If you think the health care reform debate has been hideous, honey, you better man up because immigration reform is next.  I've been wrestling with a nasty lie taco and trying to study up on illegal immigration for a couple of months now.   The immigration system in this country is clearly broken, and it pains me that so many people suffer as a result.  Fact is, I'm downright angry about it.  But I wouldn't be caught dead forwarding a shameful viral email about illegal immigrants like so many on display in my Lie Piebrary, because it would be a sure sign that I'm part of the problem.  You sit right down and I'll tell you why.

We've arrived at our situation today because we demand illegal immigration during labor shortages (during WWI and WWII for example) and then turn around and make a big show of kicking down doors and dragging folks off in raids during job shortages (after WWI, during the Depression, and after WWII).  I'd like you to visit an immigration history timeline or two.  You can try here, here, and here.  I would also like you to read up on the "Bracero" program and the practice of "drying out the wetbacks" here.  We have a deplorable 100 year track record of slipping illegal immigrants in the back door and then kicking them out the front.

Immigrants come here illegally because they are poor, vulnerable and desperate.  Or, as folks bent on making a buck would say, "Ripe for plunder!" I believe Harry Truman summed it up very well:

There are many thousands of these people who have escaped detection and remain in this country today. Thousands more will find their way here before the year is out.  Since these unfortunate people are here illegally, they are subject to deportation if caught by our immigration authorities.  They have to hide and yet must work to live.  They are thus in no position to bargain with those who might choose to exploit them.

And many of them are exploited, I regret to say, and are left in abject poverty.  They live always under the threat of exposure and deportation.  They are unable, therefore, to protest or to protect themselves.

Today illegal immigrants are known as "walking ATMs" and are easy prey for rapists, human traffickers and criminals of every stripe because illegal immigrants don't call the police.  You can read more here.

To make things worse, the cruelty doesn't end with the human-looting profiteers.  No, after those villains take their filthy lucre and get off scot free, then the bigots pile on to carve out their pound of flesh.  For example, here's what racist jackass Rep. John Box said in 1929:

Another purpose of the immigration laws is the protection of American racial stock from further degradation or change through mongrelization.  The Mexican peon is a mixture of mediterranean-blooded Spanish peasant with low-grade Indians who did not fight to extinction but submitted and multiplied as serfs.  Into that was fused much Negro slave blood.  This blend of low-grade Spaniard, peonized Indian, and Negro slave mixes with Negroes, mulattoes, and other mongrels, and some sorry whites, already here.

You can search my Lie Piebrary for "lie taco" and view my collection of viral emails chock-full of scorn for illegal immigrants.  I find these viral emails to be the most despicable lies of all. Rather than behaving as Christians (Lev. 19:33-34, Matt. 25:35-40), people seem to think it's bright to forward viral emails portraying illegal immigrants as parasites who need to be eradicated.  It couldn't be any plainer:  folks who stomp on the necks of the downtrodden are a disgrace.

There is no doubt our immigration system is broken.  But this nonsense of treating millions of God's children like refuse that needs to be bulldozed into a landfill is worse than contemptible.  Were it not for our own insatiable appetite for profit at any cost, we wouldn't be in the shape we are in.  We need to take responsibility for our own greed, put our heads together and come up with smart, principled, and humane solutions to our immigration crisis.  If your only concerns are your own wallet and your racial stock, then you are part of the problem.  Shame on you.  Like Rep. John Box, the cries of the destitute sound like the howls of mongrels to your ear.   I hope you are wearing a fire-retardant suit if you get hit by a bus, honey--it's going to be hot where you're going.