I was checking the stats today, and I note that I had a visitor from the University of Oregon, no doubt drawn by this post.
For those of you who don’t want to click, it’s about Gullyborg’s (who handles the Carnival of Cordite) little adventure last weekend at the University of Oregon, where a bunch of our big-hearted government employees were falling all over themselves to help illegal aliens get matricula consular cards and sign up for welfare.
I suspect they got here by following the trackback links from his Carnival of Cordite #47. That’s cool.
I hope you enjoyed what I had to say about your actions. Were you surprised when you saw I was one of the more charitable responses?
It really jerks my chain. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in the US is a descendant of immigrants. Even our “Native Americans” aren’t native–they immigrated. Man did not evolve on this continent. But most of our ancestors came here legally, at least under whatever system was in place. And they didn’t have the benefit of welfare–they came here looking for a better life, and they damn well worked for it. They worked in sweatshops, they worked in mines, they worked on railroads, they fought their way west and farmed, they worked in the lumber industry, they started stores and so on. Nobody gave them squat, except for a hard time because they were Irish, or Chinese, or Finns or whatever.
(Yes, I’m leaving out the slaves and the few tranportees we had. Special cases. Slavery and involuntary transportation of criminals for labor are abominations. Our lowest impulses getting acted out. Happens.)
These people are not special, and they have no more right to come here than anyone else who wants to immigrate. If they want to come, let them do it the right way–get a visa, get a work permit, come, learn the language, work hard and get ahead–in that order. I’ll be happy to stand there at your swearing in as a citizen and bid you congratulations–you’ve figured out the dream that is America.
If they’d rather their first act was a crime (face it, coming here the way they do is a crime in this country, whether the law is enforced or not), then I don’t think we need them. We definitely don’t need to be putting them on welfare–we need to be sending them back home and securing our borders.
Of course, that won’t happen. Neither Democrats nor Republicans nor Libertarians want to secure our borders or truly deal with our immigration problems, though for different reasons.
That means that all those people who think like me (and I’ll be you lunch there are more of us than there are of you, oh U of OR folks) are going to sit around and stew and say nasty things about you.
You may want to get used to it.