Another Day, Another Rightwing Frame

To be fair... (0.00 / 0)

To be fair to Jon, that's been his stance since day one in the election.

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by: Jay Stevens @ Fri May 25, 2007 at 01:33:33 AM UTC

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Has Max flip-flopped on this issue, or has it also been his stance as well?

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by: Mathello @ Fri May 25, 2007 at 02:39:21 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

He's never been so demeaning to a group of people (0.00 / 0)

The anti-immigrant sentiment in this country is bad enough, the FBI recently arrested a bunch of people looking to attack a Hispanic community. Stirring up more hatred is the last thing that's needed.

Amnesty and illegal aliens really are the words of the far-right.

This is something where I've disagreed with Jon from day one, but he's crossing a line now in this rhetoric.

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by: Matt Singer @ Fri May 25, 2007 at 14:46:34 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Leadership should take a few staffers to the woodshed (0.00 / 0)

My impression was that Matt's complaint was - once again - the use of stock right-with frames to explain their position.  Give 'em a week and maybe we'll see "tax and spend Democrats" and "cut and run" dusted off? 

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by: Nick Domitrovich @ Fri May 25, 2007 at 02:50:36 AM UTC

Turner (0.00 / 0)

I'm a mainstream progressive with respect to most issues.  I favor gay marriage, getting out of Iraq now, getting rid of all lobbyists, pursuing investigations into the corrosive influence of the large corporations in in our government, etc.

But, while I favor our continued engagement internationally -- especially in reducing the pain (some of it caused by European and American imperialism)  in third world countries through the UN -- I remain very much a nationalist.

I believe that we have a country and that our country has self-interested laws that must be upheld.  Some of these laws have to do with protecting our boundaries from being overrun by non-Americans seeking to circumvent our normal immigration policies (which may need to be streamlined and made fair).

This is not xenophobia, racist, or right-wing.  It is common sense.  I don't see how anyone can view the videos of groups of young men illegally sneaking across our southern border at night and not be outraged.  If we have laws about immigration, where are the people who are supposed to enforce them?

And who are these guys sneaking across the border?  Are they the well-intentioned, hard-working folks that I'm told they are by my pro-amnesty friends? Or are they thugs coming into a country where crime pays better than it did where they came from?

How can we know who's coming into our country unless we screen them through some sort of orderly, fair process? 

By the way, why is it so impossible to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants?  Maybe we can't locate and deport ALL of them, but why not start with closing off the border completely for a while, punishing illegal employers, and setting a target number of, say, 50,000 deportations per year?  These measures would work wonders.

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by: Turner @ Fri May 25, 2007 at 14:59:25 PM UTC

The gay marriage of this cycle (0.00 / 0)

You hit the problem on the head when you said, "Punishing illegal employers..."  As long as Americans make it a viable option for these people to escape poverty with a short trip across the border, no amount of enforcement will ever cut the number of illegal immigrants flowing into the country. 

When I lived in Chicago, half my friends worked at restaurants and bars and the ENTIRE kitchen staffs of these places were here with no visas from Mexico and other Latin and Hispanic countries.  The management and owners of these restaurants didn't give two seconds thought about hiring this labor.  I regularly heard things like, "Oh, your 15 year old cousin wants a full time job doing dishes back here?  Just have him come back with some papers and we'll set him up, etc..." 

I got to know several of these workers pretty well in the course of the time I was there and it was amazing what they could do in their home countries with the money that they saved here.  Many of these young men were building homes for their families, etc... Just waiting to save enough before they went back.

The true offenders are the people who facilitate and foster these situations in the first place.  If we truly wanted to make an issue of illegal immigration (right now it's just another right-wing call-to-action for the coming election cycle), we could address the problem overnight with series of raids and indictments on the major employers.  But you and I both know that will never. 

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by: Nick Domitrovich @ Fri May 25, 2007 at 15:30:55 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Turner (0.00 / 0)

Clarification: By "close off the border entirely for while" I think I mean aggressively screening incoming traffic so that only those people with visas or justifiable reasons for coming in are allowed to enter.  It might also mean putting a lot of national guardsmen on the border to stop illegal crossings.

It would slow things down a lot.  But it would be worth it.

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by: Turner @ Fri May 25, 2007 at 15:08:28 PM UTC

Letting Them Dominate the Debate (0.00 / 0)

Anti-immigrant groups have been allowed to dominate this debate for too long behind groups like the Minutemen.  No one is scared of coming of xenophobic or anti-immigrant.

It is time to change that.  We need to unite behind immigration reform in the same way we've united behind other issues.

Learn about the new pro-immigration reform PAC that supports candidates who are willing to stand up for whats right: www.immigrantslist.org

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by: dseman @ Tue May 29, 2007 at 17:33:25 PM UTC