Immigrant Song

Judging by the comments (all two of them), I am clearly on the wrong side of the immigration debate in the eyes of my loyal (and not quite so loyal, but just stumbling upon) readers. First, in response to the comments:

Can we just round up all the immigrants and send them home? This right here is the biggest reason why a "kick them out" policy will never work. This would be feasable in someplace like Nazi Germany or Chavez' Venezuela, but here in the USA? There isn't a prayer in heaven. Think about it for a moment. You have the US government, designed to be ineffectual by the founders in large part to prevent things like the wholesale rounding up and internment and/or deportation of people. The only way that this would be remotely feasable is if the government had the military do it and even then it wouldn't happen. When you consider that the most effective part of our government is closing in on six years without finding Osama bin Laden, it's hard to think that they'd ever be able to get 12 million people out from among us, and remember, not all illegals are Mexican. You've got plenty of Indians, Asians, Africans, and Europeans here too. In addition, the US Army can't operate on US soil without the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is also a rather significant political hurdle.

Let's assume that we decide to override the Constitution for about a 1 year period to give the President the ability to get all the illegals out. Are we prepared for, in addition to the economic cost of booting out 12 million people and trying to replace them (at 4.5% unemployment, that's not an easy task), the cost of increased taxes to fund the effort? Knowing the government's penchant for waste, let's assume that to procure flight time on military C-130s, build internment camps, house and feed the illegals until they're shipped away, provide fuel for the transports and for the camps, and so on down the line, let's peg this at a conservative $300 billion. That's about the yearly cost of the Iraq War, and it doesn't seem like this would be any smaller an effort. It took that much to clean up the Gulf Coast after Katrina, and that's not done yet either. That's going to be a tax increase now or later.

Let's assume that we still go forward. Do you think that they'll go quietly like the Japanese did during World War II? A lot of that could be attributed to misguided patriotism, which the illegal immigrants most certainly will not have if we come to boot them out. Who here would like to place a bet on how many states will have martial law declared before it would be finished? You'd see it in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas for sure, with other states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, Maryland, and Georgia distinct possibilities as a result of their highly immigrant-centric urban centers. You would likely see a lot of violence before this was curbed as the illegals fought for their lives and the lives of their families against a nation that has turned against them.

Is that worth it, or should we just decide that the rule of law is good in most instances but bad in this one. Current immigration policy is ridiculous already and there's no sense in punishing all these people, as well as the rest of the nation just because a dumb law is on the books. There was a law in Missouri until Kit Bond rescinded it in 1976 that you could kill a Mormon. Is that law really one that should have been followed or used as any sort of justification in a court of law? No. Let's let common sense dictate what we should do and allow these people to stay here, with a penalty, and not try to ham-handedly enforce an archaic policy that should have disappeared with smallpox.