Originally Posted by fnelson9

Chris,

You keep saying "I'm not against them because they are illegally here" yet 90% of your discussion is all about how they are illegally here. I'm still trying to figure out exactly why you want to kick these people out so badly.

Also, I think you might have misunderstood my post. "Illegal aliens are ILLEGAL, they are not "law-abiding" they are equivalent to felons, they didn't come here legally, etc." are your arguments, not mine. I was just re-stating what I took from your previous post.

When anyone comes to the U.S., they are moving from A to B. Whether they enter legally or illegally, that is what they are doing. Whether they enter legally or illegally, they are coming here because they believe life will be better here. I'm having a real hard time viewing that as criminal conduct.

So, what is the "real" difference between a legal entrant and an illegal entrant - not very much. One "followed the rules" and one didn't. You think that's incredibly significant for some reason - significant enough to call the person a "felon" and/or a "criminal" and use that label to justify forcibly removing them from the U.S. I, on the other hand, am not all that impressed with "the rules" so I'm not so morally outraged when someone breaks them. You complain about political pandering, yet "the rules" you hold so dear are entirely constructed of, by and through political pandering. Very, very little of what makes up our current immigration laws actually protects our security or ensures the "legal" immigrants will meet any particular moral, ethical or security standard - those laws exist, of course, but they are just a small fraction of the morasse of involuted statutes and regulations which comprise our immigration system.

If Congress had passed a law this morning making it a felony to exceed the speed limit, I would have been guilty of a couple of felonies today. You would be able to argue that I am both a criminal and a felon and try to persuade the rest of the world that I shouldn't be entitled to any government benefits because I am a criminal. However, the fact remains that all I did was drive 70 in a 65mph zone.

Immigration laws aren't any different. Congress creates illegal immigrants based on criteria which change almost constantly. An "illegal immigrant" today might very well have been a "legal immigrant" a decade ago and visa versa. In order to persuade me that illegal immigrants should be viewed and treated the same as armed robbers or child molesters (other groups of " felons"), you're going to have to convince me that what they did was "bad" - as in evil, harmful, destructive, etc. Merely telling me that it's "illegal" doesn't impress me very much.