65, was trying to stay hip by imitating the jive talk that our black "entertainers" toss about with abandon, the same way David Letterman graces his monologues with phrases like "Let me axe you a question" – though Letterman is suave enough to get away with it. Thus, Imus was fired not for what he said, but for saying it while white. If that’s too politically incorrect for you, best stop reading now, because this week and next I hope to weigh in with a warning about the dangers of Political Correctness, and in order to discuss them I’m going to have to violate some of the strictures of this pathetic brand of self-censorship. One self-anointed "Hispanic leader" attending an editorial board meeting here at the newspaper actually covered his ears and told us "I will not listen to these words" when I kept referring to illegal aliens as illegal aliens. The goal, of course, is to brand us as boorish, insensitive, tone-deaf racists if we use anything but this months’ preferred euphemism. If I’m up-to-date, that would now be "undocumented guest worker" – a phrase meant to imply these millions of law-breaking trespassers have merely neglected to stop by the nearest federal Guest Worker Services bureau to pick up their "instant citizenship" and voter registration cards, available merely by paying a bribe which our socialist politicians (fortunately, the socialists now dominate only two of America’s major parties) euphemistically call a "fine." This is where PC doublespeak really helps these double-talk artists, because the practice of openly bribing our elected officials is so relatively new here that these liars and thieves can rely on the species boobus voteris Americanus to buy this booshwah while knowing the targeted Third World invaders will immediately identify it as what it is: a Latin-style bribe for our entire Immigration bureaucracy to look the other way. If any of that sounds facetious, it’s not meant to. Democratic politicians, particularly, see this as the huge untapped voting bloc that will put them over the top, likely to embrace a platform tricked up in nice euphemisms but which really means – wink, nudge – "We’ll tax the hell out of these morons who play by the rules and file their 1040s every spring, in order to give you guys free medical care and 19 years of free child care (complete with free meals) in our Youth Homogeneity Camps, free for all kids aged 4 to 22, cradle to grave, baby." No, I’m not making that up. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson stopped by here April 30 to tell us he opposes private-school vouchers because "They’d undermine the public schools, everyone would go to the, uh ..." (sentence never finished.) Richardson, who I must say appeared a bit jet-lagged, also noted "All-day kindergarten is important; pre-school is important, you’ve got to get the kids before they’re four." His solution to the current invasion by Spanish-speaking peoples with no apparent interest in real assimilation, no visible interest in playing by the rules? Mr. Richardson parroted every other mainstream politician of our time, asserting "You can’t deport ’em all; how are you going to do it?" This is an interesting position, which does appeal to my Libertarian side. If we got rid of all the welfare programs, I would indeed favor open immigration. I pretty much favor abandoning all unenforceable laws. What strikes me odd is that these politicians only seem to want to abandon this ONE (supposedly) unenforceable law. Drive down any street in any good-sized American town traveling at precisely the posted speed limit. Unless there’s a black-and-white in sight, traffic will be zooming past you on both sides. So why don’t these same politicians say, "What are you going to do, arrest them all? The battle is lost. Let’s pull down all the signs with numbers on them and just put up signs that say ‘Please choose a reasonable speed – reckless driving law still in force’"? I’m serious. I favor that. You’re a bigger danger driving the artificially low posted speed limit and causing other traffic to swerve around you than traveling 8 to 15 mph faster with the rest of the traffic. The reckless driving and "too fast for conditions" statutes would stay on the books; cops freed up from collecting revenues with ambush speed traps might actually have time to enforce them against the racers and the weavers. What about the war on drugs? Why don’t these same politicians say, "It’s obviously a lost cause. What are you going to do, round up every pot smoker? How many more prisons you gonna build?" I proposed that to Gov. Richardson, Monday. He replied "I’m not in favor of decriminalizing marijuana. I’m in favor of sentencing enhancements." They continue to pester us with HUNDREDS of unenforceable laws. So why is this the one law they won’t even try to enforce? If they brought all the nation’s immigration cops to Las Vegas tomorrow and started raiding hotels, they could have thousands of seasick illegal maids dumped on the beach in Acapulco next week. The river of trespassers would slow and – when they saw the celery fields of California getting the same treatment next week – might actually reverse. Eisenhower did it a year after taking office in 1953, with far fewer men than the Border Patrol has today. It was called "Operation Wetback," and it worked. By September of 1954 a force of about 700 feds had taken 80,000 illegals into custody in Texas alone – with the result that the INS estimated an additional 500,000–700,000 illegals had fled Texas voluntarily. Arrest and deport the first 10 or 15 percent; the rest get wise pretty quick. No, the real fear here is that if they rounded up and deported and otherwise drove away all the illegal Mexicans and Guatemalans today, "who would make the beds in the hotels?" The best answer is: "The children of the people who used to do it, who are mostly currently on the government dole." Cut off "Aid to Children with Dependent Families" – or whatever this year’s euphemism is – and most unwed mothers would marry their babies’ daddies in short order, out of sheer economic necessity. Why continue this disincentive to forming permanent families, long known to be the best route out of poverty? Cut off the "disability" checks flowing to all those able-bodied fathers with dubious "psychiatric disabilities" (including alcoholism) that line up at the post office on the first of the month, and we’d have a huge new work force, overnight, all in need of a job.
May 7, 2007 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2007 Vin Suprynowicz |
