Originally Posted by
Renathras
I have to wonder if you actually read my post before responding to it...
Except I clearly didn't say illegal immigrants would be voting, did I? I said their CHILDREN could be, and parents DO have some influence on how their children think and vote, at least when they first become adults.
Their kids are American citizens by birth, yes. If you think that's what I'm talking about, you miss the point, so allow me to elaborate.
What I mean here is more the culture. American culture is a thing, though it's a vague notion and not as neatly packaged as many other cultures. It has basic underpinnings which are the ideals (note I'm saying ideals here, not that the US has always made good on them) of liberty, democracy, and a social contract of freedom and individualism.
Many children from these illegal immigrant families are raised in the home with more forbearance to their parents' culture than the shared American culture. Cultures that tend to not have the same basic values. Immigrants from the Middle-East, for example, come from cultures that don't prize women as equals and assets like European cultures have come to. Immigrants from many third world countries have a preference for socialistic or communistic ideals of the government running things - I had a debate with a woman once who didn't see why the President shouldn't unilaterally change immigration law with an Executive Order. When I actually explained to her how our system of government works, how the Legislative and Executive Branches together interact to make laws, her first response was "What good is a President if he can't make laws and run the country?"
Because that's how leadership worked in her native country.
Her children, you might be shocked to hear, thought much the same as she did - what good is the leader of a nation if he can't impose laws?
Because she didn't come from a country that considers the idea of republican and liberal democracy as somehow sacred to their cultural and national identity.
Yes, those kids born are every bit legal citizens. But even going to the same schools, they can often be raised at home in a completely different culture. One that doesn't prize, for example, women's rights like the rest of US society does. (There are places in the world where women can't leave the house alone, much less have jobs or run for public office.)
Yes, but that's the problem - the population isn't shifting. The population is being, for lack of a better term, inundated by an outside source in violation of the laws which were originally designed, xenophobic or no, to prevent that inundation, or at least keep it at a maintainable rate that didn't overwhelm the nation's ability to blend them into the gestalt of American citizenry.
The comparison could be made to injecting someone with small amounts of a live virus - which can serve as a way to make their body stronger overall - versus overwhelming their body with it.
It's more akin to an invasion than it is to a natural change of the society. Because it's not the society's previous population changing, it's them being displaced by a tide of new population that didn't come here through a process of obedience to the nation's rule of law - or came here in accordance with (e.g. visas) but then broke with said laws.
Trying to restrict immigration by insisting on obedience to existing laws isn't an attempt to manipulate anyone. It's an attempt to adhere to the RULE OF LAW.
A nation of laws can only claim that its laws should be followed if it insists that its laws are followed. For example, if someone mishandles classified material in violation of the laws, they be subjected to it without restraint. (I'm speaking here of the fact a junior officer in the nuclear program of the US Navy, for example, mishandling classified information can spend a decade in Levenworth while a retired General and head of the CIA can do so and gets a relative slap on the wrist. Though if you want to extend it to politics, you have a political candidate who did so and may not even see an indictment.)
When a nation does not enforce its laws, and a sizeable portion of the population argues that people should be able to freely violate those laws, then it calls into question if ANYONE is really beholden to ANY laws. Why should one person obey the law requiring them to pay taxes if another can ignore its immigration laws? Which laws WILL we enforce today? And if we don't enforce this law TODAY, might we decide to TOMORROW?
Actually, no, my argument is the opposite - that Democrats want to adapt the country through allowing and encouraging illegal immigration and future voting blocs rather than enforce existing immigration law, which would keep the nation more like what it is that we HAVE today. Or, to use your words:
Fundamentally, my argument boils down to pointing out that Republicans want to keep to the country that they have, and want to not manipulate the voting population to create a different country, that's more politically suited to Democrats, rather than adjust their platform to be more appealing to the population Democrats are trying to introduce/change us into. Doing otherwise would be a complete perversion of the entire Democratic, representative process.
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One further note:
You seem convinced I'm complaining about all of this.
I've become something more of an observer. I stopped really caring about all of this when I decided there was nothing I could really do about it, and that I'm not really sure that there is a "right" answer to it, one way or the other.
To my estimation, the United States will not last as a nation, at least not as it is today, for another century. The divisions are too deep and too played up to the point there will eventually be something of a separation, and that's if it isn't forced apart by monetary collapse and fiscal insolvency.
I'm merely observing and don't have a horse in this race anymore, if I ever did.
I wasn't "complaining" about it, nor do I particularly side with Republicans on basically any issue (I tend to strike much more libertarian, and am marginally opposed to most of the laws that make up the US immigration system for reasons not dissimilar to your stated in this thread - they attack the people and not the corporations/businesses that make money off of them.)
Your animosity towards me is typical of partisans, but I was just answering the OP:
Democrats DO hope for a new demographic shift that would give them a voting edge, progressives DO want to amplify their ideology in the US and change the nation so they can change the world through it, big corporations and companies and the Chamber of Commerce and political centrists/Wall Street/Donor class DO love the cheap labor and obscene profits they can get by hiring illegals and seeing Americans on welfare still buying their overpriced knickknacks, there are race-baiters that can't see anything outside of the lens of racism, and there is a sizeable amount of the political left (though not exclusively the political left) that want to label everything that is "traditionally American" as bad and everything not "traditionally American" as good.
None of these are not statements of fact.
Further, your complaint in your last paragraph about Republicans and change - the Republican party's official stance, really before 2012 but particularly in their 2012 post-mortem of Romney's loss to President Obama was the opposite of what you're saying. It was to embrace Hispanics and illegal immigration in an effort to try and get more Hispanic votes!
The exact OPPOSITE of what you claim, which is them trying to change the country to fit them, they did the exact opposite of what you claimed they wouldn't: They embraced the immigrants almost as much as the Democrats do.
And, this is not something new - the Chamber of Commerce/cheap labor businesses have had the Republicans doing this for a long time. In 2006 they tried to basically pass an amnesty bill but had the Congressional phone lines "melt" when Americans called in demanding they not do it. At which point they listened to their constituents - the democratic, representative process in action - and the bill was scuttled.
The same thing happened with the Gang of Eight bill, which is also the one main reason the Republican "establishment" so much wanted to support Marco Rubio up until he crashed and burned in Florida.
And, apparently, a substantial part of the population - there's that democratic, representative process again - doesn't like it, to which end they support Trump and Cruz together in large numbers.
How much of that will translate into the 40% of the nation that votes in the General Election is anyone's guess, but the Republican primaries have seen record turnout, and together, the "anti-immigration" Trump and Cruz amount to something like 70% of the primary voters, which include a lot of independents and Democrats who voted in the open Republican primaries. Nor should we say that support for this position is limited to those groups, since there are many people who feel the same and will vote in the General Election but don't take part in the primary process.
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No, Endus, the Republican party leaders desperately want to hold the position you say they do not. Basically the same position as the Democrat party leaders - change the demographic of the nation to suit their money donors and hope they can talk good on immigration and immigrants to get enough of their votes to stay competitive.
It is the pesky voters - again, that democratic, representative thing - that are the problem.
What with wanting rule of law and sovereignty and borders.
And, indeed, the Republican party wants to join with the Democrat party and change the nation from the nation they have into creating a different nation/population. To use your terms.
Again, it's those pesky voters and that pesky democratic, representative process that wants to keep the nation they have rather than see others create a different nation out of it.
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Season of Discovery Hotfixes - April 29
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