Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
1. They sank the California economy: FALSE
- They commit more crime than others: FALSE
- They have 'anchor babies' to help them stay: FALSE
Let's take these one by one:
California: While illegal immigrants are a convenient scapegoat for California's economic woes, California is actually a victim of itself. Dominated by liberals, California used the recent economic boom to grow the state government by 31% when their population increased only 5%. Joel Kotkin writes about this at forbes.com
Crime: The attempt to scapegoat illegals for criminal activity relies on you believing that something about their very nature makes them more likely to commit crimes. This idea of innate criminality is dehumanizing to all of us. The Sutherland Institute has addressed this in a very interesting paper.
Anchor Babies: Congressman Chaffetz is using the idea of 'anchor babies' to overturn a portion of the 14th Amendment. His assertion leads us to believe that while you or I have children out of love, illegals have children to help them gain an advantage in their attempt to stay in the United States. The fact is that a citizen baby will not protect an illegal from deportation. The parents will be given the option to take the baby with them or leave it with family. Also a citizen must be 21 years old before he could sponsor his parents. And if the parents were here illegally, they would be ineligible for citizenship anyway.
Our society right now spends a lot of time trying to show how illegal immigrants are nothing like us. Perhaps we hope that imagining them as subhuman will help us deal with the problem.
