A brutally honest conversation about illegal immigration …

We have a legal right to decide who gets to come into our country. Much less stay. It’s not a civil-rights issue. It’s not a question of international law. 

And we’re not legally required to adhere to a poem on the Statue of Liberty.  I find it rich that many advocates for illegal immigrants quote that poem as if it has the weight of law.

It’s a poem, for God’s sake.

Even more disingenuous are those who quote the Bible to claim we have a moral obligation to give a free pass to illegal immigrants. 

Spare me the pontificating.  Especially when many of the same people openly ridicule and revile anyone else who uses the Bible as a guide to how they should conduct themselves. Then when they act on their beliefs, what’s in the Bible doesn’t matter at all. 

Ask the folks at Chick-fil-A. Or Hobby Lobby. Or the Little Sisters of the Poor.  Or the bakers in Colorado.  Or just about anyone else these nouveau-righteous prigs have attacked. 

Hypocrites. No, I take that back – assholes.  But I digress.        

It makes me crazy when Democrats, liberals, and their pals in the media – all of whom couldn't otherwise care less about “morality” most of the time – claim the whole question of what to do about illegal immigration is one of morality. 

Keeping would-be illegal immigrants out is immoral; kicking out those here illegally already is also immoral. Yet protecting violent illegal immigrant criminals from deportation is moral. 

Talk about selective morality. 

Then there’s their Orwellian use of weasel words like “undocumented” to describe people here illegally. As if being here illegally is simply a matter of missing the proper papers.

By their standards, I can call myself an “undocumented” airline pilot and be allowed to pilot a 747, even though I have no formal training, have no pilot’s license, and no legal right to do so.  But hey, it’s just a matter of paperwork, right? Merely a technicality. 

Calling illegal immigrants simply “undocumented” is dishonest. They didn’t lose their paperwork. Their dog didn’t eat their immigration forms. And their documents aren’t still sitting somewhere, left behind by accident. So stop pretending their illegality is just a technicality.

They are here illegally. That makes them criminals, regardless of why they came here.  Building a border wall is akin to locking your doors to keep other criminals out. When our law enforcement catches a criminal, they arrest them and then prosecute them. I fail to see why illegal immigrants should be treated any differently.      

That’s why I have such a hard time with the whole immigration debate.  If I felt that illegal immigrants crossed our border not knowing they were committing a crime, I might feel different. But the hard truth is they know they are committing a crime; they just hope to get away with it.  That’s no different than a run-of-the-mill criminal.  So why do they expect special treatment? 

The media can show all the tear-jerker videos of illegals being deported and leaving behind their bawling broods. They can tell stories about someone who has never broken any other laws, but because they came here illegally years ago is afraid of being deported.  They can go on and on about the plight of children brought here illegally by their parents.  They can show caravans of migrants hoping to gain asylum, including the mothers hoping to drop their anchor baby here instead of Mexico.      

I don’t care. 

I have lost any sympathy whatsoever those already here illegally. If someone has been living and working here for years and never applied for US citizenship, time’s up. Get out.

I especially abhor many of those now using their kids, or some kid that may or may not be theirs, as a get-in-the-US-for-free card. Make no mistake: that was their plan from the get-go.  They counted on politicians and our media to make the case for them, using kids as hostages.       

Democrats and the media are doing their part to further these immigrants’ plan. Both are publicly horrified we’re separating those same kids from their parents – or someone claiming to be their parents – when they try to breach our borders. We’re obviously monsters.   

How can we be so cruel? How can we be so heartless? After all these kids have been through to get here: the hardships, the life-threatening travel, the scrounging for food, water and shelter, the dangers they faced – how can we possibly take them away from the adults they traveled with?

Simple. Those adults put those children in danger. They don’t deserve to have custody of any kids anymore. They’ve shown they are clearly irresponsible. When anyone is that negligent of the welfare of children, possibly even their own, they can’t be trusted.

If they weren’t illegal immigrants trying to get in, and just another ordinary American parent, Child Services agencies across the country would take those kids away from them, too, for putting children through all that. Think about that for a moment.   

Those adults knew perfectly well what they were doing and therefore should be held solely responsible for the consequences. They knew the peril they put the children in to get here. They knew what would happen when they got to our border. And they didn’t care. They hoped they could use a child as a shield to bypass our border enforcement laws. 

It was callous and calculated.  Just as it is now when Democrats and the media make it seem that Maria and Pepe had no idea they would be separated from the kids they brought. I’m sorry for the children caught up in this, but the adults who brought them are entirely to blame.  

The adults knew the law. All of them did before they started trekking toward our border.

There are few innocent adults here in all this – just people trying to use children as pawns. We can’t allow anyone to use children that way.  Forget the sob stories and the made-up propaganda about “child prisons” and realize what many of these people really are: hostage takers. 

If we send a message that it’s okay, we’ll put more innocent children at risk. As it is, the threat of separating children from the adults they’re travelling with should be a powerful deterrent to anyone who cares about the welfare and safety of those children. 

We should not be afraid to continue the practice.  Separating those children from those adults may make for heart-wrenching video, but it’s often in the best interests of the children. 

The bigger problem is continually waffling on how we enforce our immigration laws. It’s the perpetual ambiguity that encourages more illegal immigration.      

As harsh as this sounds, highly publicized zero tolerance is the only answer.

We can’t leave any doubt about what will happen. It needs to be crystal clear that you simply can’t cross our border illegally.  I say turn back at the border anyone trying to cross illegally – adults with children, pregnant mothers, unaccompanied minors, whoever – and particularly anyone faking demands for asylum when they’ve already been offered asylum elsewhere. 

Like Mexico. Which many of them were.    

Illegals already here screwed the pooch and diminished any compassion I might have had. 

They’ve done this by demanding rights they don’t have and don’t deserve. They’ve forged documents to get benefits to which they are not entitled. They’ve belied their real feelings about assimilating into America by insisting we must adapt to them, not they to us.  

They see no need to learn English, or to follow our laws, and many of them publicly and openly mock us for thinking we can ever kick them out. That's chutzpah. 

Which prompts me to ask: Who the Hell do they think they are? 

Spineless Republicans are too afraid to deal with this. They’re afraid Hispanics will not vote for them if we actually enforce our immigration laws. 

Hispanics here illegally won’t, of course. 

But maybe Republicans should talk to Hispanics other than bullshit-artist activists like Jorge Ramos, Congressman Luis V. Gutiérrez, the propagandists in the media, and others.

Any number of recent polls show that a majority of Hispanics here legally, especially immigrants who went through the legal process to become citizens, are opposed to illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal immigrants, and support cracking down on illegal immigration. Almost 74% are opposed to sanctuary city laws that protect violent illegals from deportation. 

And here’s why: they think too many illegal immigrants are gaming the system, burdening public schools, draining public assistance programs, reducing wages, and taking jobs away from citizens. They can’t understand why people who come here illegally should be praised and given a pass for no other reason than they refused to respect and follow our immigration laws.

Doubt this? Talk to some Hispanics who are US citizens or in the process of becoming one. They’re fed up, too.  Many want the border wall as much as Trump and a lot of other Americans, for many of the same reasons. 

It’s not about race, to them; it’s about fairness and equal justice under the law.  

We need to fix our immigration system, that’s true. But when we start the process, we need to put the priority on equal justice and fairness to our own citizens first. 

There’s absolutely no reason to give preferential treatment to any illegal immigrants.