(Birmingham News photo) |
A brief
article (“Latinos plead with Sen. Jeff Sessions asking him to help them andtheir families”) in the Sunday print edition of The Birmingham News reported a town hall meeting in which our
senator, Jeff Sessions, was confronted by Latinos in the audience about the
reality of their lives here in our state. Sessions’ initial response was that we
should abide by the laws of our country.
Later Sessions admitted that our government for 20 or 30 years has
failed to address the immigration issue.
So Jeff Sessions loves to fall back on making sure we treat the issue of
immigration in accordance with our laws, but as a member of the law-making body
he is just as unwilling as the rest to make changes that would allow for a
sensible and humane immigration policy.
If it did
not benefit our society to have undocumented immigrants working here, they
would not be here. Increasingly over the past 2 or 3 decades, we have willingly
paid these immigrant people to mow our lawns, do our housework, clean our
hotels, dig our ditches, work on our construction crews, and do any number of
dangerous jobs in the meat-packing industry and other types of unskilled labor.
We have used them for our advantage (or I should say, our society has). Now we are getting a little uneasy and anxious.
It is as though we are shocked and outraged that all of these aliens whom we
have employed at low wages (and without reporting said payments) are somehow in
our midst. We resort to passing harsh immigration laws rather than making it a
more reasonable process.
It is quite
telling that on the front page of the same edition of the News there was a “50 Years of Progress” article about how this
state relied upon unreasonable laws to prevent African Americans from
exercising their rights as citizens back in 1963 (see "Threats. Bombs. Love. Hate. Descendants of local civil rights figures reflect on 1963") On one page we pat ourselves on the back for
how far we have come; on the other page we celebrate the fact that we are still
relying upon unfair laws to suppress those who provide us with their hard
labor.
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Incisive, to the point, and right on. Even if we believe that it is wrong for current laws to be broken, we shouldn't allow that conviction to keep us from changing those laws.
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