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AR-312319920

“‘This deferred action is a temporary permit,’ says Claudia, who fled from violence in her native Mexico and has been living in the US since 2000. ‘What is going to happen when Mr Obama is no longer president? They are going to know where I am, where my family is. Is it possible that we will all be deported?’ she tells the BBC in El Paso, Texas.” It’s an entirely sensible concern, expressed to the reporter in ‘The silent enemy of Obama’s migrant plans at bbc.com. “Now, with the new executive action, the Obama administration hopes many immigrants will provide their personal details, and it is confident the initiative will not be overturned when a new president comes to the White House in 2017. Remind you of anything? TTAG reader NC sees a parallel . . .

This story’s easily tied to the Connecticut gun registration and the subsequent banning of “assault weapons.” The main connection: a change in political climate can change a harmless registration into active confiscation (or in the migrants’ case deportation).

It’s not paranoia, it’s possible reality. The media understand this and is sympathetic. As long as it’s not guns.

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82 COMMENTS

  1. One thing the left seems to assume is that everyone who is anti illegal immigration is anti immigration.

    I personally have no problem with legal immigrants. Maybe we could polish the system a bit so less people will cross illegally, but the whole deferred action plan is making it harder for states to ensure the safety of their citizens.

    • I’ve found that they are trying to deny the use of the word, “illegal,” as it pertains to immigration. So that’s how they suggest anyone that is anti-illegal immigration is just anti-immigration.

      • You can have open immigration or a welfare state but you can only have one unless you are out to destroy the fabric of the nation

        • +1

          As I’ve pointed out in another comment here, I also think that we would need a strong shall not be infringed RKBA and less legal barriers to lawful self defense to retain the integrity of our nation with open immigration. I support open borders but certainly not without the elimination of the welfare state.

        • Open borders would be great if we could do so while keeping ALL constitutional limits on government power in place and undiminished, not just the RKBA, (and possibly enforce English as an official language since or laws are written in it and translations are intrinsically imperfect), however we know the whole purpose of opening the borders is to get a voting block that will expand government power.

        • @Marcus (Aurelius) Payne: I can’t disagree with your post and I too don’t think this administration’s purposes for porous borders is benign or genuinely altruistic.

      • That’s a standard tactic. Make a position appear to be some wild derivative of that position. For example:

        Against the Department of Education? Then you don’t want anyone to be educated.
        Against government welfare? Then you want poor people to die.
        Against mandatory gun permits? Then you’re want gun users to skip training and be stupid.
        Against the war on drugs? Then you want everyone to be a stoned-out psycho. Or you just want to smoke pot.

        Etc.

      • While I agree with you, there is a reason for the terminology debate that is not pure propaganda

        It has been unofficial policy for decades, largely in the agricultural and protein areas, to invite people over without papers

        So, the undocumented terminology rather than illegal is meant to highlight this unofficial support (largely from republican business owners and growers btw). If support is too strong, deliberate blind eye is certainly true

    • I don’t have a problem with immigration either, legal OR illegal. What I have a problem with is not working, not paying taxes, not adapting to American culture and language, and welfare eligibility.

      Off topic: Robert, the adds on your site are out of control. I have 3 add killing programs running and your site still stutters so much that every 4th-5th letter that I type doesn’t show up. This doesn’t happen anywhere but here. I have worn the print off of my backspace key fixing mistakes in almost every word that I type here.

      • If I have a post of any length, I type it in a word processing program, saving fairly often. Then copy and paste. It eliminates a lot of frustration.

      • I no longer try to read TTAG on a Windows PC. Despite my best defenses, it takes over the CPU and bloats the memory.

        My Android phone works much better.

        • course, my solution is using a monstrous gaming rig with gobs of CPU power on tap, more then plenty of RAM and a high end GPU. I figure if i can run 4 game clients simultaneously have a browser in the background with 12 tabs open, and watch a movie I am doing it right. Also, elaborate, it is lacking in power saving, energy star features (turned off, they interfere with my gaming) and has flaming maw into which I toss in old growth redwood trees (complete with spotted owls and hippie tree climbers) for power, and massive exhaust stack that spew pitch black smoke and cinders 24/7. All byproducts are stored in lead lined barrels and shipped to Chernobyl where nobody will notice them anyway.

          On the lighter side, i have used the video card exhaust to warm up the honey, it gets pretty solid on cold mornings.

      • If legalized you are probably right, and certainly right on some spend for schools etc

        But keep in mind most people here illegally pay taxes and receive no benefit. They use a fake or someone else’s ssn and so have all the payroll deductions but accrue no ss benefits and can claim no unemployment or workers comp etc

    • I’m afraid the “polishing” would have to be done with a chain saw. Trying to secure the border won’t work any better than prohibition did in the 1920s or the war on drugs works now. Instead, remove the incentives for illegal immigration.

      A hundred years ago, an immigrant with nothing more than a strong back and a will to work hard could make a living. If he failed, there was no social service network to support him. That’s no longer the case. To earn a middle class living and pay for the social services you consume, you need a skilled trade or a college degree. Jeff refers to “working in the farm fields for minimum wage”. We already have enough native born citizens unqualified to do anything better without importing more from foreign countries.

      • I’m for open borders but in conjunction with elimination of social welfare programs, a strong (as in shall not be infringed) RKBA, and less restrictions on ordinary self defense in law. IMHO, open borders without these other fixes creates the disaster we have now.

    • You would have to do more than polish it. Immigrating legally is pretty difficult, and it’s not a line at the border per se where if you just wait long enough you’ll get your turn. If you aren’t a highly skilled individual who can afford to get here and stay here legally, the barriers are really high and you will likely never get to the front of the line.

  2. All non citizens should be deported. All dual citizens should be deported and stripped of US citizenship. The borders should be closed with no immigration of any type for at least 50 years.

    • I definitely agree with deportation – at least in some cases. The fact that we have a significant portion of our population paying zero income taxes while using social services really irks me.

      • id just as soon have the income tax done away with entirely. Even considering how many public programs will get flushed, the private sector is much more efficient at getting things done, and the demand for certain services will spark its own industry.

        • +1

          My grandfather spoke out against the personal income tax. AFAIK, it wasn’t initially supposed to be permanent. He warned that once government had the revenue stream, government wouldn’t give it up voluntarily. He also warned that the amount taken by government would grow and would cause our people to become dependent upon socialism. He was concerned that the government would one day no longer know how to function without vast sums of money, a large segment of the population would become dependent on government social welfare programs, and the working segment would come to believe that the tax and these programs were crucial to our nation. IMHO, Gramps nailed it.

        • Income tax was passed due to it only being 1%. That lasted, what, 3-4 years? People back then were just as gullible as we are now. And crooks were just as willing to lie, in order to get their way.

        • Fun fact: our current withholding tax was implemented in 1943, not to fund WWII, but to fight inflation caused by the government spending on the war effort.

      • Of course, the big problem with the social services stuff is that anyone that’s on them is making little enough (legally anyway) to be eligible isn’t really paying taxes anyway. Sure, they pay some on their paycheck, but they get way more back come April 1, than they paid in.

        Being military and living below the poverty line for 8 years while I served, I know this for a fact. I paid in less than 2,000 each year, and got well over $5k back in refunds each year.

        No, the real problem is that no one is punished for hiring illegals. Not really. And obummercare actually encourages small businesses to hire people under the table to keep themselves off the stupid high tax bracket for having too many employees.

        • That reminds me, watch out for the terminology “means tested” when being sold all manner of giveaways. What the term means is, “If you are one of those who pays for it, you can not qualify to receive it”. ALL benefits of the federal government should be equally available to each and every American. We don’t allow only certain people to use the Interstate highway system, our military does not defend only some of us from foreign enemies. There should be no special benefits, particularly, that you have to be an abject failure with no recovery possible in order to collect them. If you have more children, you should pay MORE taxes, not less.

          Yet our representatives from both sides of the aisle keep pushing the concept of “means testing”, leading more and more people to pursue the lowest possible level of failure, in order to get that “free stuff”. It’s a slippery slope.

    • Because I’m sure you want your children working in farm fields for minimum wage. I don’t feel the border should be completely closed nor do I believe we should exploit a group of people for low wages but the belief in entitlement is killing our society. Look at the occupy movement.

      • People shouldn’t been entering the border at will. We are the only major country on the planet that this occurs. Many of these people are dangerous criminals. Even the so called “dreamers” that were brought here due to “no fault of their own” commit crimes including murder and join gangs. Ellis Island was not a free-for-all. More illegals have come over the Mexican border than came through Ellis Island during its entire operation (~12 million).

        • We are the only major country on the planet that this occurs

          You know this happens in literally every developed country across the world, right?

        • Immigration. Nearly every European country has tons of illegal immigrants pouring in from places like North Africa, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe.

      • What’s wrong with our kids working in the farm fields for minimum wage? I did it growing up, and it taught me the value of hard work and money. (Now I sound like my dad…) Kick people off unemployment rather than extending it, and there would be a lot less “jobs Americans won’t do.” What little money they made, they would spend here instead of sending it back to their families in Mexico.

        • I agree with both. I worked in the fields for two summers for less than minimum wage. Those experiences gave me heavy motivation to go to college and get a good job. All the while I managed to pay taxes and respect the Constitution.

          As I’ve said before, illegals are disproportionately represented in serious crimes and car crashes. Our nation is already $18,000,000,000,000.00 plus in debt with much more on the way. Obama, an incompetent leader at multiple levels, has done little to protect our nation from additional debt. We simply cannot afford illegal immigration in its current form.

        • There is nothing wrong with hard work. I grew up in northern MI where most working teen boys are trimming Christmas trees along with the migrant farm workers. I myself worked pouring concrete at a cement lawn ornaments store. What I was trying to say if you close the border completely, only people that are born here are going to be doing all the tasks needed to keep our country running. This would not happen with our current generation of occupy children that think the world owes them everthing, and that the rich need to forfeit their fortune so they don’t have to earn their keep. Comments about closing the doors and kicking everyone out though…. I have native American Great Grandparents so I guess lets start with everyone that settled after 1492. (/sarc)I believe that the U.S. is a better place for our hard working ancestors that came and put in the effort. There should not be a free ride and we should be deporting troublemakers and border jumpers, but there should be a legal way to continue to allow for imigration.

      • Yes, I am sure that you are correct in saying that there never a solution to a problem that doesn’t involve throwing illiterate laborers at it. And yet.. a significantly smaller fraction of the population of the first world is involved in growing crops today as compared to two hundred years ago. Why are you so dedicated to opposing technological progress?

      • Farm work would be great for American young people. Outsourcing food production to a migrating peasant class could have disastrous national security implications. I’d love it if my kids did the jobs we only let illegals do, if only for summers in between semesters.

    • Bullshit!!! You’re just making Nancy Pelosi’s case for her. The problem with US immigration policy is that it doesn’t distinguish between immigrants who will contribute more than they cost in social services and those who will cost more than they contribute.

      Here’s an example of the kind of immigrant the US should admit. During the late 1950s, A. V. Roe Canada designed and started building a state-of-the-art fighter interceptor called the Arrow. After the program was cancelled by a Canadian prime minister lacking in self confidence, most of the engineering staff was snapped up by American aircraft manufacturers. Several took high level positions in NASA.

      • You are giving Governmeny far too much credit for it’s ability to sort out who will be productive and who won’t be. NASA is also a massive waste of money.

    • So you are saying that my wife should be deported even though we jumped through all the hoops and expense so she could be here legally? Your view is rather short slighted and selfish…

        • Which is really at the heart of it all. “I don’t like those darn foreigners moving in.” It’s nothing new though, and it been going since just about the time the first European set foot here.

    • I have a friend who married an Englishman who was in the United States as a resident alien. She has two children with dual citizenship due to their father’s background. Both children were born in the US to an American mother, grew up here, went to school here, and work here. You’re saying they should be shipped off to England? Seriously?

  3. How about this: we demilitarize our police force, and send all the MRAPs, military gear, and everything else the DOD tries to sell to the local PD to border patrol. To the agency that actually needs it.

  4. “They are going to know where I am, where my family is. Is it possible that we will all be deported?”

    That’s exactly what should happen. Every step these people take on American soil is trespassing, and every red cent of public assistance they accept is theft. Round them up and ship them home with a bill pinned to their collar for all the money that was stolen by them or spent removing them from these United States.

  5. A developing Republican narrative on illegal immigration is that Obama’s open borders policies are rapidly populating the US when low and unskilled people who will compete for jobs against an already stressed native American workforce. In the southern parts of the US, for instance, the grunt-work in the bodyshop business is almost entirely filled with Spanish speakers who give every appearance of being newly arrived. The same can be said for pick-up-and-carry jobs in the construction trades.

    But the real problem, the one thing nobody—not even the conservative media who should know better—talks about, is cultural displacement. One place you will find people talking about this is in the Aztlan ideology. They think the southwestern US belongs to them. They want it back and unimpeded immigration from south of the border is how they plan to accomplish the take-over.

    From Wikipedia:

    “The name Aztlán was first taken up by a group of Chicano independence activists led by Oscar Zeta Acosta during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They used the name Aztlán to refer to the lands of Northern Mexico that were sold to the United States as a result of the Mexican-American War. Aztlán became a symbol for mestizo activists who believe they have a legal and primordial right to the land. In order to exercise this right, some members of the Chicano movement propose that a new nation be created, a República del Norte.”

  6. Any illegal would have to be nuts to give these fools their personal info. Once KING obuma is gone, ICE will hunt them down and deport the fools. The same thing is going to happen with guns some day.

    • Big brother better fill the O2 tanks and suit up in scuba to find all the guns lost in tragic boating accidents read about in these comments.

    • ICE can’t even deport criminals properly, and how many leading Stupid Party politicians care more about defending the country (or being seen to do so, anyway) than the money of businesses which profit from employing low-g, low-wage, illegal labor?

      • My wife’s uncle told a story about visiting Texas. For fun they drove to Home Depot and asked the “help” that stands out front looking for work for guys that knew how to paint, a bunch jumped into the back of the pickup expecting a job, but got a one way ticket to the local ice office. Funny how a guy in his 70’s was able to get a truckload of them to an ice office, but ice can’t seem to find the illegals themselves.

    • Never ever let an anti-gunner tell you “b, b, b but the Nazis actually loosened gun ownership regulations” as some sort of argumentative talking point. Yes, Adolf Hitler did make owning a gun easier for the German people, and then he completely banned ownership of arms by all the groups of people he wanted buried in mass graves.

  7. The real issue with both legal and illegal immigrants alike is the potential for a lack of assimilation. The only reason we haven’t had a Charlie Hebdo sort of incident yet is because our immigrant groups still think gobbling up American pop-culture and learning English is cool. I couldn’t count the number of Spanish speaking Paraguayan and Guatemalan couples I went to church with whose kids spoke near fluent English. Once that affection for assimilation goes away, the one-way locomotive to Balkanization station starts up as immigrant communities gradually cocoon. The result is, of course, virtual colonies of immigrants who gladly soak up all the entitlements but show outright hostility towards the people, culture, and language of the host nation that so graciously took them in to begin with. Of course, our own gaggle of politically correct nitwits actively catalyzes this process through the strategy of appeasement; printing almost every food packaging, instruction manual, and label in two or more languages. We may be a nation of immigrants, but my Austrian great grandpa had to learn English like everyone else on the damn boat if he didn’t want his life in America to be an absolute nightmare. That unwritten requirement of immigrant life never should have ceased.

    • My Wife taught a Head Start class filled with Mexicans and she had a Hispanic assistant that insisted the kids learn and read in Spanish. The kids really did not want to learn English. The Mexicans wanted their own little Mexican Balkan Nation. We are already there in that the Mexicans have their own little society within ours and get all sorts of government handouts.
      Interestedly enough, my Mother In Law was from the real Balkans ( Croatia).
      My Croat speaking Mother In Law was not permitted into the school system until she could speak English.

      • Both my parents came here from Croatia. Dad when he was 13. His family was on the immigration wait list for 15 years. Mom, after she married Dad (US Army in West Germany). Dad grew up in East Chicago and Gary Indiana. His story is the same: Assimilate, learn English, work your ass off at shit jobs until you make your own success.

        That’s why this child of immigrants wants every illegal rounded up and shipped home, and every welfare dredge to be cut off and given a choice of working a shit job or starving to death. It’s the choice my family had and they were grateful for it.

  8. English is the official language.
    No amnesty.
    Build the wall now.
    Have the illegals build the wall before shipping them back.
    Immigrants who do not require government hand outs can stay.

    • A comedian once made the joke to hire all the illegals to build a wall, thenvask them to see how the otherside looks, once the go to look at the south side lock them out.

    • The United States has no official language

      I do not understand all the xenophobic nonsense. Have any of you saying deport all the illegals considered that Mexico’s near civil war situation might make the majority of these immigrants somewhat progun because they saw first hand how things can go when the populace is disarmed?

      • …and then you have a bunch of Mexicans working in a factory who cannot read and understand English Process Instruction Sheets screwing up the process and not being able to fire them because it would be discrimination. Of course the Mexican kids in schools gets really fascinating as they cannot understand the Teachers and are not only illiterate but also isolated. The only thing the Spanish speaking kids do is slow the school down. The License Branch get interesting and slow as well.
        I was raised in a community where during the 19th and to mid 20th century German was primarily spoken by folk of Swiss and German ancestry. Even some commercial and church buildings had inscriptions in German. However, the people of that community were very fluent and literate in proper English and could interact with the Anglo-Saxon world very well. Official government business still was done in English. The schools were primarily English speaking and the lessons were issued and completed in proper English. English literature was taught at the schools. Some of the Amish, Lutheran, and Mennonite schools still have German speaking families and some of the lessons and services are in German, but the kids are very fluent in English.
        Most of my ancestors did not come from English speaking countries. Some of my ancestors actually could speak multiple languages ( a sometimes cumbersome necessity in Switzerland).

        • I have a similar background(my Transylvanian grandfather spoke 6 languages). But I disagree on the Mexican people I know. In my neighborhood south of Chicago the hard working Mexicans mostly speak some English. You have to go to Chicago to get those anti English neighborhoods(like Little Village). You can paint them with a broad brush or understand they’re not all the same Indiana Tom.

      • My Grandparents grew up in German-speaking communities and a German-only household. No English was allowed in the house. We have German-centric towns still today. Many still have German-style festivals like Oktoberfest. Yet the Mexicans, who have lived in this continent far longer than whites, are supposed to just abandon everything they know? Not only is that xenophobic, it’s borderline racist.

        • Requiring people to learn English is not asking people to give up everything they know. I don’t see how you go from language to all cultural elements side from deliberate dishonesty.

          And your grandparents were wrong to require only German in their house.

        • Except that the next complaint about Spanish-speaking immigrants is how they form “cultural enclaves”. That’s just plain ignorance of history. Every immigration group has formed “cultural enclaves” in the US, from the Germans, to the Italians, even the Scandinavians in the North Central areas. That is what I am referring to.

          And it was not wrong what my great-grandparents required in their own house. That is called “freedom”.

        • That’s quite a dumb statement. I mean seriously, I almost don’t know where to begin. But Mexicans have their own country they could be staying in. It’s called Mexico. Second, just because you have the perception that they were here longer than any white person of European descent, at what part of America does that entail? Just the Southwest portion of it or the whole continent? Also criticizing the lack of enforcement of current immigration policies (that goes back for years, not just this president, although the current POTUS has a knack for sticking people in the eye with this) does not make it “xenophobic”, no matter how many times you throw out this word. As a son of two immigrants (from Hong Kong) who spent the time, money, and effort to adhere to the immigration laws of the United States and became American citizens, they are not at all pleased with this open borders philosophy and the illegal aliens failure to assimilate to the American way of life.

          Despite what you think, we are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens.

      • Child of immigrants here. English should be the official language. I grew up learning both English and Croatian. In addition to German and a little Hungarian. Did me a world of good. Also I grew up surrounded by my Croatian culture, but I am 100% American.

        If you send these people back to their hell holes they might be motivated to fix them instead of running.

        How that’s line from Hunt for Red October go? “When he reached the new world Cortez burned his ships. As a result his men were well motivated”. If you put a hellhole in front of them and a wall at their backs, they’ll figure it out. It won’t be easy, but nothing worth while is.

  9. One could draw the same parallel over the common core education standards. Having a national standard for primary and secondary education might seem harmless now under the current political environment, but a future environment might lead to using it as a justification for the feds to dictate curriculum to the states and locals.

    • http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/chinese-immigrant-common-core-reminds-me-communist-china

      “I’m here to tell you, Common Core really scares me.”

      Chinese-American Lily Tang Williams says she is scared of America’s Common Core education system because it reminds her of the Communist education she received as a young girl growing up under Mao Tse-tung’s regime in China.

      In a video posted to YouTube, Williams points out the many similarities between her education and the one her 15-year-old daughter is currently receiving in a Colorado public school. Similarities like the national standards and guidelines Chinese teachers were expected to implement, lest they lose their jobs. Or the Chinese parents who have no choice, or rights, in what their children learn, and no privacy whatsoever. Williams described even having to hand over her private diaries for teacher review.”

  10. Two observations, one is that we have an immigration problem that congress needs to address and the solution must contain ways to prevent the problem from coming back in a few years. Second, the idea of registration is bad for both guns and aliens. We have a law preventing a federal gun registry and we need to get federal protection from states building gun and gun owners registries. They can abused much too easily for bad actions.

  11. What we need is smart immigration. “Can you contribute to society” should be the question It seems that all “professional” people who want to immigrate cannot, or when they do, are not allowed to compete in the job market. Doctors and engineers are not recognized for what they are and must take menial jobs.

    I would propose a job training/proving course. Are you a doctor and can you prove it? Yes. Then pay to take a 6 month to 1 year course/apprenticeship to prove you are a competent doctor. Are you an engineer and can you prove it? Yes. Then pay to take a 6 month to 1 year course/apprenticeship to prove you are a competent engineer. Etc.

    The .gov can front the money, but you will pay it back via paycheck deduction.

    There are a ton of smart people that want to do this the right way, but our current .gov will not let them, so they come across illegally.

    On a different note, I agree “education” should be in English. I am from a family of Prussian immigrants in the 1840’s. They spoke German at home, but made an effort for their children to learn English and to be assimilated into society. That said, assimilate should not mean to give up your culture, but to integrate it into regular society to add to it. Just look at St. Patty’s Day or Cinco De Mayo.

    None of this would likely happen though, as we must protect those poor folk who contribute nothing other than to illegally vote for the left. Seriously, how wrong is it to prove you are an American citizen to vote?

    Just my two cents anyway.

    -K

  12. So let me see if I have this straight. Claudia has been in the US since 2000 on a “temporary” permit. Thats more than enough time to become a US citizen. Yet she hasn’t. Why?

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