Conservatives & Aliens

Illegal immigration is a really touchy subject with many Americans today, especially those on the conservative side of the coin. More often than not, my conservapeeps and I come to blows when immigration is brought up in a discussion. It is usually my fault, simply for the fact that I know that I am right and they can’t admit that they are wrong, especially after I let them build their case and frame their argument on the subject. I do that because I’m kind of a dick. I allow them to build their thought fortress, thinking I agree with them, and then I flip the script, making it all come crumbling down. That’s when they are reminded of the fact that us libertarians are fucking nuts, albeit superior.

See, unlike most libertarians, many conservatives are against illegal immigrants coming into this country to reap its benefits. They claim that the huge influx of Mexicans into the United States is destroying our country. They take our jobs, they live off of the state and they send their money back home to help bring more illegal immigrants into this country. A lot of people are incredibly outraged by what’s going on. They want to build monstrous walls to keep them out. They want to deport them. They want companies to be forced into not hiring illegal immigrants for wages less than minimum. They want these people to not be able to achieve the American Dream. I think that’s complete fucking bullshit.

Conservatives are seemingly missing the point when it comes to illegal immigration. Many of them argue that they don’t care if people come over but they have to do it legally and in the proper way, through the proper channels. In a classic example of unintended consequences, this conservative mindset is too narrow of a view. While it seems like a good thing, having immigrants fill out shitloads of paperwork and having them go through the system from the get go seems like a great idea but it creates a much larger problem.

Realistically, I would rather the immigrants be here illegally than legally for one primary reason: the welfare state. Legal immigrants can receive help from the state at unprecedented levels. The illegal immigrant, even though there are programs in play that help them, cannot do as much damage to the economy and the taxpayers’ wallets as the legal immigrant can. You see, it is the welfare state that is the problem, not immigration. Even though I feel that immigrants really should go through the system the right way, doing so only worsens things. That is the unfortunate reality about all of this.

With the welfare state in place, America looks even more attractive to outsiders. Sure, many people want to come here and make a better life through hard work but our system, at its core, creates a beacon of hope for freeloaders and those who drain the teat of liberty dry. I don’t blame the freeloaders. Hell, I don’t blame the good people who come here with good intentions and a dream that trade them in for an addiction to the oppression of the welfare system. I blame us, the people who can fight to eliminate the oppressive welfare state. I blame the conservatives, who see the broken welfare system but somehow don’t see the correlation between it and illegal immigration.

This is one of the major issues where libertarians are pretty much at odds with conservatives. If only conservatives would take all the energy that they are wasting on fighting illegal immigrants and transfer it to combatting the welfare state, a lot of the problems we seemingly have, could be solved. There has to be an alternative, other than building walls and closing the borders. I don’t want to live in East Germany circa 1961. I want to live in a country where we provide freedom, safety and the opportunity for prosperity to anyone who is willing to work for it. Everyone deserves that chance.

In the old days, everyone had that chance, as immigrants came to the United States from every single country on the globe. Times were tough, life was hard and making it in the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of America, at the time, was incredibly difficult. However, a huge segment of the immigration population was able to persevere and defeat the odds: conquering competition and even oppression from those who already made it. If the welfare state had existed back then, we never would have achieved American Exceptionalism. Our country would not be what it is today. In fact, I doubt we would have ever become a real power in the world, let alone numero-fucking-uno. Being a haven for people seeking freedom and opportunity is what America is about. That’s what makes us special.

The welfare state destroys the chance for immigrants to achieve the American Dream. Through the welfare system, illegal immigrants are completely held back and unable to properly adapt and integrate into American culture. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with immigrants holding onto their own culture, in fact that is what I love about this country. I love how other cultures have come together and created an America whose culture is an amalgamation of the best the world has to offer. That is one of the many things that makes America beautiful and unique.

Where the welfare system fails immigrants, is that it makes them reliant on the state for everything. In fact, the welfare programs and the general nanny state forces other Americans to have to adapt to their culture. By having everything in Spanish and English, the immigrants aren’t pushed into having to learn the English language. Imagine if everything a hundred years ago had to be in Italian, Greek, Chinese, German, French, Hungarian, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Indian and a dozen other languages just to make adapting to our culture easier for the immigrants. That shit wouldn’t have flied back then, as Americans weren’t such politically correct pussies like they are now. By not learning English, Spanish-speaking people are stuck, living in their Spanish-speaking communities unable to fully communicate with the world outside of that.

Now conservatives put up good arguments when trying to convince the rest of us that we need to keep the immigrants out. One of those arguments is that with immigrants comes crime. The fact is, that isn’t necessarily true. For instance, the media loves to tie the millions of Mexicans crashing the border with the Mexican drug cartels. Granted, many drug cartels get their soldiers through but what is the ratio of drug cartel shitheads to honest, hard-working people? It is miniscule. Besides, even if we built a superfence, the drug cartels would still plague our southern border and murder lots of innocent people on both sides. The real issue to examine in regards to these drug cartels is Nixon’s ongoing War on Drugs not the immigration issue. However, the War on Drugs is a huge fucking issue, that I’ll have to blow open in a later article.

Now, excluding the drug cartels, raised crime rates are still pinned on the immigrants from the south. Stop listening to Glenn Beck’s hysterical rants about the “illegal immigration crime wave” and pull yourself back down to reality. The truth is, as the latino population in America has exploded the last few years, crime rates across the board are down. If millions upon millions of Mexicans come in yearly and crime is down, what logic comes to the conclusion that illegal immigrants are terrorizing our nation?

Since 1986, when the federal government gave amnesty to illegal aliens, the murder rate in America has dropped 37 percent! Drunk driving is down by half. Hell, forcible rape is down 23 percent, which debunks the myth that Mexican lawn crews are sizing up white neighborhoods for white women to pillage with their cocks while the white women’s white kids are in school and their white husbands are at the office.

Looking at the numbers, less than 5 percent of inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. Most of them that are there, are there because of the fact that they are here illegally and waiting to be transported back to Mexico. Apart from breaking immigration laws, it would seem that immigrants are more law-abiding than American citizens. What the media and many conservatives view as an evil phenomena is really just smoke and mirrors to cover up their fear. Realistically, I believed that the rhetoric about crime rates was true. Once looking at the real numbers, my opinion has changed. In fact, over the last year or so, my opinion on illegal immigration has changed and evolved completely.

Leaving the crime issue behind, let’s look at another conservative argument which is that our open borders make us susceptible to harm by foreigners who want to kill us. While this is a valid point, the thought of closing the borders to everyone is just fucking retarded. Are you going to lock all your doors, seal your windows, plug your drains and never let anyone into your house because you’re afraid that a snake or a spider could get in and do you harm? Give me a break. There are holes in every armor and no matter what one does, if something wants to penetrate the defenses badly enough, they will. This country needs to stop handing away its liberty in small doses because the fear turtles eat up the hysteria like bobbing white kids in the ‘Jaws’ films.

Now the conservative front that is pushing for fences on the border needs to wake the fuck up. The fence is a failure, the government at this point is already moving away from it and even where it was solid, illegal immigrants ripped right through it like they were in a wet paper bag with scissors in their hands. No attempts to solve this problem has worked. If there is a will there sure as shit is a fucking way and no tin foil border fence is going to keep the inventive and resourceful Mexicans out. Hell, we should celebrate their inventiveness and resourcefulness and be glad that they are bringing it here, in a place where they can prosper with those skills.

The point is, we’ve got to stop blaming the Mexicans for what is deemed the “Mexican Problem”. They should have the same opportunities that our grandparents had. Yes, some will take advantage of the system. Hell, most will take advantage of the system. Shit, most poor people no matter what their ethnicity, take advantage of the system. It is the system that is the problem. The sooner people realize this and do something about it, the sooner we can be done with the immigration issue and move on.

Abolishing the welfare system may sound scary and heartless and evil but when one objectively looks at how corrupt, useless and enabling it is, one can see that it needs to be reformed, if not completely destroyed. Being a libertarian, I am going for “completely destroyed”. One has to look passed the bullshit rhetoric that people like me are assholes because we want to kill entitlements. The reality is, entitlements and welfare hinder progress and prosperity. They eliminate opportunity and keep people at a level that they can never overcome. Welfare and entitlements are the proverbial “easy button”. Truth is, life ain’t fucking easy. We’re all in this together but at the same time, we’re all responsible for ourselves and no one else.