Alright, one last time and I’ll get off the immigration stuff. I’d like to talk a little bit about another email I received yesterday. By now most of you have probably seen it. It’s the one that asks, what do President’s, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower have in common?
Turns out that between the three of them, they deported something like 16 million illegal immigrants in order to provide jobs for American citizens. I suppose the mass-deportation crowd is trying to use this message as proof that it can be done. Yeah, they did it alright. But damn!
Google, Mexican Repatriation and Operation Wetback and see what you come up with. Since nobody’s really talking about it, I’m not sure that if I were trying to convince the American people the only way to fix the problem is to deport all illegals, I’d really want to bring any of this up.
I’m not sure I’d want to call attention to the fact that the Mexican Repatriation (yes, this is straight out of Wikipedia) refers to the forced migration that took place between 1929 and 1939, when as many as 1 million people of Mexican descent were forced or otherwise pressured to leave the U.S. It’s estimated that up to 60% of those driven out were U.S. citizens. And the event was carried out by American authorities and took place without any kind of due process.
Operation Wetback was carried out in 1954 by the Eisenhower administration in order to make jobs available to vets returning from WW11 and Korea. Just makes sense, right?
The effort began (yes, this one’s straight out of Wikipedia too) in California and Arizona. Tactics included going as far as systematic police sweeps of Mexican-American neighborhoods and random ID check points of “Mexican-looking” people. Some 750 agents targeted agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions per day.
Yeah, I suppose if the emailer’s intent was to prove that mass-deportation is possible, he accomplished that. But it also proves that the people like our very own, mrwednesdaynight and nimper, you know the one’s out there jumping up and down and yelling about “civil rights” are right too.
And damn, I hate it when that happens…
Kevin McGinty
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
"But"...
Depending on who’s telling the story, we have somewhere between 12 and 20 million illegal immigrants living in America today with 465,000 or so in Arizona alone. How much higher must those numbers climb before we quit pretending it’s not a problem?
They say we have around 75,000 illegal immigrants currently detained in our Federal prison system. Again, how much higher must that number climb before someone finally has enough common sense and say, this is ridiculous? There’s no reason for it.
I haven’t seen a study on it, but common sense should tell us that way too many local, county, and state, jail and court systems, especially in the south-western states, are overwhelmed by cases brought on by illegal immigrants. At least that seems to be the case in Arizona.
What are they supposed to do? How many more rapists, murders, and thugs in general should Arizona be forced to let in? How many more drug related kidnappings should they have to deal with? How many more armed robberies? How many more violent gang members (M 13) do you think Arizona needs? How many more cops and land owners need to be gunned down before it’s okay to do something about it?
How many more terrorists should be allowed to come in through South America, work their way up through Mexico, and simply walk across our southern border? Yeah I know, that’s just crazy talk, right? Is It? You know that for a fact, right? Think about it. Right after the attacks of 9-11, the first thing we did was to tighten up security at our airports. It didn’t make it impossible to sneak a terrorist in that way but it did make things harder. You can say what you want about the terrorist organizations who want to do us harm, but you can’t say they’re stupid. If they can’t get in through the front door, they’ll just come in through the back door which everybody in the world know, is wide open.
No guys, this isn’t about racism. It’s not about hating someone simply because they come from somewhere else. It’s not about denying someone the chance to come here in order to provide a better way of life for their families either. Those are the people we want. Since we all came here from somewhere else, these people are no different than we are and we should do everything we can to make room for them, period.
What’s at stake here is public safety and our national security. We can either do something about it. Or we can do like we’ve been doing all along and pretend it’s not a problem…
Kevin McGinty
They say we have around 75,000 illegal immigrants currently detained in our Federal prison system. Again, how much higher must that number climb before someone finally has enough common sense and say, this is ridiculous? There’s no reason for it.
I haven’t seen a study on it, but common sense should tell us that way too many local, county, and state, jail and court systems, especially in the south-western states, are overwhelmed by cases brought on by illegal immigrants. At least that seems to be the case in Arizona.
What are they supposed to do? How many more rapists, murders, and thugs in general should Arizona be forced to let in? How many more drug related kidnappings should they have to deal with? How many more armed robberies? How many more violent gang members (M 13) do you think Arizona needs? How many more cops and land owners need to be gunned down before it’s okay to do something about it?
How many more terrorists should be allowed to come in through South America, work their way up through Mexico, and simply walk across our southern border? Yeah I know, that’s just crazy talk, right? Is It? You know that for a fact, right? Think about it. Right after the attacks of 9-11, the first thing we did was to tighten up security at our airports. It didn’t make it impossible to sneak a terrorist in that way but it did make things harder. You can say what you want about the terrorist organizations who want to do us harm, but you can’t say they’re stupid. If they can’t get in through the front door, they’ll just come in through the back door which everybody in the world know, is wide open.
No guys, this isn’t about racism. It’s not about hating someone simply because they come from somewhere else. It’s not about denying someone the chance to come here in order to provide a better way of life for their families either. Those are the people we want. Since we all came here from somewhere else, these people are no different than we are and we should do everything we can to make room for them, period.
What’s at stake here is public safety and our national security. We can either do something about it. Or we can do like we’ve been doing all along and pretend it’s not a problem…
Kevin McGinty
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Coming To America...
I’ve been trying to figure out a way to write about the new Arizona Immigration Bill that was just recently signed into law without coming across as a raging racist. Some of you’ll hear me out and some of you will call me a racist no matter what I have to say. So, good or bad, right or wrong, I might as well jump right in there.
Unless you’re a Native American, and they’re the one’s who really got screwed. But all the rest of us are here in this country as a direct result of immigration of some form or another. Immigration is how this country was built in the first place.
Me, I’m the sixth generation descendent of an Irish immigrant named, Bernard McGinty. Other than names and dates, I really don’t know his story. I don’t know why he was willing to risk literally everything to move his family to America. Hell, for all I know, he might have been running from the law. I suspect though, like thousands of other Irish immigrants of his time, he was escaping the punishing poverty and sickness that had become so widespread and common in Ireland.
I can’t help but wonder how he’d feel about the way his family turned out. Like any really big family, we’ve had our share of problems. It’s turned into a family made up of people from, literally, all over the world. We’re made up of people from every political and religious point of view imaginable. Most of us just have regular every day jobs and try to raise our families the best we can. We have at least two Airline Pilots, one doctor, and three registered nurses that I know of. A lawyer or two. And yeah, some of us just haven’t been able to get it quite right. A few among us have ended up in prison. And if you think that’s not coming out during a fight with your wife, you’re crazy.
We don’t get together as often as we’d like but when we do, it’s always a good time. It’s a good time to relax and just be you. All the sudden, he’s not the “Big Shot” who runs the power company in South Dakota, he’s just uncle Mike to us. If we’re talking about my cousin’s little boy, Daniel, well, he’s just a cool little kid. We all know the story of how they adopted Daniel from Guatemala but really, none of that matters. He’s just Daniel to us. Same thing with Lucy and Aurora, the little twin girls my wife’s brother and his wife adopted a couple years ago from China. They’re just Lucy and Rorey to us. When my loud mouthed, Aaron and his wife show up, it’s just, hey guys, Aaron and Maria are here. It’s not, Aaron and that girl from Mexico he married. You see, none of that matters and it’s really all that important. We’re just a great big, sometimes dysfunctional, family and that’s good enough for us.
No, I don’t know for sure what Bernard McGinty would think of the family he started all those years ago. But I do believe he’d be glad to know the huge gamble he took by bringing his own family to America in the first place paid off. And I think he’d agree that, all things considered, it’s a pretty damn fine family.
So yeah, I know a thing or two about immigration and understand what it means to someone wanting to come here. I get it.
But…
Kevin McGinty
Unless you’re a Native American, and they’re the one’s who really got screwed. But all the rest of us are here in this country as a direct result of immigration of some form or another. Immigration is how this country was built in the first place.
Me, I’m the sixth generation descendent of an Irish immigrant named, Bernard McGinty. Other than names and dates, I really don’t know his story. I don’t know why he was willing to risk literally everything to move his family to America. Hell, for all I know, he might have been running from the law. I suspect though, like thousands of other Irish immigrants of his time, he was escaping the punishing poverty and sickness that had become so widespread and common in Ireland.
I can’t help but wonder how he’d feel about the way his family turned out. Like any really big family, we’ve had our share of problems. It’s turned into a family made up of people from, literally, all over the world. We’re made up of people from every political and religious point of view imaginable. Most of us just have regular every day jobs and try to raise our families the best we can. We have at least two Airline Pilots, one doctor, and three registered nurses that I know of. A lawyer or two. And yeah, some of us just haven’t been able to get it quite right. A few among us have ended up in prison. And if you think that’s not coming out during a fight with your wife, you’re crazy.
We don’t get together as often as we’d like but when we do, it’s always a good time. It’s a good time to relax and just be you. All the sudden, he’s not the “Big Shot” who runs the power company in South Dakota, he’s just uncle Mike to us. If we’re talking about my cousin’s little boy, Daniel, well, he’s just a cool little kid. We all know the story of how they adopted Daniel from Guatemala but really, none of that matters. He’s just Daniel to us. Same thing with Lucy and Aurora, the little twin girls my wife’s brother and his wife adopted a couple years ago from China. They’re just Lucy and Rorey to us. When my loud mouthed, Aaron and his wife show up, it’s just, hey guys, Aaron and Maria are here. It’s not, Aaron and that girl from Mexico he married. You see, none of that matters and it’s really all that important. We’re just a great big, sometimes dysfunctional, family and that’s good enough for us.
No, I don’t know for sure what Bernard McGinty would think of the family he started all those years ago. But I do believe he’d be glad to know the huge gamble he took by bringing his own family to America in the first place paid off. And I think he’d agree that, all things considered, it’s a pretty damn fine family.
So yeah, I know a thing or two about immigration and understand what it means to someone wanting to come here. I get it.
But…
Kevin McGinty
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