2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Dallas City Hall Protest and March
Is there some giant group of Americans who are against legal immigrants? I think the general consensus is legal immigration is good, spreading and learning other cultures is good.
Criminals who cross the border illegally are not good. I’m grateful we live in the greatest country and Earth and that everyone wants to come here, but why can’t we enforce immigration laws?
Comment by noncongruent at 04/02/2025 at 07:06 UTC*
5 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Most people in this country are against illegal immigration. The problem is where do you draw the line between legal and illegal. For instance, back when Hitler was rounding up Jews to burn in the ovens many fled Germany, France, Poland, and the other countries taken over by the Nazis. They began arriving in the US, families, mothers, children. The prevailing view toward refugees back then was the same as Trump and his followers now, even down to the "America First" slogan.
So, we sent those Jews back to German where they burned in the ovens. Nobody here really knew what was happening at the Death Camps, but when the liberation photos, films, and eyewitness testimonies from our soldiers became public knowledge here our utter shame as a nation was deep. We helped kill unknown thousands, tens of thousands, who knows how many Jews. We helped Hitler burn them in the ovens.
One of the big things that came out of the Holocaust is that most civilized nations adopted laws to keep that from happening again. We have laws on the books that have been on the books since the 1940s and 1950s that require that we accept asylum seekers into this country and give them a chance to make an asylum case to a judge in a court, something we denied all those Jews who burned in Nazi ovens. Under those laws people seeking asylum, whether it's from cartels fueled by American drug addicts or trying to save their little girls from being raped to death by the MS-13 gangs we exported to Honduras and other countries we as a civilized nation have said, never again. Never again will we do what we did to the Jews.
So, many of the people that Trump and his followers refer to as "illegals" are actually here legally under those laws. They are following the laws, and unlike the Jews we sent back to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the 19 other Nazi Death camps we as a nation give these refugees the right to plead their case.
So, if you just wave your hand and declare that all these people legally in the country and following our laws and international treaties as now being illegal, that makes us little different to the America Firsters back then. Many of the people, families and children, fleeing the countries that we've wrecked through exporting violent gangs, fighting proxy wars with communists, buying drugs to feed our drug addicts, etc, are fleeing for their lives. They don't risk their lives crossing the Darien Gap, risk being killed (as so many are) by violent gangs, just to get a better paycheck. They're coming so that they and their children can have a chance of living a real life, not a short life truncated by rape and murder.
We already know that many of the parents Trump sent back to Mexico in his first term have disappeared, likely killed by cartels. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of orphan children in this country now who were adopted out to families they had no connection with. Lots of little boys and girls just disappeared because Trump and his goons didn't think it was important to keep track of them. At least he didn't tattoo numbers on them to track them, though perhaps that would have made it more difficult for so many to just vanish.
So here we are, reverting back to the America of the 1930s where refugees are referred to as parasites and animals, and even though they're here legally and have broken no laws, are being sent back to die. In a very fundamental way there's no difference between what we're doing now and what we did to Jews back then. Dead is dead. Assuming this country doesn't collapse into a violent civil war that morphs into a global nuclear war I don't see any way we ever come back from this twice shame. Forever more America will be regarded the same as Trump, as cruel, venal, transactional, and most definitely not to be trusted. Our word will be whatever our weapons and threats say it is, and nothing more. I wouldn't be surprised if world civilized society turns their back on us. We deserve that.