I’d Be an Illegal Alien, Too
If I had been born in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador or Nicaragua, short of committing murder, I would do anything to get into the United States. That seems to be the rationale that many of those calling for open borders regard as a compelling argument. It’s not. Just because you or I can sympathize with those trying to sneak into this country and even, in my case, picture myself making the attempt, doesn’t make it right.
If I had been born in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador or Nicaragua, short of committing murder, I would do anything to get into the United States.
That seems to be the rationale that many of those calling for open borders regard as a compelling argument. It’s not. Just because you or I can sympathize with those trying to sneak into this country and even, in my case, picture myself making the attempt, doesn’t make it right. That’s the part that Democrats don’t understand. And by “Democrats,” I’m speaking of ordinary voters, not the politicians who see illegal aliens as potential votes and who don’t really care if they’re the “decent, hard-working” people they’re always yakking about or if they’re rapists, pedophiles and members of MS-13. A vote to those scumbags is a vote, no matter how vile the person casting it might be.
We are often told that these interlopers just want a better life for themselves and their children. But so do hundreds of millions of people in Europe, Asia and Africa. Why should people in Mexico and Central America have the advantage just because they don’t have to cross an ocean and can walk here?
In the old days, when people actually came here legally, a lot of them were drawn by rumors of streets paved with gold. But once they got here and faced reality, there were jobs even for the least educated among them.
Today, when technical skills are necessary even for many low-level jobs, we already have a glut of unskilled, ill-educated, people competing for manual jobs. Letting in millions more only makes the competition stiffer and the wages lower, while increasing welfare and over-crowding the schools, health clinics and prisons.
Two questions I have often asked myself is, one, whether anyone on the Left has ever had a good idea and, two, how it is that whether we’re talking about the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Los Angeles or San Francisco, they never seem to connect the dots between their political and economic policies and the poverty, the lack of freedom and the human misery that are the inevitable result of those policies.
Consider two of the Left’s favorite notions: minimum wage and rent control.
Time and again we have seen that whenever the government, state or federal, arbitrarily raises people’s wages, some people get more money and other people lose their jobs because their employers simply decide they’re not worth the extra few dollars an hour.
When it comes to rent control, something similar takes place. A few people receive the benefit of paying less for their apartments than they would if the landlord was able to charge whatever the traffic would bear. But it means that the landlord has no incentive to maintain the premises, let alone improve them.
It also means that people are a lot less likely to construct new apartment houses because the politicians are determining what they can charge. This, of course, inevitably leads to not only a shortage of dwellings, but to the ruination of entire neighborhoods.
One other thing it leads to is fraud. I used to live in the city of Santa Monica, California, sometimes referred to as Moscow by the Pacific or the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.
My wife and I lived in a condo which was next door to a rent control apartment house. Because the landlord was himself in a financial bind, not able to raise rents but still compelled to pay the highest property taxes in the nation, he saw no reason to pay a gardener to maintain the yard which had become a weed-infested eyesore.
However, I became acquainted with a couple who were the beneficiaries of the city policy. They weren’t elderly, they weren’t handicapped, they were young and apparently had a lot more money than I did. I know this because I would see him outside on the weekend washing his and her $50,000 cars.
And while I don’t know what the tenant laws are where you live, but here in California, you have to hire a lawyer if you wish to evict a tenant, even if it’s for non-payment of rent. The process can take months. On my block, here in North Hills, a young couple rented a house for a while. When they finally disappeared in the night, they left the home-owner holding the bag for $13,000 in unpaid rent.
Speaking of clueless Socialists, considering the contenders for the Democratic nomination, is it possible that they will cancel out each other and Trump will run unopposed?
I mean, Democrats are notoriously stupid, but it’s difficult to imagine a lot of people rallying to support these assorted doodlebugs.
Pete Buttigieg favors paying reparations not only to blacks, but to the children of illegal aliens.
Joe Biden admits he’d eliminate hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs in the oil industry in order to bring about a greener economy. (But obviously not greener in terms of money.)
And those two guys are what passes for moderates in the primary sweepstakes these days.
Somewhere Leon Trotsky is spinning in his grave and wondering if they’ve lost their minds.
Elizabeth Warren, who is trying so hard to tiptoe on the left-most edge of the party, she has been driven to state that when she’s president, she’d make it a priority to place trannies in the jails of their choice. Yes, you and I can easily see convicted rapists claiming to be women and insisting on being stashed in a women’s prison. But, apparently, that’s never occurred to Sen. Warren, perhaps because she’s trying so hard to lock up the votes of the three trannies presently living in Iowa.
Even though it’s not getting the attention it deserves, President Trump has finally gotten around to ending George W. Bush’s war on incandescent bulbs. The federal government is now officially out of the light bulb business. Now if only Trump would get us out of Bush’s other war, the one in Afghanistan, he will have earned yet another gold star, undoing much of the unnecessary mischief caused by the self-aggrandizing knuckleheaded son of a knuckleheaded father.
It troubles me that when members of the media, academia and the upper echelons of the federal bureaucracy, hear themselves referred to as elitists, they take it as a compliment. Is it possible they really believe the rest of us hold them in high regard? Are they that oblivious?
Don’t they understand that we’re referring to their snobbishness and their over-inflated opinion of themselves?
Do they really not understand that when normal people refer to someone as an elitist, we have in mind someone who’s pretentious and egotistical, someone, say, like Hillary Clinton, Karl Rove, Paul Krugman, George Stephanopoulos, John Brennan, Joe Scarborough, Eric Holder and James Comey?
Have they never noticed that whenever a conservative calls someone an elitist it’s said mockingly and that he accompanies it with air quotes or rolled eyes or both?
I always find it amusing when politicians try to present themselves as just regular folks, especially when they often try to prove it by having photo ops showing them noshing on hot dogs or pizza.
When they all congregated last summer at the Iowa State Fair to be photographed consuming such bizarre delicacies as bacon crisp ice cream, caramel-dipped pecan pie on a stick and deep-fried strawberry and chocolate cheesecake, I got my biggest laugh when committed vegan Cory Booker found himself having to gnaw on a deep-fried knockwurst on a stick for the cameras.
If they want to convince us they’re just regular Joes and Janes, I say they should fly commercial, getting to the airport three hours early so they can stand in endless serpentine lines and then take off their shoes and belts for the TSA agents. Or how about if they spend two or three hours a day commuting to and from their jobs driving their own cars and paying for their own gas for a change? Or let us see how they pay the mortgage, put food on the table and get their kids into private or religious schools, all on $50,000-a-year.
Until then, I’m sure it would be a lot easier to stomach all those deep-fried vittles at the Fair than it is to stomach their pretense of being dedicated public servants who share or even give a damn about our troubles.
