What does it mean to be illegal?
When I was a kid, if you did something in violation of the law, it was called ‘illegal’. When you did something that was illegal, you could get in trouble, and it was generally understood that there would be consequences. You might get away with an ‘illegal’ act, such as say, shoplifting, but you might not. If you got caught, you would fully expect to have to face the penalty for that act. We called it “busted.”
But apparently that’s not what illegal means today. Today it means that if you have done something in violation of the law, then you should be let off and possibly even compensated because you have been in an illegal state for so long. In fact, the longer the violation, the more the compensation.
Thus, we have articles like this one, in which the commentator just can’t seem to understand why we don’t just give “illegal immigrants” (notice the word illegal) driver’s licenses and paths to amnesty or higher education in our already overcrowded schools. What he calls a “terribly sensible” plan makes me just want to vomit. Sensible how?! To who?? How is it sensible to give people here in our country illegally any of those things? He posits that they already do all those things anyway, so why not give it to them. But why should we spend the billions it would take to create an entirely new system of identification (which would undoubtedly be easier to forge than our current driver’s license system, creating a whole Pandora’s Box of new security issues and incompatibilities between various state and federal offices) when a perfectly viable system already exists?? We don’t want them driving with legal identification, we don’t want them driving AT ALL! We want them to go through the proper system and become a LEGAL immigrant. If it takes too long, then don’t throw my money at pointless complexity, FIX THE PROBLEM! Fix the SYSTEM!!
When I was in college at San Diego State University, there were a number of years where I was forced to try and crash a class (or classes) because there wasn’t room. The problem was, there wasn’t room because 80-90% of the class was composed of minority students who got priority. We both paid the same fees, but I got shafted because of my ethnicity. So it just makes my skin prickle to hear people like this commentator blow off all that and propose that we should give illegal immigrants a “path” to higher education. It’s not that I’m opposed to education, higher or otherwise, but why should I take a back seat to someone who flaunts the law?
In the mean time, sorry, but YOU… ARE… ILLEGAL!!
BUSTED!!