Sunday, August 8, 2010

On Deporting Illegal Immigrants

What with it's never being boring around here, Israelis are all roiled up these days about the intention to deport hundreds of foreign workers who don't have permits to be here but have children below age five (the government has determined that if there are children in school already, i.e. older than five, they and their families get to stay here permanently and acquire citizenship).

It's a complex subject which I'll look at in depth someday. Today I'd simply like to quote The Economist on a totally different matter:
At bottom the argument between Arizona and its critics is political. The stated aim of 1070 is to reduce the number of illegal immigrants, mainly by enforcing federal laws which local politicians accuse the federal government of neglecting. Although Mr Obama is in fact deporting more illegals (a total of about 400,000 a year) than George Bush did, that cuts little ice in Arizona because people know his eventual hope (or at least the one he dangles in front of Hispanic voters) is to give illegals a pathway to citizenship, not kick out as many as possible. Mr Obama’s policy was also Mr Bush’s, and is probably the only humane way forward. But in Arizona “amnesty” has been turned into a dirty word. [my italics]
Obama's administration is deporting 400,000, that's four hundred thousand illegal immigrants a year, and the Israelis are agonizing, correctly or not, about deporting fewer than one thousand. Interesting, isn't it.

4 comments:

RK said...

Oh, those cruel Americans. Except you didn't mention that those 400,000 illegal immigrants are almost certainly not children (or at least U.S.-born children), since unlike Israel (and many Western European countries), the U.S. extends automatic birthright citizenship even to the children of illegal aliens. In effect, part of the question Israelis are mulling nowadays has long since been resolved in the U.S., in favor of the immigrants.

Some politicians on the Right have proposed revising this, but it would likely require a Constitutional amendment (though some of them dispute this). In other words, it's not going to happen.

Anonymous said...

RK
a bit misrepresenting American history, aren't you?

a by ol' world standards vast country, almost a continent, with just 2 neighbours, in need of immigration in most of its history, whenever it wanted to settle more land (or maybe it was the other way around), sounds a bit "let them eat cake" when it demands of ol' worlders do as wonderfully as we do.

OT but still rankling with me:
Do you remember the time when all your media told us that you would never have home-grown muslim terrorists because you knew how to do it right? (our more idiotic pundits leapt that up by the way and the "wisdom" was universal)

Silke

AKUS said...

Thanks for pointing htis out:

"(the government has determined that if there are children in school already, i.e. older than five, they and their families get to stay here permanently and acquire citizenship)."

Its been lost in the sound and fury.

Anonymous said...

Leave it to the Economist to get the story wrong. There are over 500,000 illegals in Arizona ALONE, and an estimated 10-20 million countrywide. The problem with believing that Obama is deporting 400,000 a year is that those deportations are not permanent; i.e., that many simply walk back across the border. We have cases of illegals having been deported up to 13 times and still we find them in the country after an arrest. No wonder we despise the term amnesty-It merely rewards continued law breaking.