(11-19-2018, 11:08 AM)MalabarJag Wrote:

(11-19-2018, 09:47 AM)mikesez Wrote: I wasn't even born in 1980.  I'm not going to debate that circumstances have changed since 1980; they may have changed even more than you're accounting for.

In 1980, school districts in Texas, representing Texas voters and tax payers, were at that moment arguing their way up to the Supreme Court that they should be able to keep children of illegal immigrants out of school.  And California and Arizona both were going to pass a state amendment that illegal immigrants shouldn't get services from the state. 

It would have been very easy for Reagan or Bush to stake out an angry, aggressive position on the issue.  They would have gotten a lot of support.  Instead they both asked their supporters to think about the common humanity of Mexicans.  They both asked their supporters to think long term, about what the future would look like if a sub class of children grew up with no education.

But what hasn't changed is that illegal immigrants and their children are still equally human as us, with the same dignity.  What hasn't changed is that how we treat them says more about us than it does about them.

While Trump's rhetoric hasn't touched on public schools, yet, he has said that we should discriminate between immigrants on the basis of religion, and that we should separate parents from children.  These are equally offensive to their value as humans and ours.

What the voters in Texas and California wanted in 1980 has nothing to do with the vast difference between the illegals in 1980 vs. the illegals of 2018, which a conservative (or anyone with a IQ higher than chopped liver) would instantly recognize as an apples to oranges comparison. Your first three paragraphs are a deflection.

I don't think a person actively and illegally committing a crime by crossing a border to take money from other people has the same dignity as me. You can speak for yourself. And your position of claiming they deserve the fruits of other people's labors just because they are equally human does say a lot about YOU. Forced income redistribution has never been a conservative position.

As for the last paragraph, that's a flat out lie on your part (probably parroting a lie you read on one of the Far Left websites you frequent). Trump has been opposed to separating families, but chose to uphold the existing law that was in place under Obama. Of course a family would not be separated if they didn't break the law and enter the US illegally to begin with. The parents actively chose to have their family separated. I feel sorry for the children of such parents, but it's a big world with lots of evil and no magic wand to fix everything. If they were US citizens the child welfare authorities would remove them from those parents too.

And don't even try to claim these are "asylum" seekers. They could seek asylum in any of a dozen or more countries much closer than the US, with the same language and much similar cultural values. Most are coming here solely to live off the dollars taken by force from working Americans.

The bold text there is totally wrong.  Most of the people we're talking about are crossing at posted locations and telling the police there that they intend to claim asylum as refugees.  There is nothing illegal about that.  And even if it was illegal we would then have to ask, like Augustine or MLK Jr., if the law was just.
Anyhow, after they cross, legal proceedings begin to find out if they are legitimately refugees or not.  We count the number of people who cross in this circumstance, and find out their names and where they intend to stay.  We give them court dates.  The vast majority keep their court dates.  They don't get money from the government unless they present enough evidence to the judges that they really are refugees.  Less than 40,000 people per year are granted this status.  It's a drop in the bucket.  It's not a significant amount of money in the end.  It's such a small number for the reasons you cite: many of them realize that they'll fit in better and have more success in places like Mexico.

I'm not actually a leftist, so if you want to blame Obama or Clinton for requiring families to be separated while these legal procedures go through, I'm not going to argue with you.  Even if you're right about that, though, I still blame Trump for continuing it.  Tu quoque is a fallacy.

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