City of Immigrants, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

May 15, 2010 Martha Thomases 17 Comments

There is a lot of arguing about illegal immigration, but none of the people doing the arguing ever discuss the aspects that seem to me to be most important.  In order to fill this vital gap, I’m going to use the high-profile of Michael Davis World to bring them to the attention of the world at large.

Illegal immigration is, well, illegal.  In general, I support the rule of law.  In certain specific cases, however, I favor civil disobedience.  Some of the people I most admire went to jail rather than be drafted into the military.  Since committing civil disobedience is serious (because breaking the law is serious), the person committing it must be willing to go to jail.  During the Viet Nam war, there was actually a movement to fill the jails with anti-war protesters to demonstrate how little support there was for that particular folly.

(As a side note, many people opposed the war by evading the draft, rather than resisting it.  All paid a price, either through alternative service, exile, and sometimes crippling self-injury.  And then there were those who evaded the draft through subterfuge, but supported the war.  Those people are hypocrites.  But that’s not what this column is about.)

When we talk about immigration, we need to remember why we’re here.  My cousin, Susan, has done a lot of research into our family history.  She discovered that the Thomases family is from a village in Romania.  In the 1880s, they were among the town’s Jews, all of whom were brought to New York by five wealthy Jewish families, who saved themselves and their people from pogroms.

Not everyone has friends with money.  My ancestors came here to escape violence and oppression.  They came here because  the United States offered the possibility of freedom and prosperity.  Yours probably did, too (if you’re white).

Who benefits from our policy regarding immigration?  When some people are here illegally, they may still be better off than they were in the land of their birth, but they are not free.  They are easy victims for all kinds of predators.  Employers can pay them much lower wages than they can to citizens and legal immigrants.  Often, this pay is far below minimum wage.  This not only exploits illegals, but suppresses wages for the rest of us.  Entire industries (e.g. restaurants, landscaping) are based on the premise that there is a large, illegal pool of workers who will work for crap wages under dreadful conditions without complaining.

Here in New York, we have all kinds of immigrants, legal and not.  There are Chinese, Irish, Pakistani, Sikh, Indian, Mexican, Dominican, Columbian – you get the idea.  For the most part, we coexist pretty well.  We ride the subway together.  We eat each others’ food.

So, do I believe in totally open borders?  I’m not sure.  The 9/11 hijackers were, for the most part, illegal immigrants, here on expired visas.  It seems reasonable (and good manners) to have rules that foreign visitors should follow when they are here, just as we should follow the rules in

the places we visit.  The rules should be fair, and reasonable.  I’d like to believe it’s possible for computers to keep track of people when their visas expire, but then, I’d like to believe that computers can do anything.

The ball sack who tried to blow up Times Square is not only a legal immigrant, but a naturalized citizen.  There are those who want to strip him of his citizenship and his rights – including his Miranda rights – because he is a suspected terrorist.  I disagree.  For one thing, even after they read him his rights, he continued to talk, so there has been no damage.  For another, according to our Constitution, our rights are “endowed by our Creator,” which implies that they cannot be taken away, nor are they exclusively the rights of Americans.

This guy is easily demonized as a terrorist because 1) he’s from a foreign country and 2) he actually did try to blow up Times Square.  What about other people who might be perceived as terrorists?  Should Timothy McVeigh have lost his citizenship?  What about those people who stalk women outside of health care clinics?  What about people who carry guns to Tea Party rallies?  I may perceive them as threatening: you may not.  The definition of a crime should not depend on a person’s swarthiness.

In the meantime, I think we can all agree that New York has improved noticeably since the addition of taco trucks.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases really enjoyed Iron Man 2 until she realized that they stole the ending from Ghostbusters.