Illegal diatribe
Most of the idiotic excuses for illegal immigration in a single email. (Blame white people)
Here's an email from a reader responding to a column I did on illegal- immigrant felons whom Mayor Nutter will protect from the feds. (The chief fed being President Obama, of course.)
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/stu_bykofsky/20140502_Foreign_felons__welcome_.html
The email is so stupendous in its misunderstanding of the issue, and mixing an ounce of fact with a gallon of emotion, I am presenting the entire note, with my detailed analysis following.
All White people in the U.S., including you, are the
descendants of illegal immigrants who came here and stole the land and
resources from the Native Americans, through trickery and violence,
while polluting the environment and keeping the wealth for a few select
Whites, until the unions and Democrats forced change. Your hypocrisy is even more infuriating when you pretend to be concerned about crime and "felons", then criticize smoking bans where children
play, thus proving you have no moral character whatsoever and no true concern about crime.
Your racist and moral hypocrisy, and your inflammatory and
hateful rhetoric like "they violate our sovereignty", is an
embarrassment to the Daily News, the city of Philadelphia, the state of
Pennsylvania, your generation and all European-Americans (who are the
descendants of illegal aliens and who are living on stolen land) and I
think it's time that you resign or be fired for your disgraceful, and
hypocritical, hate-mongering and your total inability to know right from
wrong.
Sincerely,
Gabriel Gottlieb
My first thought was this probably came from Gilbert Gottfried, the loopy comic once on "Saturday Night Live."
But no – Gabriel Gottlieb is apparently serious.
He says I am a descendant of "illegal immigrants who came here and stole the land and resources from the Native Americans…."
Well, first I am a Philadelphian and it is an historical fact that William Penn bought land from the Native Americans and signed a treaty with them that was enduring.
There was neither trickery nor violence, although that was not always the case as regards European treatment of Native Americans, which in many cases was criminal. Probably the majority. It is a stain on our history.
I'm sure Gabriel wouldn't see it this way, but what happened to Native Americans is an example of what happens when you don't control your borders.
Second, since my ancestors arrived in the early part of the 20th Century, that land was already "stolen" and my grandparents, who lived in jammed tenements on the Lower East Side, where the beneficiaries of nothing other than the exquisite blessing of freedom and the ability to pursue happiness.
Nor were they illegal. They followed the law and rules of the time. Almost all immigrants of that (and earlier periods – Irish, German, Italian, Scandinavian) – stopped at Ellis Island (or similar) and were there processed and documented. If Gabriel chooses to visit Liberty Island in New York Harbor, he will see the documents for himself.
I will ignore his laborious Marxist riff about the environment and wealth as being not germane to the issue at hand. Clearly, my family was not among those few who got rich at the expense of others. Probably the same is true for you.
Now, about my moral character and crime because I criticized Mayor Nutter's ban on smoking in city parks.
Where to start? How about here: Laws are passed by legislative bodies, Gabriel, not by the edict of a mayor or president. So the ban is not law. Ignoring it would not be a "crime," let alone a felony. But I did not say I would violate it, did I? I did not encourage anyone else to violate it, did I?
As to the "children" – a favorite prop of do-gooders – are there children on every square foot of Fairmount Park? Is there no nook or cranny where there are no children and where smokers can light up?
The city streets are far more crowded, with children!, but the mayor didn't ban smoking on city streets, did he? (No, he didn't. Not yet.)
But all that is a distraction because Gabriel decided not to defend the idea of giving foreign felons a free pass. Not "immigrants," even if illegal -- felons.
Every nation has the right – actually, the duty – to enact immigration laws and the U.S. admits more immigrants each year than the rest of the world combined.
They are legal and at least once a year I write a column celebrating the foreigners who elected to join the American family – the right way.
Like this one from South Korea:
Or this one from Sierra Leone:
http://articles.philly.com/2012-07-06/news/32566796_1_new-citizens-citizenship-american-dream
Oh, yeah. I am one big racist.
Every nation writes its own immigration laws and to arrive illegally, or overstay a visa, is, in fact, a violation of U.S. sovereignty. Gabriel doesn't like those words. The truth hurts. As I have written, we can't allow our sympathy for them to prohibit us to ask them why they didn't behave in the right way.
Gabriel then repeats the tired and false trope that my people arrived illegally, they did not, and stole land, they did not, and brilliantly concludes I should quit or be fired for not knowing right from wrong.
The only thing Einstein didn't include was a explanation of why it is "right" for immigrants to come here the "wrong" way.
Others have made that case and if they do so here, I will answer it.
All the soft-headed, point-at-someone-else whining can't turn wrong into right.
Although they try, they really try.
--
As regards illegals, I ask them three questions:
Having broken our law, arrived here illegally, they now demand special treatment – protection from the laws they knowingly violated. Not many citizens have that much chutzpah.
The criminals among them must be arrested and jailed and/or deported.
The rest? I'm with President Obama, whose plan is almost identical to one I proposed two years before his:
Come out of the shadows, get documented, pay whatever fines or taxes that are due, have a clean record, learn English, and then, if you want to become a citizen (and many of them don't), go to the end of the line and get processed after every single immigrant who did things the right way. Yes, it might take years. It takes years for legal immigrants and your bad behavior can't be rewarded with any special treatment.
Even if saying that makes me a hypocritical, hate-mongering racist.