Intellectual Laziness

I’m tired of this intellectually lazy “it’s the law” immigration argument. How many of us exceed the speed limit when we drive? How many of us drank a beer before we were of legal age? How many of us regularly smoked a cigarette before we were of legal age? How many of us got the wrong change at a store and kept it and felt like we were stealing from them? If you did any of these, you are as much of a "criminal" as someone who crosses the border illegally. So where are the calls for speeding roundups? Where are the Sheriff's Posse patrols for beer drinking kids? Nowhere. How is that fair or just? This is nothing more than selective enforcement of a law for purely political purposes. It won’t solve the immigration problem, it won’t improve the economy, it won’t lower taxes and it won’t lower crime rates.

Fixing immigration means changing the focus of the discussion away from enforcement and towards solutions. The Republicans don’t want that to happen because they need it as a wedge issue. The Democrats seem incapable of deciding whether they want to lead on this issue because they’ll probably come up with some plan that will get labeled as “amnesty.” There are simple ways to solve this, but as long as we discourage people from talking about solutions, we’ll likely not get past this issue for a long time.