Tag: Dispatches

The final piece of my five-part Dispatches series on immigration reform is up.

Dispatches is up — another in my five-part series on immigration in Central Jersey.

This week’s Dispatches is the second of my five-part series on immigration in Central Jersey — the driver’s license debate.

I’ve received about a half dozen comments on this week’s Dispatches column, “Immigration misperceptions stymie reform,” mostly from people who think I am a) crazy or b) a pie-eyed, or who make less-than-veiled attacks on the ethnicity of the undocumented.

I share some of it here, just to give you a taste:

From “BajaRat”: “Illegal aliens are criminals and parasites, one and all. Their very presence here and practically everything they do on U. S. soil is illegal. They need to be ferreted out, rounded up like cattle, punished for their numerous crimes, then booted back to whence they snuck in from with such extreme prejudice that they will never, ever think of violating our sovereignty again. Enough is enough.”

Hmmm. Check the language — parasites, cattle, criminals who’ve committed numerous crimes, sneaky. Pretty harsh.

From “From Gay Marriage to Illegal Immigration”: “Hank Kalet, there you go again. Lets start from the basic premise that illegal immigrants are not legal immigrants. It is not fair to those legal immigrants that may have waited their turn to enter this country legally.

Kalet is a liberal in every sense of the word.

We seem to have excused Turbo Tax Cheat Tim Geithner from paying his taxes even after he signed a form notifying him that he needed to pay his taxes that the IMF gave him a separate check specifically for this tax. So what do we do – we put this guy in charge of among other things the IRS. Now that is pretty blatant.

So now Hank Kalet wants us to lump in illegal immigrants with the legal ones. Hey, no need to follow the law. furthermore, lets be sensitive and give these folks a drivers license. I would say they might as well drive illegally as well. In-state tuition should be given as well. Lets not forget the free health care at the emergency room.

Please don’t give us this c r a p about the TV guys and Republicans. Either it is the law or it isn’t. That is the part that infuriates us.

Now if you want to call Hank directly at the Packet to discuss this be sure to press #1 for English, or is that #2?”

Yes, I am a liberal. And yes, I do believe gays and lesbians should be able to marry. What this has to do with the plight of the undocumented is beyond me, as is the odd Tim Geithner tangent. Best I can tell is this may be an Obama reference — you know, “the devil.”

This “it’s the law trope,” by the way, is a logical non-sequiter, failing to address the underlying ethics of the immigration debate. Yes, the undocumented have broken the law — as have all of those people who drive above the speed limit, lie on their tax forms, do home remodeling without a permit, smoke the occasional joint or authorize torture in interrogations. All of these things are illegal; their morality, however, has nothing to do with their legality.

The issue is not necessarily the law, but the ethical underpinning of the law. Laws change — slavery was legal and endorsed by the U.S. Constitution and interracial marriage was against the law until the 1960s. The question, in the end, is what purpose a law serves and I see no public purpose to taking a hardline approach with some poor manual laborer, but letting a presidential administration off the hook for violating national anti-torture statutes (yes, this is my own non-sequiter, but I think it’s a relevant one).

Dispatches, which is the first of a multi-part series of columns on immigration in Central Jersey, is up here.