To hear the media cover immigration, you'd get the sense that the United States has slammed the door in the faces of a world that wants to come here, so if there are illegal immigrants here, what could you expect?
What you could expect, of course, is that those illegal immigrants would try to come here legally.
Here's another angle on illegal immigration, though: Do illegal immigrants take away job opportunities from legal immigrants? The Foreign Language Blog has some anecdotal evidence that indeed they do:
It seems in the wake of the federal raids on the Swift meat-packing plants, wherein some 300 illegally-employed workers were arrested from the Cactus, TX branch, other, legal, immigrant groups have been coming from around the country to take their places, lured by relatively high wages ($12/hr. starting) and low cost of living...
So the next time you hear the sob story of some illegal immigrant who was just trying to make a better life, take some time to think of the story of another immigrant, someone who waited in line, filled out the forms and played by the rules and ask yourself, Do we want to honor this person's efforts to come here the right way? Or do we want to tell those whose actions indicate they view living in our land as a privilege to be won, not a right to be seized, that they are chumps? Just sayin'.
