Son,

The news media is talking. Politicians are yapping. Bloggers are blogging. Protect America – close the borders!

This immigration thing has somehow been tied to terrorism. Immigration is also associated with economic prosperity. So the solution is to build a really big fence and train some pit bull border guards. Arm the general populace with assault rifles. Teach good Americans martial arts. Build a bureaucracy of anti-immigrant fighters. Resurrect the KKK with a new mission – they know how to deal with undesirables! The immigrants are just a bunch of low-life people who want to come here and steal our jobs and blow up our buildings. Round’em up. Ship them back to where they came from. That’ll fix’em! I remember an old police sergeant in my home town that once told me, “They should ship all the blacks (he used a different word) back to African and they should make people like you (me) the head oarsmen on the boats.”

In modern American we call this thoughtful discourse. I guess the thing that astounds me is the shallowness of the arguments. If we took half the money the U.S. Government spends to fight with people and invested it in education, health care, and economic prosperity in the world…

There I go. Just another give-away liberal. Discredited because of my desire to stop fighting, to help others. I think my proposals are just practical. Those Mexican illegal immigrants don’t want to come here – they are compelled by gut wrenching poverty in their home town. A man leaves his family, he goes to a far away land to clean the greasy floors at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Omaha, Nebraska; to scoop pig guts at Triumph Foods in St. Joseph, Missouri; to pick apples in some desolate region of the west; to clean a rich white man’s toilet. He lives in poverty – so he can send meager funds back home. He is a Catholic – but he is alone at Christmas. He is a pilgrim of sorts – but he has no Thanksgiving Dinner.

And we condemn him. We chastise him. We accuse him of being immoral, dirty, uneducated, and worthless.

Oh that more American men had this level of commitment to their family’s well being.

Sadness wins. The posturing by the prosperous as somehow ‘better’ disgusts me. The value of the immigrant in modern America rests in what he has to offer us – not in the self evident truth that all men are created equal, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Dad