History will be a harsh judge of how U.S. has treated Mexican immigrants
By NEIL STEINBERG, Chicago Sun-Times Column, October 26, 2007
Haters always have their reasons, always always always. Good, solid, reasonable reasons, at least in their own minds. If you tapped any Southern slave owner on the shoulder, he could unspool a litany of exactly why blacks should remain forever slaves -- because they're inferior, because they can't learn, because God Almighty intends them to be slaves -- reasons that nauseate us today but made perfect sense to them, then.
Give our modern world credit. The "illegal" canard brandished by those who want a permanent underclass of Hispanic serfs -- shorn of rights except the right to work hard at crap jobs until deported -- is a stroke of genius. You can be the most rule-averse, speeding, tax-cheating, shoplifting American miscreant and suddenly you're Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes if it means keepin' down them Mexicans.
Forget that we invite them in with our open borders. Forget that some have been here for decades. Forget that our mechanism for citizenship is broken. Their papers are not in order, so they must be made to suffer and their children made to suffer, as evidenced by the Senate's craven rejection of Dick Durbin's DREAM Act, the one shred of immigration reform that should have been completely unopposed, a modest plan to let teens brought here as children qualify for college assistance or join the army and harbor hopes of becoming citizens of the country where they have spent most of their lives.
These are days of shame. Someday, in the country we are assuredly becoming, we're going to look back and ask why we responded this way, who we thought we were fooling with our fig leaf of illegality and how we could have believed it hid our failure to act as decent Americans and compassionate human beings.