On Sunday's Meet the Press, Tim Russert (back in 1961, you said you wanted to be a jet pilot; now you want to be president; what happened?) was talking to Mike Huckabee about immigration, and the issue of sending back legal citizens arose.
The legal citizens are, of course, children born in this country to illegal immigrant parents. Whether that automatic legality is a good idea or not (though how we grant legal status to someone who has no independent rights and no ability to take civic responsibility is beyond me), what runs through seemingly everyone's commentary on this subject is abject horror that a child would be forced back to a country like, say, Mexico.
What does this say about us that we even try to determine this issue based on this idea? There is an amazing arrogance in our willingness to create immigration policy around the concept that, once here and a citizen, a child forced to return, with his or her parents, to another country is, somehow, being cast into a Dante-esque inferno of perdition.
People can grow up just fine in Mexico or Poland or wherever, and it is not unduly harsh to require them to stay with their parents, no matter what their legal status may be.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
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