<p>Northstarmom, the diseases are already being spread. There’s a heck of a problem with TB in New York. I’m particularly sensitive to the illegals/medical care issue. As I’ve posted before (pardon the repetition), I live in a community of 500,000 people which has two pretty small hospitals, one of which is in bankruptcy. The financial failure of that hospital (my brother in law is a high-leven financial executive in the hospital) is directly attributable to unreimbursed medical care provided to illegals. That’s the hospital we used for ZG’s recent hospitalizations. The care is appalling because of the crowding and lack of funds. On that same train of thought, I’d really like to know who Senator Obama’s 47 million uninsured actually are. I’m not willing to provide to illegal immigrants comprehensive coverage.</p>
<p>“Not so in Guatemala, to my knowledge. (Probably more Brazil.) But the actual story there is even worse.”</p>
<p>I know the history of Guatemala pretty well (I was publisher of a book on nonviolent resistance in Latin America, which included resistance to the U.S. trained, backed, and armed death squads.) The border areas of Guatemala, with southern Mexico, is where the post-NAFTA immigration has come from. This land WASN’T arable on a large scale, and contained only small plots plus forests. </p>
<p>I worked during the 90s for our state board of health around the regulation of farmworker housing. I never met a single southern Mexican or Guatemalan working in the orchards until 1997. Now virtually all the migrant labor comes from there (those from northern Mexico have mostly settled out).</p>
<p>Ahhhh!
Its drives me CRAZY that illegals are gaining citizens for their children by manipulating the system.
They are obtaining amnesty through a clause in the 14th, and the sole purpose of that clause was to allow slaves to become citizens.
Its wrong that illegals are border jumping, when Legal paths exist, especially when millions of immigrants, both sides of my family, found the means to come to Ellis island, become legal citizens, learned english and willingly assimilated to US culture.
It would be benefiticial if the SC would receive a case challenging the amnesty/illegals coming here just to deliver their baby, and make it clear that the purpose of the 14th is not consistent with todays practices.
to curb illegal immigration, ICE and the fed gov needs to rigourously enforce immigration policy, and deport illegals. If illegals knew that, for example, their new born may be us, but since the mother is illegal she is deported, and the baby put in foster care. Or getting rid of the wet/dry policy. It may be harsh, but maybe people would think twice.
We need to know who is in our country. Some of these illegals have criminal records, and committ crimes in the US, or obtain fraudulent ID information.</p>
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<p>If all of this is true, (not doubting, just admitting my own ignorance), then I agree we need to take action to rectify the problems we have caused in other countries. But I do not think the proper solution is to open our borders and bring everyone here.</p>
<p>I agree, Bay. Suggesting open borders was not my intent.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I have to admit that I found it hard to sympathize with the British when people from the nations that they had conquered and stripped of assets began to flood into Britain…although I do mourn the passing of the England I knew as a kid.</p>
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<p>Last time I checked ignorance wasn’t an excuse for breaking a law. If a friend gets in my car and accidentally drops a bag of marijuana in my car, I get pulled over for something unrelated and get searched and the cops find it…I get busted. Any illegal alien should be worried about getting busted and deported. </p>
<p>The constitution should be amended to keep any illegal from crossing the border to give birth just to get their children citizenship (I know that’s not what happened in this case so don’t lose your mind).</p>
<p>I’m with Consolation on the problem about our hypocrisy and multiple standards of how we are handling the illegal situation. I am particularly incensed that we are not going after one of the sources of the problem which are the US employers who are deliberately recruiting and hiring these folks. What can you expect when we dangle such temptation in front of those who cannot make a living in their countries. I don’t have a huge preference or much knowledge as to how to right this situation, but the way we selectively go after illegals sickens me. We need to enforce our laws, but we need to be consistent in doing so and the laws have to make sense. We allow large groups to come into this country, live here, send their kids to school here, make laws so that it is difficult to identify them and send them back, turn a blind eye to those hiring and paying them, and then go after isolated cases. I’m ashamed of the whole mess.</p>
<p>Is there an implication that if you commit social security fraud and are an illegal, it’s all in good fun, but if a citizen of the US commits the same crime, then they should be prosecuted? </p>
<p>Or would that mean that stealing someone’s identity is OK, for everyone, regardless of citizenship? </p>
<p>And if fines, deportation, or jail time are a consequence of committing a crime, then doesn’t it follow that these are the penalties imposed, as appropriate for a particular individual?</p>
<p>The fact that she’s a librarian is irrelevant… she’s still an illegal.</p>
<p>This seems like a case of making a child pay for the sins of her parents. She was a <em>toddler</em> when they came to this country. She had no say in becoming an illegal immigrant. This country is the only home she’s ever known. In culture, language, upbringing, and education, she is an American–and a bright, hard-working one. What her parents did was not her fault. Her crime has been protecting them.</p>
<p>Yes, the social security fraud is a serious thing. But the main person harmed by it was HER. She would never dare try to collect on those benefits in her retirement, yet she paid them. And how could she have stepped forward, knowing that it probably would get her own parents deported and/or prosecuted? </p>
<p>She’s done wrong, but I feel for her. She’s lived her whole life between a rock and a hard place, knowing she’s not legally entitled to live in the only country she’s ever known as home.</p>
<p>Does anyone remember Dan-el Padilla Peralta, the Dominican Republic illegal classics scholar? He left the country to study at Oxford and is still working to gain some legal status.</p>
<p>This unresolved situation has gone on for far too long. I feel for the kids graduating from high school without legal status.</p>
<p>Sorry to disagree with you critics, but this woman did have options, though admittedly, none were optimal [from her perspective]. I could be mistaken, but couldn’t she have returned to Mexico as an adult and submit an application for a U.S. visa or residency from there [avoiding U.S. prison, at least]? And, I don’t mean going to Mexico to live like a pauper. With her U.S. education, she’d have an advantage in securing a middle-class job in Mexico, particularly in the border regions. No guarantee, but she’d likely have an advantage over the typical Mexican laborer, like apple pickers in Washington state who come here legally, live in the barest of conditions while here, and often leave here essentially empty handed (poor harvest, etc.)</p>
<p>As for her parents, of course they are culpable. They should have addressed the situation years ago. Let’s be candid; this exact situation is going to be repeated over and over in the coming years. Illegal immigrants know what they are risking. What do we tell people like the American citizen who was depicted in the NY Times last year? She is a latina whose name and SSN were “appropriated” by an illegal alien, unbeknownst to her.</p>
<p>I don’t know the exact facts, but just as a hypothesis, imagine that this woman believed that she was a legal U.S. Citizen, having had a Social Security number since she was a child. She came up through U.S. schools, got a job, paid taxes, including Social Security taxes, and has been a productive law-abiding citizen. If those are the facts (and they may or may not be), I can’t see how anybody can’t be troubled by the idea of simply deporting her as an “illegal.”</p>
<p>Just to create a hypothetical case that makes it even clearer, imagine that you adopted a child through a U.S. adoption agency that assured you the child was a U.S. citizen, and even provided you with the child’s Social Security Number. Years later, it comes out that the agency was lying, and the child was actually an “illegal.” How would you feel about efforts to deport that particular illegal?</p>
<p>Hunt, of course similar fact situations have occurred before and will probably happen again. Of course it’s tragic. But what do you do and say to other such “victims” of the immigration laws? I remember reading about the story of an American clergy couple that adopted a Canadian baby while living and working there. Years later they returned and retired to the U.S. When their daughter became a teenager, she discovered that the parents, God bless them, had never completed all the paperwork necessary to secure the girl’s U.S. status. That girl grew up in the U.S. with American parents, and yet she had to fight the bureaucracy, endure deportation and heartache before being permitted to return to the U.S. And this was in the 1970s, long before 9/11 and the ICE. People don’t like being told that their own situation doesn’t merit the same consideration as some other person facing similar circumstances.</p>
<p>It’s a sad situation and yes, the daughter will pay for the sins of the parents. That’s the law. Ask those families who have lost their houses because one of the parents is growing pot plants in the basement and the cops sieze the house. Insantly homeless.</p>
<p>FWIW, the article has been corrected to clarify that Martinez is not a librarian, but a library employee.</p>
<p>Many of the arguments here are based on ‘higher’ moral justice, not legal justice, which has a pragmatic component. The pragmatic component is there with limits in mind. (If ‘this’ exception, why not others?) Hunt, (and others), the majority of illegally arrived immigrants have law-abiding & productive intentions. (When they do arrive, they may be shocked in some cases to see the disparity between what they assume about the U.S. economy, and the reality of ‘making it’ – but that’s another story). So to allow one exception is to mandate it universally, otherwise such an exception does not meet any standard of moral justice.</p>
<p>And again, we’re back to limits. I have yet to see one politician or candidate demonstrate the spine to engage in radical, comprehensive reform, which is the only approach that has the possibility of combining legal (from hence forward) and moral justice. It would involve simultaneously doing several things:
–reversing the 14th amendment provision about citizenship birth, to restate it as an outcome of legally immigrated parents
–allowing re-entry/re-application for any person born to ‘illegals’ such as the library employee in question
–providing paths to citizenship for those undocumented workers without a criminal past and willilng to trade ___ years of service for the generous lack of enforcement & social services received (for example, 5 years of service for 15 years of benefits & non-enforcement)
–aggressive economic mutuality with Mexico – not the corporate kind currently & previously operative, but that benefitting the poorest of their citizens
–parental literacy efforts for both new legal arrivals and those undocumented seeking a path to citizenship. (For the latter, it would be a condition of citizenship.)
–radical reduction in the red tape aspects of legal immigration
–aggressive, visionary global initiatives by the U.S. & other First World countries as partners, in reducing the need to use the U.S. as the sole ‘economic refuge’ of the current Third World – which includes so many millions of people that their import to the US would transform life in this country as any of you know it.
–repeal of so-called ‘sanctuary city’ provisions which are nothing more than Release the Criminal codes & which make other citizens complicit in illegality. Originally, these were designed for immigrants seeking political refuge. Now they are a cover for blanket non-reporting (in other words, criminal activity). But it is worse than that: city workers in many of these criminal-sanctuary cities are forbidden from revealing information about any fellow employee whom they discover is here illegally. It makes others complicit in illegality & subverts their rights to free speech. It’s actually reverse blackmail – with the blackmail victim being the innocent, law-abiding one, and the cost of reporting being his or her job (rather than cash).</p>
<p>No policy can be adopted without practical consequences in mind, or that policy itself is <em>not</em> moral at all. It may feel good, it may be sentimental, but it is hardly moral.</p>
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<p>And we know this… how?</p>
<p>I agree with Epiphany regarding sanctuary cities. The concept of santuary cities as presently applied is a farce. The concept is not being used to protect vulnerable people from political intimidation and the threat of loss of life. take Haitians, for example. There are characteristically a very hard-working people. Whether they make it to the mainland or are intercepted at sea, illegal immigrants from Haiti are jailed in the U.S. From Sanctuary city proponents, I’d like to know how many Haitians are they defending. Few or none, I gather. And American policies have had severe detrimental impacts upon Haiti over the last 100 years.</p>
<p>I think that she and her family are already paying dearly for what was done. And this will not be the end of the matter. Social Security fraud is a serious crime with serious penalties attached. She may not have known her SSN was fraudulent if her parents gave it to her. My kids would not think an instant about their SSNs and the legalities. They did not even know their numbers until filling out college apps. </p>
<p>The consequences for the young lady and family are there. The problem is that things can get to this point with the illegal situation. What can be done to nip the problem more in the bud and address our multiple standards regarding illegals?</p>