Illegal Immigration Amnesty Bill, FrontPageMag, John Ellis

KEEPING THE LOOT

Ellis: Amnesty Like Encouraging Bank Robbers







While Trent Lott would have the nation believe that opposition to the amnesty bill for illegal immigration is confined to talk radio, even hosts realize the Internet has been a driving force behind the public's sense of outrage.

And it isn't merely fueled by emotional tirades, as Bush and his congressional friends in both parties would have us believe. Case in point: a new piece by John M Ellis just published at FrontPageMag.

Ellis, Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, makes the surprisingly apt comparison between illegal aliens and bank robbers. What would happen if amnesty were granted for other crimes?

An excerpt from the piece:

To get a clearer sight of what is really happening, let’s move the discussion to another area of the law, and imagine for the moment a general amnesty for bank-robbers. What would that actually mean? Simply that all crimes of a certain kind committed up to the date of the amnesty will be forgiven and not prosecuted. Now let’s suppose we offer amnesty to all bank-robbers who will come forward to confess their crimes and have them entered into a record of those for which amnesty had been claimed and granted. But now a particular bank-robber, noticing how eager the authorities are to get him into the program, decides to bargain for more. “Can I keep my loot?” he says.


[...]


Instead of insisting that amnesty just means forgiveness of past crimes, not legalizing them, the authorities say, in effect: all right, we’ll change the law to create an exception for you so that you can go on behaving exactly as you have been doing.


By now the bank robber senses that the authorities will do anything to get him into the program, and he asks for a reward on top of everything else. And sure enough, he is given a handsome reward worth a great deal of money. But at the last minute, the authorities, becoming aware that what they are doing looks ridiculous, say sternly to him: but you have to agree to a fine of $5000.

The robber, looking at the much greater value of what he has ripped off, what he can continue to rip off, and the reward, sensibly understands that the fine is a trivial face-saver and accepts the deal. At which point the robber naturally phones his friends to say: take up bank-robbing quick, you won’t believe the deal you’ll be offered—the government has gone crazy.

This ought to be just a risible fantasy The trouble is, it’s not fantasy at all: it’s what the immigration bill actually proposes. That bill says that we’ll not only forgive you your crimes to date and not prosecute you for them (the real meaning of amnesty). We’ll also let you profit from your crime by keeping what you have illegally taken (presence in the US), and we’ll amend the law so that it does not apply to you at all and so that you can go on doing what you have been doing (the Y visas) though the old law will still apply to others who have never committed the crime you committed, and on top of all that we’ll give you a valuable reward too (citizenship with all its many benefits).

Since the left sees terrorism as a mere crime- and- punishment issue and not one of global jihad against the West, why can't they view illegal immigration the same way?

Both within our society and around the world, what message are we sending about the oddly selective way America chooses to enforce its laws?


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