AMNESTY FOR UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS

The opponents of immigration say that they don't want amnesty. I WANT AMNESTY. The 12 million undocumented workers currently in the U.S. (please don't call them "illegal aliens") have come to the U.S. to seek work and to make a better life for the family children. Let's by a simple act of Congress according amnesty bring them into the open by giving them a chance to obtain permanent legal residency and citizenship if that's what they want.

But consider this article today on The New York Times web page by reporter Julia Preston.

"The undoing of the immigration bill in the Senate this week had many players, but none more effective than angry voters like Monique Thibodeaux, who joined a nationwide campaign to derail it.

"Mrs. Thibodeaux, an office manager at a towing company here in suburban Detroit, became politically active as she never had before. Guided by conservative Internet organizations, she made calls and sent e-mail messages to senators across the country and pushed her friends to do the same.

"“These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period,” Mrs. Thibodeaux, a Republican, said of some 12 million illegal immigrants who would have been granted a path to citizenship under the Senate bill.

"“In my heart I knew it was wrong for our country,” she said of the measure."

I too hated the Senate Bill 1348 because it was harsh and punitive towards immigrants. I don't want to build a hated wall along the U.S. Mexican frontier. I don't want to penalize applicant immigrants with fines and long waits. I don't want to create a class of underclass temporary workers who would be deprived of any rights to petition for residency or citizenship. I therefore want S. 1348 to die once and for all.

"Here in Michigan, speaking at her neatly maintained home under hickory trees in Washington, a town north of Detroit that has been battered by auto company layoffs, Mrs. Thibodeaux said the immigration bill worried her like no other political issue. She believed it would reward undeserving immigrants who do not speak English and would soon become a burden on public services that Americans need in a time of economic uncertainty."

But I am also against "mean" Republicans like Mrs. Thibodeaux as reported in The NY Times piece. I suspect these people are not so much anti-immigrant as anti-Latino-immigrant. Just because an immigrant speaks Spanish, it seems the Republicans can generate a loud and racist group to lobby against giving immigrants any rights.

"Mrs. Thibodeaux said she favored orderly legal immigration, but did not think illegal immigrants should benefit from American generosity.

"“I have a very hard time with illegal,” she said. She proposes that all illegal immigrants be given a 90-day period to leave voluntarily. After that, immigration agents, local police and the National Guard, if necessary, should be mobilized to deport them, she said."

People like Mrs. Thibodeaux represent everything that's small and mean and racist about those who would so meanly deport 12 million undocumenteds and their families.