Some Days The Mind Fairly Boggles

Writer Vox Day waxes poetic about illegal immigrants in the United States. (Take note - the link is to Wingnut Daily, so be warned...)

Argues Day, it is possible to rid the United States of some 12 million illegal migrants:

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

Now - I won't even go into the astonishing level of ignorance it takes to compare illegal immigrants in the US with the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany.

The complete absurdity of stating that enforcement of the national immigration laws is unrealistic,

Uh - some 12,000,000 people who are quasi-assimilated (living, working in the country is a much bigger logistical problem in a relatively open society than this nut thinks. Finding a few thousand deportees is difficult enough, without turning the place into a police state. Where Vox Day misses the point entirely is the fact that there are now a lot of those "illegal aliens" who are raising children. Children who were born in the United States - and by the very laws of that country, are entitled to the benefits of citizenship. Just maybe, there's a much larger constituency of legal Americans who are descended from illegal migrants than he thinks - and more and more of them are of legal age to vote.

Instant deportation policies, employer fines and bounty programs combined with the denial of all social services to non-citizens would suffice to settle the matter without the need to imprison the American citizenry.

Yes, such well-informed policies - that will ultimately gut the service jobs part of the US economy - you know the people who are doing all the jobs that Americans have avoided for decades. Cleaning out buildings, doing grunt work in factories (oh - wait - most of the manufacturing is done in China these days, isn't it?). Not to mention the impact of such policies on people who _are_ American Citizens - children born on US soil - even if their parents are illegal migrants. Such a small detail - like pissing off the fastest growing population in the United States - brilliant thinking.

As the Minutemen have proven, again, unleashing the power of motivated private citizens is far more efficient than relying on government bureaucrats.

Ah yes, the classic argument of the extreme libertarian viewpoint - all government is evil, and should be replaced with motivated individual groups. A lovely fantasy world that results in the tribalistic warfare that ravaged Europe for centuries, and still runs rampant through other regions of the world. Newsflash - most of the comforts you enjoy today wouldn't exist were it not for societies larger and more complex than the average agrarian village circa 1200 AD.

It amazes me that anyone that is at least half sentient (and I presume that someone capable of operating a keyboard qualifies as such) could come up with a "round-em-up-and-deport-em" approach to illegal immigrants. When decades of American governments have turned a blind eye to those same migrants for decades if not longer, the definition of "illegal migrant" and "dispossessed citizen" become pretty blurry. One certainly couldn't work on the basis of ethnicity, and demanding "proof of citizenship" documentation would result in "deportation" of just about every homeless person in the country - because most of them can't prove their citizenship either.

Referencing Hitler's handling of Jews in Nazi Germany merely sets the tone for "Vox Day"'s enlightened outlook on the world. And this guy's supposedly "Christian" ... *shudder*