Should we deport all illegals?

Darling, I can't tell you how much it annoys me to see people claim "well, my great-grandfather was an immigrant and he did things legally." Did these people not go to school? These people are apparently too ignorant to realize just how open immigration to the US was during their grandparents' and great-grandparents' day.

Unless you were visibly ill or deemed physically unfit (usually, tubercular or with a disability the immigration official found yucky), or, at certain times, if you were from specific countries (like the exclusion of many would-be immigrants from China in the 19th century), you got in. That was it. Just look healthy.

No need to speak English, no need to have a degree or a job waiting for you. There was nothing like the process we have today. I have to echo crapbag's observation, too, that it's absolutely insane to advocate shooting someone on sight for not having papers.

Absolutely nuts. Scary, darling. Me?

Naw...I don't have a problem with people who just want to work hard and make a better life for their families. (((AAM))) Yo, JP...so... you're just advocating shooting people when they're actually straddling the border and have one foot in Mexico and one in the US? Or do you want them to be shot if you find them within a specific distance of the border?

What would that be? Ten feet? Ten miles?

A hundred miles? Are you designating a kill zone? How about if they have one foot in Canada and one in the US - shoot to kill again, or are we slightly less bothered by the idea of non-brown people coming in here?

At what point in "shoot on sight" at the border do you stop and go through the niceties? Do you wait until you ask someone for papers and summarily execute them if they don't have any? And you're comfortable with the idea of having not so much border guards as border killers?

OK first of all please stop using the word "illegal" as a noun. No human being is illegal. It's been a deliberate and very successful strategy on the part of the authorities to call refugees "Illegals" It dehumanises and demonises them.

It creates an all-encompassing antipathy towards them..It negates the possibility of them being decent hardworking, resourceful individuals and turns them all into a faceless mob of potential muggers.. A strongly pejorative word such as "Illegal" conveys many things which the PR people at the INS wish to have permeate the community. It leaves people with an impression about illegal aliens (itself a frightening and derogatory term) Their essential wrongness, their potential to do harm, their nefarious purposes."They" are separate from "us". Different.

Inferior. Bad. They want to take things from us.

The word has criminalised the people it is attached to in the minds of others. It has been a brilliant strategy, and masterfully carried through. I cry every time I hear it being used.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.