Speaking in code words to disguise what they really mean

Here in America, citizens and other legal residents have every right to stage rallies, protests, and demonstrations on any topic that tickles their fancy.

But they ought to say what they mean. It’s reached the point where some of these characters use so many misleading code words that you need some kind of Politically Correct secret decoder ring.

And I wonder if the folks who cover such events for newspapers shouldn’t provide us with a little of that cryptanalysis.

“Locals rally for immigration reform,” read the headline on the local break page of the June 2 Review-Journal; “Campaign seeks solution that keeps families together. …

“A coalition of labor, business, faith and immigrant rights leaders gathered in downtown Las Vegas on Monday to launch the local leg of a national campaign pushing reform of America’s immigration laws,” the story reported.

“The campaign, dubbed Reform Immigration for America, seeks to encourage lawmakers this year to consider comprehensive immigration reform that emphasizes keeping families together.”

“All of us have seen the disastrous effects of this broken (immigration) system, which has enforcement only as its approach,” said Peter Ashman, chairman of Nevada’s chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “The immigration system must be overhauled to create and accommodate a balanced and sensible approach to immigration, one that takes into account our need for secure and orderly borders and protects our integrity as a nation of immigrants.”

By which Mr. Ashman actually meant to say that he now demands we “finish the job of making our borders the least secure in the world, inviting every poor person in the hemisphere to swarm here illegally, thus bankrupting legal immigrants and native-born Americana alike, and if you object I’m going to call you a racist and pretend your forebears broke just as many laws getting here as my clients break every day.”

Millions of immigrants “have been suffering for many, many years and living in the shadows,” the newspaper quoted Geoconda Arguello-Kline, president of the Culinary union, as saying back on June the second.

Meantime, lawyer Ashman said immigration reform is necessary in part because trying to “remove the undocumented population” isn’t realistic. “It’s too costly, unworkable and un-American,” he said. “It has not worked.”

Where to begin?

First, if we define “immigrants” as most people would, meaning those millions who have gone through the minimal required legal steps to immigrate to America legally, I wonder where we would find the “immigrants (who) have been suffering for many, many years and living in the shadows,” as Ms. Arguello-Kline contends.

I know plenty of immigrants. They’re proud to be active participants in every aspect of American life. They’re not afraid to go virtually anywhere, in public, with their heads held high, because they know if the occasion should ever arise where they should have to prove they have a legal right to be here, that won’t be any problem.

The people to whom Ms. Arguello-Kline refers as “immigrants” aren’t “immigrants,” by that sensible definition, at all. They’re trespassing illegal aliens, who violate multiple laws, including the statutes against fraud and identify theft, every day they’re here.

That is who she’s talking about — right?

Calling these people “undocumented” is meant to create the impression their “documents merely failed to show up in the mail,” a situation easily remedied by filling out a couple pesky forms. That’s like calling a rapist an “insensitive lover” or a bank robber a “customer who makes withdrawals without presenting proper withdrawal slips.”

And not even THEY seem to be suffering much in the shadows, so far as I can see. I wait behind them in the post office all the time — people who need translators because they speak no language but Spanish (unlike legal immigrants, who often have a larger English vocabulary than the native-born.) So why try to confuse people by pretending to describe the plight of people who came here legally and played by the rules?

Furthermore, I submit none of the 50 people who staged their photo op down by the courthouse last Monday have any interest in seeing U.S. immigration laws liberalized. Let’s say Congress were to decide tomorrow to double, triple — heck, to multiply by five — the number of foreign folks to be allowed to immigrate to this country, legally, next year: five times more people from all over the world invited to apply, demonstrate they have no criminal history or infectious diseases, that they have either a big enough bank account or enough education and training in a needed skill to guarantee them employment upon arrival here.

Would even that massive a “reform” please these protesters? Of course not. No such real “reform” would make any difference to the illegal trespassers already here, since they’ve demonstrated they have no interest in obeying the law, no matter what it says. If they were to go back to Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador and try to apply for legal emigration to the United States, the fact they they’re functionally illiterate and have no notable skills means they STILL wouldn’t get to emigrate legally — not just to America, but to any other First World country, since they ALL set similar, sensible standards.

Heck, even MEXICO has such standards!

That’s why we next get the code words about “keeping families together.” The only qualification these protesters want to see for mass amnesty is “a family member already here, even if it’s only an anchor baby, to help show us how to sign up for all the free stuff” — starting with our vastly expensive welfare schools.

If the radicals who gathered downtown on June the first want to demonstrate in favor of a mass amnesty — for open borders, over which hundreds of millions of the world’s poor and oppressed would be invited to come here and swarm our free public schools and free hospital emergency rooms until our current socialist policies drive us finally, completely, bankrupt — let them at least say what they mean.

Nowhere in U.S. law does it say those who sneak across our borders can “pay a fine and stay.” These radicals can use all the euphemisms they please to avoid the word, but anyone who believes illegal trespassers should not be deported — or imprisoned and THEN deported — is promoting amnesty, and needs to answer the question: How does giving amnesty to a couple million knowing law-breakers not encourage the next set of knowing law-breakers, inviting them in no uncertain terms to “Come on in and enjoy all the free stuff; after a few years you can get ‘amnestied’, too!”?

“Removing the undocumented population” is “too costly, unworkable and un-American,” Mr. Ashman? It “has not worked”?

Harry Truman did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it, with remarkable effectiveness, and at no great cost, in “Operation Wetback.” (http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0706/p09s01-coop.html.)

Calling that mere enforcement of our laws “Stalinesque,” as the ideological descendants of Stalin now do, is mere name-calling, intended not to clarify, but to intimidate and silence. Stalin imprisoned, tortured, and murdered millions — often through purposeful starvation — for the “crimes” of owning property, or simple not going along with his collectivist schemes.

During “Operation Wetback,” so far as I know, no one was killed, beaten, or tortured. If any court found such humane law enforcement “illegal,” please cite the case.

And note that once a few tens of thousands had been legally deported, back in 1954, hundreds of thousands more caught the drift and headed home on their own.

Which one of those great men was “un-American,” Mr. Ashman? Truman or Eisenhower? How can it be “un-American” to insist that Congress has a constitutional power to set even-handed immigration policies, or that America’s laws be enforced?

And how on earth can anyone say rounding up and deporting our population of illegal alien trespassers “has not worked,” when — with the exception of a few token raids on meatpacking plants, apparently now suspended by the scofflaw Obama — it hasn’t been seriously tried in 50 years?

(Those token packing plant raids, by the by, disproved in spades the claim that these are “jobs Americans won’t do,” as thousands of legal residents applied for those jobs in the days after the raids.)

It worked in 1954. It would work again. So what’s the real objection? That it would leave too big a gap in current Democratic voter rolls?

REFUTING SOME STALE LIES

p.s. — What’s that? Trespassing illegal aliens don’t cause any trouble, they’re just here to peacefully support their families? None of them kill people on our highways and then run away? Hey, good one. Check out:

http://www.amren.com/news/2012/10/report-illegal-drivers-behind-high-hit-and-run-rate-in-la/ , or

http://www.usillegalaliens.com/impacts_of_illegal_immigration_traffic_accidents.html , or

http://www.immigrationshumancost.org/text/crimevictims_2.html , or

http://www.ojjpac.org/memorial.asp , or

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/12/california-police-illegal-immigrant-alien-towing-immigration/1#.VPkr9y6TuUk , or

http://rense.com/general47/polic.htm , or, best of all, my own account of the murder of lovely young Las Vegan Tara Cleveland by two illegal im . . . — oh, whoops, sorry — two peaceful undocumented guest workers just quietly working to support their families, at:

https://vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=262

and then go get yourself some new lies; the old ones are wearing thin.\

10 Comments to “Speaking in code words to disguise what they really mean”

  1. Rad Geek Says:

    The people to whom Ms. Arguello-Kline refers as “immigrants” aren’t “immigrants,” by that sensible definition, at all. They’re trespassing illegal aliens,

    A “trespasser” is someone who intrudes on another person’s property against the will of the property-owner.

    Let’s pretend I’m an illegal immigrant renting an apartment, working for a meat-packing plant, shopping at the local grocery store, et cetera. Presumably my landlord is willing for me to live on his or her property: if the owner didn’t want me to live there, he or she wouldn’t have signed the lease. Presumably, also, my boss is willing for me to be inside his or her plant; otherwise he or she wouldn’t be paying me to do it. Presumably, also, the stores I shop at are willing for me to be inside their stores: otherwise, they wouldn’t welcome my business.

    So just whose property, exactly, am I “trespassing” on?

    How does giving amnesty to a couple million knowing law-breakers not encourage the next set of knowing law-breakers, inviting them in no uncertain terms to “Come on in and enjoy all the free stuff; after a few years you can get ‘amnestied’, too!”?

    You say “knowing law-breakers” like it’s supposed to be a bad thing to knowingly break the law. Coming from someone who so vocally praises the American Revolution, this seems odd.

    If the radicals who gathered downtown on June the first want to demonstrate in favor of a mass amnesty — for open borders, over which hundreds of millions of the world’s poor and oppressed would be invited to come here and swarm our free public schools and free hospital emergency rooms until our current socialist policies drive us finally, completely, bankrupt — let them at least say what they mean.

    That sounds like a problem with the socialist policies, not a problem with free immigration.

    Why exactly do you want to save socialist policies like government control over schools and hospitals?

  2. frost Says:

    Well stated, no argument.
    Next step, who’s funding these constant trouble-makers?
    ACORN? Pradva? Socialist Workers Union? Soros?

  3. downwithwelfare Says:

    If a woman from Brazil, who is fluent in three languages including English, holds a four-year college journalism degree, has a management job with a medium-sized company in her native country, and has had multiple job offers from different US companies has not been able to meet basic US immigration requirements for years, what sort of chance do you think a typical Mexican man or woman might have?

    The only thing more outrageous than identity theft committed by “illegal” workers, whom I can only assume are in the US primarily to work, are the US laws requiring such serialization of US citizens to the point where the equivalent of an internal passport is required for survival! This issue will only become worse as the Department of Home/Father/MotherLand Security begins requiring more and more sectors of the workforce to verify Social Security Account Numbers demanded from employees who have been voluntarily hired by their employers.

    The virulent socialist policies currently in force within the US must be abolished immediately. Once removed, these policies will not be an enticement for those who wish to sneak into the US and live off the sweat of those forced at government gunpoint to provide for such sneaks, and the private charities which will take up their rightful place in turn exercise the discretion that the various levels of government are demonstratably incapable of.

    “… Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

  4. Vin Says:

    Vin replies:

    So, presumably, if I wrote warning people not to let their children swim in the river because there are crocodiles, “Rad Geek,” hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, would ask:

    “Why exactly do you want to save the practice of crocodiles eating little children just because they go swimming in inappropriate places?”

    Signing my name, standing tall and risking the consequences, I have fought a radical, no-compromise battle for the complete shutdown — not some kind of half-assed “reform,” but the literal dynamiting (once the children have been removed to a safe distance) — of the government schools, and every government income redistibution bureaucracy, for more than 15 years.

    Warning of — heck, simply observing — the consequences of allowing unlimited millions of people to violate American immigration laws, arriving here to flood the government welfare schools and enormously expensive tax-subsidized hospital emergency rooms every time they come down with the sniffles, means I want to “save” these evil redistributionist schemes?

    How does acknowledging a reality of which we disapprove indicate we want to “save” it? By this logic, if you believe the Constitution forbids government agents from restricting your right to carry a loaded firerarm into a federal courthouse (as it most certainly does), you MAY NOT leave your firearm in the car; you MUST carry it into the courthouse in defiance of the orders of the armed guards there, lest you stand accused by “Rad Geek” of “wanting to save all their unconstitutional gun laws.”

    You must, in short, PRETEND that all current conditions of which you disapprove DO NOT EXIST.

    In the real world, this is a good way to quickly get yourself killed. But “Rad Geek” will accuse us of “wanting to save” any current condition that we merely acknowledge as “currently existing.”

    Do the illegal aliens stand up and declare “We reject your laws, here we stand with our guns, we’re willing to risk death to proclaim that your laws have no dominance over us,” like the patriots at Lexington and Concord?Are they fighting to free us, as well as themselves, from unconstitutional tyranny? I haven’t noticed them doing that. What I notice them doing is walking away from car crashes and hospital bills and orders to appear in court to answer for their crimes, refusing to take any responsibility for the damage they cause.

    Yes, if there were no tax-funded “commons,” and none of us were numbered or taxed, the arrival of a million strangers seeking work would do me little harm, provided they maintained reasonable sanitary safeguards. When “Rad Geek,” hiding in the shadows of anonymity, has managed to accomplish goals to which courageous Libertarians have been unable to win over even 5 percent of our casually socialist neighbors in 40 years of effort, I hope he’ll let us know.

    Meantime, since he wants to speak in hypotheticals, let’s pretend “Rad Geek” is a landlord or an employer, telling all applicants who speak poor English, “I’m not going to rent to you or offer you a job, because I think you may be an illegal immigrant and I don’t want to become an accessory to your crime.” Do you think our brave federal bureaucrats will congratulate him and back him to the hilt, demanding the applicant prove he or she is here legally?

    Those employers and landlords soon find themselves in an Alice-and-Wonderland world, threatened with fines by the EEOC and other alphabet bureaucracies, you simpering innocent. “Presumably my boss and landlord are willing?” Go talk to a few of them, before you go presuming too much, you ivory-tower twit.

    Why do you suppose Barack Obama declines to put “E-Verify” into widespread use?

    Yes, I would prefer no “Social Slave number” or “internal passport” were necessary to go about my business. But if we WERE allowed to take one state of 50, and make it a Libertarian state, hasn’t it occurred to you that we’d have to require new immigrants to forswear socialism, under oath, and upon penalty of immediate exile, before granting them the right to vote? Otherwise, we’d be swarmed by socialists fleeing their own dysfunctional enclaves, who would immediately vote to tax their wealthier neighbors for their own sustenance, at which point we would have accomplished nothing at all.

    — Vin Suprynowicz

  5. Rad Geek Says:

    “Rad Geek” is a pseudonym, but it’s hardly a “cloak of anonymity.” If you spent a minute searching for it on Google, you’d find my website, which (among other things) talks at length about what my views are, who I am, where I live, what my real name is, and what I’ve published under my name. I don’t usually post comments on the Internet under my given name because it’s a common name, which happens to be shared by at least one prominent blogger with radically different views from mine, so that “Rad Geek” actually provides you with a more reliable way of finding out who I am and what I stand for than “Charles Johnson” would.

    Not that your sniping about pseudonyms as against big manly signatures, or your thuggish anti-intellectual sniping at “ivory-tower twits” has anything to do with the argument; these are simply textbook examples of argumentum ad hominem (abusive form).

    Warning of — heck, simply observing — the consequences of allowing unlimited millions of people to violate American immigration laws, arriving here to flood the government welfare schools and enormously expensive tax-subsidized hospital emergency rooms every time they come down with the sniffles, means I want to “save” these evil redistributionist schemes?

    The question is simple. If you don’t want to save government welfare schools and tax-subsidized hospitals, then why in the world do you care whether or not they are flooded? Are you normally in the business of advising government bureaucrats about how to keep their unsustainable socialist schemes running?

    By this logic, if you believe the Constitution forbids government agents from restricting your right to carry a loaded firerarm into a federal courthouse (as it most certainly does), you MAY NOT leave your firearm in the car; you MUST carry it into the courthouse in defiance of the orders of the armed guards there, lest you stand accused by “Rad Geek” of “wanting to save all their unconstitutional gun laws.”

    Well, no. All that I think you “MUST” do is refrain from cheering on government agents when they go to arrest, exile or kill those who DO choose to exercise their rights.

    If you stand by government police when they do try to enforce tyrannical gun laws on innocent people exercising their rights, then yes, you are trying to save tyrannical gun laws. Otherwise, no, you aren’t.

    Of course, the problem here is that you ARE explicitly calling for bigger and more aggressive government when it comes to monitoring, policing and punishing illegal immigrants. Even though you haven’t anywhere stated who they are “trespassing” against by living in the U.S. without a permission slip from the federal government. And one of the reasons you give for this is the alleged effects of free immigration on cockamaimey socialist schemes that you yourself consider wasteful and foolish.

    Yes, if there were no tax-funded “commons,” and none of us were numbered or taxed, the arrival of a million strangers seeking work would do me little harm, provided they maintained reasonable sanitary safeguards.

    It’s true that when you combine something basically moral (free immigration) with something completely immoral (government subsidies for education and medicine) you may get bad results from the combination. But why spend your time attacking the moral part of the combination, instead of the immoral part?

    Are they fighting to free us, as well as themselves, from unconstitutional tyranny? I haven’t noticed them doing that. What I notice them doing is walking away from car crashes and hospital bills and orders to appear in court to answer for their crimes, refusing to take any responsibility for the damage they cause.

    I don’t care whether or not illegal immigrants fight to free me from tyranny. A little help is always appreciated, but I don’t think that fighting for everybody else’s freedom is necessary for people to be justified in breaking unjust laws. Do you think the American Revolutionaries should have been expected to fight not only for their own freedom but also to free the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the English commoners, or any number of other victims of tyrannical English government? Do you expect Ford to make cars for GM?

    As for those fighting their own freedom, maybe it’s a matter of who you know. I know plenty of undocumented immigrants who are actively engaged in pro-freedom politics and against the bordercrats’ “Papers please” police state.

    And as for irresponsibility, I’m sure there are some individual illegal immigrants who are irresponsible. So what? I hear some native-born Americans are irresponsible, too. In a free society, institutions work to hold individual people responsible for what they do. They don’t launch massive collectivist campaigns to hunt down and exile whole populations regardless of whether or not they have ever actually done any of the things you mention.

    But if we WERE allowed to take one state of 50, and make it a Libertarian state, hasn’t it occurred to you that we’d have to require new immigrants to forswear socialism, under oath, and upon penalty of immediate exile, before granting them the right to vote?

    No. I don’t believe in using government to police political thought.

    I also don’t know how you intend to enforce these immigration restrictions you plan on implementing without exactly the sort of Officially Permitted Citizen, “Papers-please” documentation requirements that you claim you would prefer to abolish.

    Those employers and landlords soon find themselves in an Alice-and-Wonderland world, threatened with fines by the EEOC and other alphabet bureaucracies, you simpering innocent.

    Oh, please. If you think that Tyson wouldn’t be hiring any illegal immigrants but for the nefarious manipulations of the EEOC, I think you probably need to think about this harder.

    Of course, in specific cases where a landlord would like to exclude illegal — or for that matter legal — immigrants from renting apartments, or a boss would like not to hire them, I think that he or she ought to have the right to do so, and that if the EEOC tries to interfere, the EEOC is violating the rights of that boss or landlord. But of course this doesn’t answer the question of who illegal immigrants are “trespassing” against. If the landlord doesn’t give a damn where the tenant comes from as long as she pays her rent — and many landlords don’t — and if the boss doesn’t give a damn where the worker comes from as long as she does her job — and many bosses don’t — then just who the hell is left for this “trespasser” to trespass against?

  6. Vin Suprynowicz Says:

    “Rad Geek” asserts:

    “The question is simple. If you don’t want to save government welfare schools and tax-subsidized hospitals, then why in the world do you care whether or not they are flooded?”

    Vin replies:

    Because I am taxed to pay for them. I am given no choice in the matter. If I refuse to pay the (ever-increasing) taxes to fund these things, the government will (it has, since I have fought these battles for real, not merely as a “let’s pretend” intellectual exercise) ) seize(d) my paychecks. It will eventually seize and expel me from my house.

    Illegal immigrants, who are trespassing because they come where they have no legal right to be, violating the laws of the place to which they travel , tend to vote socialist, because they are looters. Ask those charged with collecting hospital bills how many illegal aliens make good faith efforts to pay their bills. Those who would “amnesty” them will guarantee the continued spread of socialism, bankrupting us all.

    There IS a theory that this is a good thing: “Let socialism be overburdened and collapse. Then we will build a better, more Libertarian society on the ruins.”

    Interesting theory. It can be argued, for instance, that a society more respectful of the Rights of Man was built on the ruins of Rome, once Rome fell.

    It was. The only problem is … it took about a thousand years.

    If there is no right to exclude looters from our midst;
    if we must allow free entry of anyone who wants to come to our community — and the smallest community is my house — and then allow them to decide how my stuff shall be redistributed “by majority vote,” then freedom of a family of three can last only until four “guest workers” break down their front door and “vote” on how to divvy up the food in the refrigerator.

    This is the current reality. “Rad Geek” supports it, apparently under the delusion this is some kind of admirable “conscientious objection.,” whereas organizing a campaign to track down and punish lawbreakers is inherently “collectivist.” I rarely find myself supporting the existence or activities of the FBI, but I fail to see how it’s despicably “collectivist” for them to try to catch and punish runaway rapists, murderers, and stickup men.
    Or those who violate our perfectly constitutional immigration laws.

    I would wish him a happy life in the Looters’ Carnival he prescribes for all of us … if only I were not forced at gunpoint to share it with him.

    — V.S.

  7. downwithwelfare Says:

    That sounds more like the Vin whose writings I recognize!

    (I seem to have also made the mistake that the acknowledgement of the current reality was an endorsement of it.)

  8. Stephen Carville Says:

    If large scale immigration is supposed to make for a more free and prosperous place then what happened to California?

  9. downwithwelfare Says:

    Welfare.

    Or, more specifically, socialism.

  10. JT Says:

    Vin: “What I notice them doing is walking away from car crashes and hospital bills and orders to appear in court to answer for their crimes, refusing to take any responsibility for the damage they cause.”

    That’s really what you notice the vast majority of illegal immigrants doing here? Wow. Sounds like Nevada attracts a lot of bad people.

    Personally, I notice the vast majority of illegal immigrants working hard in the U.S. at low-paying jobs and providing for their own families. They’re generally responsible people who don’t commit crimes, if we define crimes as intruding on other people or their property. Of course, some outliers do. Hardly something on which to base sensible public policy.