Oh Please, LA Times, Knock It Off!

“It's been a while since a major American news organization treated an important national issue as irresponsibly as CNN now does immigration,” an editorial in the LA Times claimed this morning. Well, it hasn’t exactly been that long a while, even the Times had to admit, when it likened Lou Dobbs and Company to Fox News. “’Fair and balanced’ is already taken, so one supposes that Dobbs' slogan will have to be ‘bully and bluster’.” The Times’ long suit is not wit. As an example of Dobb’s irresponsibility, the Times cited the following: “One of the things that frustrates many of us who care about our country and the truth," Dobbs wrote on CNN's website Friday, "is the rampant barrage of misinformation, disseminated by such vociferous special interests, whether they are ethnocentric social activists, labor unions, the Catholic Church or Corporate America. The truth is, advocates of amnesty, guest-worker programs and open borders are unconcerned about the 280 million American citizens, the men and women of this country who work for a living and their families." First, it’s the irresponsibility of the US government that has landed us in the pickle we are in with between 11 million and 20 million illegal immigrants in the US today. Cheap labor and pandering to the Latino vote has lead to little or no security at our borders. And now illegal immigrants who do not pay into Social Security, who do not pay taxes, but avail themselves of all of our social services and are causing problems in our public schools, overloading our health care services, and welfare departments and costing the government mega-bucks are making demands. ILLEGAL is a definable word. An illegal immigrant is someone who broke the laws of our land to get here and continues to break the laws of our land to live here. If we were only talking about Emma Lazarus’s sentimental concept--"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—it would be one thing. But we are talking about what happens when the federal government in order to pander to corporate greed—that is, cheap labor—and in order to get votes condones breaking the law. No matter what the LA Times, the Bush administration and the Roman Catholic Church may argue, illegal immigrants got here illegally and are staying here illegally. That’s what our laws say. What must be addressed and seriously is this: What can we do NOW that the US government has dropped the ball for the last 20 years? When President Ronald Reagan and his administration granted amnesty to illegal immigrants in 1986, they did so with no concern for the dire lasting effects. We are now seeing those lasting effects. Repeating the same mistakes that caused the problem will not solve the problem. Because amnesty did not work in the past, because illegals were not sent back in the past, because cheap labor and the Latino vote was more important to legislators than enforcement of our laws, almost any action taken now is unworkable. Lou Dobbs and his complaints are not wrong. Our government is wrong. Our government has been wrong about illegal immigrants for 20 years.