March 23, 2006, Putting the illegal in illegal immigrant
Further giving us the definition of "compassionate conservatism" the Senate is poised to pass something like its version of a bill already passed in the Republican controlled House of Representatives which would change the status of persons in the United States without proper immigration credentials from violators subject to deportation to felons.
Naturally, the Congressman who introduced the bill, James Sensenbrenner from Wisconsin, was the happy recipient of lots of nifty protests from his constituents; they might want to consider a voter registration drive to get a s***load of new citizens as registered Democrats and unseat him... or they can scream and carry signs if they like... OTOH, the voter registration thing is... hard...
Anyway, my state's junior senator, Mrs. Clinton. decided to refer to "Scripture", pointing out that under the bill proposed, "The Good Samaritan would be made a criminal. and probably Jesus Himself would be too. I dunno... the Roman Empire in those days was pretty big... and I think might have had pretty lax immigration laws for Jesus, seeing as he was a resident of Judea which was, you know, already a Roman province, and I'm not aware of any revelation that Jesus ever travelled very far from Judea. Further, as Jesus could walk across water, there might just not have been any way to prevent him from illegally entering another nation absent tough immigration restrictions like the new bill... Hillary's triangulation by, in this case, trying to appeal to the religious right becomes downright bizarre... as someone suggested to me today... perhaps we can call it obtuse triangulation...
Anyway, we'll see where the bill goes. The idea, of course, is, in the ubiquitous name of "fighting terrorism," to kick poor Latinos (mostly Mexicans) and West Indians as hard as possible, because, well, we can... Of course, if the effect of the bill actually does make it harder for illegal immigrants to come here and stay here, then that will drive up labor costs; the offsetting labor increase (suppressing wages) as a result of banning abortion, by contrast, won't take effect for decades...
Maybe the Republicans should think this one through a little better...