Fuck the Debate on Illegal Immigration

There is no widely accepted correct answer in the question of illegal immigrants. The two most commonly heard arguments are "those dark skinned savages are stealing our jobs, money, and turning our urban areas into third-world countries" and "they are taking the jobs that nobody in the US wanted in the first place, including poor and unemployed people (in fact, before people started immigrating en mass into the US, nobody had those jobs, the companies were just sitting there waiting for the Latinos to come)". Yes, I know nobody actually says it like that, but I can say with almost complete certainty that the subtext that I've included is there. Even in their more harmless form, they're both stupid arguments, although only one also has the distinction of also being subtly racist (yay for culturally acceptable racism!). It's interesting that I've never actually heard of arguments in favor of amnesty programs coupled with serious corporate accountability for breaking laws in order to get illegally cheap labor (although one of the reasons that I may not have heard it could have to do with the fact that I gave up on following the issue a few months ago). In fact, one of the more "reasonable" arguments in support of illegal immigration, is celebrating just the opposite: that it's good for US citizens because the immigrants are exploited by the people who employ them.

It really amuses me how paranoid "border security" enthusiasts are about the future if this "dire menace" isn't stopped (on a related note, I could probably write an entire post on the creepiness of language use in this debate). Usually these kind of doomsday scenarios are only reserved for the loony-bat left, and their whole crazy theory that global trade liberalization engineered by less than a handful of powerful countries and a few multinational corporations could potentially be bad for humanity as a whole (and other such nonsense). But I digress. And I thought crazy rich white people's paranoia about affirmative action was creepily hilarious. This stuff blows it out of the water. I'm not even going to address the ridiculousness of the more "liberal" arguments, because, for all it's depravity, the border security argument at least has some sort of grounding (blatant xenophobia and racism, scapegoating, and in some cases, pure laziness). The same cannot be said for most arguments I've heard from people who support illegal immigration (except for maybe the people who seem to be more pro-business than pro-immigration).

Now this would normally be the part where I would propose some sort of theory that would make the previous two paragraphs seem less like whining and more like focused criticism preceding a coherent solution. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed from the previous two paragraphs, my writing ability has seriously degraded in the past few months. Furthermore, I don't really know enough about this debate or the facts to have even warranted any article, much less a serious serious critique and proposition. In fact, the only reason I'm even publishing this is because I'm trying to motivate myself to start this up again, and maybe seeing a new post (and possibly some input, though I don't see how anyone could really bring themselves to respond to this rambling diatribe) could provide the right boost to write something more serious and cohesive.