Immigration

For the life of me I cannot understand how people ignore an assault on their livelihood and join the very people who are attacking it.  For the most part, lawyers are well-educated;  most of them seem to have some modicum of commonsense.  I’ve often said a lawyer being a Republican, however, makes as much sense to me as a Jewish person joining the Nazi Party.  In the last two decades the Republican Party has continually attacked lawyers, blaming them for every ill befalling the nation.  The latest nonsensical  allegation is that Republicans couldn’t vote for equal pay for women because that would empower lawyers to file lawsuits.

Equally not understandable is how 3 million Hispanics who are qualified to vote in this state could stay home during election time and allow people who have a proven record of disrespect, if not outright slander, for Mexican-Americans in this state get elected.

One only has to look to legislation introduced in recent sessions to get a flavor of how conservatives feel about Hispanics’ place in Texas’ society.  A bill was actually introduced increasing severe penalties on illegal immigrants with exceptions for those who were brought in to Texas to serve as maids or yard men.  This should give any Hispanic an idea of how they are regarded by the right-wing conservatives in the Texas Legislature.

Other clues of how Hispanic Texans are viewed was revealed recently by Dan Patrick, one of the leading candidates for Lt. Governor and a leader of the Tea Party in Texas.  If one only listened to Patrick, you’d have to believe the only Hispanics crossing the Mexican border into Texas are akin to John Dillinger or criminals of the same stripe.  Patrick in his rant ascribed a majority of murders, rapes, robberies and other heinous crimes in Texas to Hispanics.  He failed in his litanyof crimes committed by Hispanics to state that his statistics were over alengthy period of years and was far less than crimes committed by non-Hispanicsin this state.

Greg Abbott, our current Attorney General and leading Republican candidate for Governor, has joined the chorus equating immigration from Mexico as an invasion of our state.  Abbott, who is defending the state Legislature’s reducing public education by $5.2 billion dollars, and a great advocate of no new taxes, and conservative government wants to spend $300 million dollars supposedly securing our border.  Abbott wants to spend $13 million dollars putting 500 DPS Troopers on the border, $8.4 million to buy a high-altitude airplane to monitor Rio Grande crossings, and a couple million on new boats to go up and down the Rio Grande.  Abbott and other Republicans who wail about securing our border seem to have forgotten the simplest of all solutions.  If they would take those folks whom they continue to refer to as “job creators” and put draconian penalties on them for hiring undocumented workers, the problem would quickly go away.  You can bet, however, they’re not going to put the onus on anybody likely to give large contributions to the Republican Party in this state.

It simply makes sense that we should not punish people who come to this country wanting only to work hard, feed their families, or be educated.  It especially does not make sense that after educating these folks we force them to go elsewhere to create jobs, invent and benefit the economy of the place they are sent.  Hispanics who are good American citizens should put an end to the insulting comments by conservatives.  You only have to vote!