A Reader Wants Conservatives To Stand Up For First Principles Against Obama's Administrative Amnesty "For The Children"
06/23/2012
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Re: Patrick Cleburne's blog post Obama's Immigration Coup: If GOP Afraid To Defend Americans, How About Defending The Constitution?

From: An Anonymous Reader [Email him]

Now that the Obama administration has decided that it doesn't need a legislature to pass the DREAM Act, I think it's time to make an observation. To wit, whenever the question of amnesty for alien minors comes up, conservatives confine themselves to oblique and pragmatic criticisms (e.g., it will be a magnet for further illegal immigration). They're afraid to stand on principle when the other side invokes The Children.

Well, I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it. We shouldn't accede to the notion that a foreign child's innocence nullifies our sovereignty. There are hundreds of millions of innocent children abroad suffering from various degrees of privation. We wish them well, but few if any Americans believe that the US government is under any binding obligation to mitigate the existence into which their parents have brought them.

 It would be a strange thing indeed if we incurred such an obligation toward that fraction of foreign youth which resides illegally in the US, solely by virtue of the fact that their parents have violated our laws.

To allow the innocence of an illegal alien child to insulate him from deportation is to give in to a form of extortion by the parents. Nice little family I've got here. Shame if something were to happen to it... We are relieving illegal alien parents (and their nations of origin) of their natural responsibility for their progeny. If we decide to deport young illegal aliens instead of harboring them, their lives may well be impacted by the dislocation, but the moral responsibility for that resides with the people who imposed themselves and their children upon us. 

I don't mean to sound crude, but this is simply brood parasitism—the strategy of the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in other birds' nests. Our side needs to be more emphatic about first principles. To argue on practicalities alone is to leave the public susceptible to the open-borders crowd's cloying sentimentalism.

Keep up the good work.

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