I recently read an article from the Washington Post – Day Laborers Squeezed on Two Sides

For a growing number of immigrant workers — even some with legal documents — the tradeoff no longer seems worth it. Once proud to send home a monthly money order, many say they can barely afford to pay their own rent while feeling devalued by an increasingly hostile society.

“All my life I heard about the American dream, but now I see doors closing everywhere,” said Eduardo Miguel, 27, an electrical worker from Bolivia who lives in Northern Virginia. “I read about how the Irish and Italians worked their way up in American society, but I don’t see the same future for us. We are losing our jobs, our mortgages and our rights. What do we have to dream about now?”

It’s 2 pages of lamenting about how difficult it is for illegal immigrants to find work in America due to the new rules, regulations, and enforcement that is going on. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about this. Everyone wants people to succeed, it is part of what makes America great. What also makes America great is due process and equal protection under the law. What that means is not only are you protected by the law, you are supposed to follow it. I don’t know that it makes sense to pick and choose which laws you are going to follow unless you are prepared to face the consequences.

I had a discussion a few weeks back about this issue. The truth of the matter is that illegals do cost our country and they are using up resources all the time. Even the small minority of illegals that end up becoming “real” criminals in California are costing the Californians $110 million a year to be housed in our jails. They are also displacing the jobs of people who have waited their turn and gone through the process of entering this country legally.

In my discussion I came up with this analogy:

I have an annual pass for which I have paid money for and it allows me to go to Disneyland for the year.

I love it there, it is much better than my town. They have rides, food, and bathrooms, I could probably live there. So I decide to move my family to Disneyland. If I get hurt, Disneyland has their own first-aid teams throughout the park to help me. I decide that maybe I’m taking too much from Disneyland, so I decide that to help out, I will clean up the trash, sort recycling, maybe even set up a hotdog vending stand to make a little money, I am a very hard worker. I do this for a whole year, and every time Disneyland asks me to leave I protest saying it isn’t fair because I am contributing and the park is much better than my own town, and besides, since I pick up trash for free they don’t have to have as many employees being paid to pick up the park as well.

Now my annual pass runs out and I now have no legal right to be on the property (ok, skipping over the fact that legally i wasn’t supposed to stay overnight and all that other stuff in the small print). They come to arrest me and force me from my home! I protest, saying that I have a much better life here at Disneyland, and they are cruel and heartless for trying to remove me from the lifestyle I have become accustom to. I get my friends to protest the park. I WIN! Disneyland makes a special exception and allows me to stay in the park. More people from other towns hear about this, they want to live at Disneyland too! Soon I have more neighbors down at the haunted mansion and across on Huck Finn’s island. Disneyland can’t get rid of them because they are also helping out by picking up trash, selling hot dogs and doing other jobs that would cost Disneyland so much money to do if they had to hire employees. Now there is a permanent population of people living at Disneyland, we’ll need to have schools to educate our kids, Disneyland better build some! In fact, Disneyland still has restrictions on the rides for height requirements, clearly they are discriminating against our kids, we must lobby to have them get rid of these biased rules and regulations that are obviously there to keep us from using these services!

This goes on for 10 years, with the permanent population growing each year. Pretty soon, lines for the rides are so long that people stop paying to get into Disneyland because all of the rides and other services take way too long to wait for. Sometimes lines are 8 hours long! We lobby Disneyland to cut back on the number of tickets they sell because it takes us too long to go on all the rides.

Take this out to the end, and pretty much nobody but the permanent population of Disneyland will be in the park, because everyone else is going to Knotts Berry Farm where the lines are shorter… Until someone from Disneyland decides that they want to move to Knotts because the lines are shorter and the quality of life is so much better there…

If we don’t protect our borders, regulate the number of immigrants, and keep control of the number of people using our services, we end up unable to function.

Don’t think this applies to immigrants and California? Just look in our emergency rooms or at the recent judge’s orders that we start releasing prisoners early because there are too many prisoners and not enough jails.

Have we really become so politically correct that we can no longer say, “Get in line and wait like everyone else”?