May 19th, 2006

Don’t Fence Me In

There's a poll up today on Excite, about the proposals to fence off the US border. The options in this poll are that one supports the House proposal (700 miles of fence), the Senate proposal (370 miles of fence) no fence, or all 2,000 milles of the US/Mexico border (which, just to be clear, is not a proposal on anyone's table). The results of the poll?

63% of the respondants (almost 5,000 people as I write this) think that the whole fucking border should be fenced off.
Once more forcing me to ask: What the fuck is WRONG with you people?

Yeah. Because building a wall worked so well in China. Or in Germany.

The problem with a wall, as I see it, is that it works both ways. "They" can't get in, but WE can't get out. Maybe it's some weird genetic memory or something, what with the fact that whole branches of my family met their ends in box cars and showers, but the idea of a sealed border just scares the beejeesus out of me.

Next, we'll all need papers to cross state borders. Oh, wait. The national ID card idea is already gaining momentum in Washington.

Papers? We don' need no steenkin' papers. Or do we?

I don't want to be an alarmist here (oh, who are we kidding? I most certainly DO want to be an alarmist: WAKE THE FUCK UP, PEOPLE!!!) but, it is looking more an more like a totalitarian government to me.

But let me just shift this rant a little over to something else: fairness across the board when it comes to illegal immigrants. See, here in Florida, we have the wet foot/dry foot policy regarding Cubans, who, as we all know, have a special immigrant status, unlike, say, oh, just randomly searching for another ethnic group, Haitians.

Cubans, you see, can stay in this country if they make it all the way to land (dry foot). If they are intercepted at sea, or even 20 feet off shore, they have to go back to Cuba and try again. Haitians, on the other hand (who, PS, tend to vote Democratic when they become citizens, and who, by and large, are Very Poor and Very Black) have to go back to Haiti even if they have two dry feet and an adoring family waiting to take them in and support them.

We already have special status for one immigrant group. And that immigrant group has a history of being given amnesty. Over and over and over and over again. But, well, Cubans are special. They vote for Republicans no matter what. No matter that every administration that arranged boat lifts, air lifts, amnesty and every other damn thing for them was a Democratic administration, to Cubans, Democrat = Communist. End of fucking story.

On the other hand, most other Hispanic groups tend to vote Democratic. Thus, a fence, and no amnesty and the clowns like Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (whose own family came in illegally). This is a prime case of there being truer no believer than the converted sinner. Kind of like that a-hole Clarence Thomas and his stand on equal opportunity.

I just gave myself a headache.