Illegal
immigrants deserve chance in America
Bradley Zint
Not a lot of things manage to get far beneath my skin, but I’m really sick
and tired of the people who call themselves the “Minutemen.” They
have managed to pervade the news, promoting their ideology that Latinos, many
of them Mexican, who enter the United States illegally, deserve immediate deportation.
Why do those Latinos deserve such treatment? Because they’re illegal and
that fact consequently makes them law-breakers and evil-doers, persons not deserving
to be here.
What a load of crap.
To be promoting such short-sided ideology in the name of American revolutionaries,
men who died to make this country a reality, is a load of crap, too.
That nasty fecal combination really gets to me.
I stand firmly in my belief America is a land full of promise, where individuals
can break the shackles of poverty and rise in society.
But no one said that was easy. We are all architects of our own destiny here.
America is full of promise, but it’s a promise you have to fight for.
Many immigrants coming from countries like Mexico, legally or illegally, are
fighting for that promise. They’re fighting for a day’s wage, fighting
for a roof over their heads and fighting for that one chance to have a better
life.
The Minutemen do not want to give them that chance. This group makes me ashamed
to be an American in a country that cannot uphold the motto on its most famous
statue, “give me your tired, your poor.”
This week’s San Diego Union-Tribune reported a Minutemen-like group tried
to raid migrant camps in the canyons of Rancho Penasquitos, a suburban district
on the northern end of San Diego’s city limits. This district has dozens
of canyons separating the housing tracts. They are little hills teeming with
coastal sagebrush and rabbits. Many immigrants camp out there because they cannot
afford proper housing.
This search to, according to the border watch group’s e-mail, “observe,
report and direct the Border Patrol,” is a wasted one. Fortunately, I’ve
got a new idea that could funnel these people’s energies toward a more
worthwhile effort.
Instead of trying to deport hard-working illegals trying to put food in their
own mouths, why don’t they instead target the legal, idiotic suburbanites?
You know, the kids who don’t have jobs, who loiter in front of Vons, don’t
do well in school and are likely to drop out of junior college and waste the
opportunity given to them at birth.
These people squander the beautiful prospects of this country, prospects illegal
immigrants wish they or their kids could have.
Let us compare them with many illegal immigrants, who either have consistent
work illegally or manage to find daily labor, who never had enough of an education
to attend college, much less high school, and don’t live luxuriously enough
to waste anything.
Yeah, let’s go after those culprits—because they’re here illegally.
I do know one thing. I will never deny anyone the opportunity to come to this
country and work, possibly providing themselves or their kids that one chance
for something better. I’m proud to come from a country that continues to
give that opportunity to people.
It’s not an illegal immigrant’s fault his or her respective countries
are in such poor and corrupt shape as to not provide for their inhabitants. In
the sense of survival, how are those people really different from anyone else?
I only wish more of us, and especially those Minutemen, felt the same way.
Bradley Zint is a junior journalism and political science major and the opinion
editor of the Daily Forty-Niner.
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