Randy:

This is no longer a debate about right and wrong. It is a debate about the will of the people, and the will of the people is to stop illegal immigration.

If political debate is not debate about right and wrong, then political debate must be changed. There’s no sense talking strategy until you’ve first settled on the right goal, and thus no sense talking practical politics except in light of principled convictions about how people ought to be treated. And while I’m a lot more dubious than you are that there are easy and reliable ways to determine what “the will of the people” is, I do know that if the will of the people demands immorality, in the form of an injustice against innocent people, the will of the people must be ignored, evaded, or resisted.

The best the illegals who are here can hope for is a legal path to citizenship through a guest worker program. Every other option involves their being forced to leave. Only the form of the force used differs from option to option. Deny them jobs and benefits or arrest them – its all the same. They have to go.

Don’t talk bosh. There is a perfectly valid third option:

Stop attacking peaceful immigrants.

ariadne:

I can’t believe how much we’ve all been duped into thinking it’s more important than, say, health care, securing nuclear materials, capturing OBL……

I think it’s pretty important to the immigrants.

Jim: Illegal immigrants violate the property rights of all Americans when they cross into our country without our permission.

No, they do not.

Illegal immigrants travel on roads open to everyone, live in places where they have been welcomed by a landlord or by their family, and work for employers who willingly hired them. Or, if they are not, then there is already a law for dealing with trespassers, regardless of nationality.

If an illegal immigrant is barging onto your private property without your permission, then I’ll gladly defend your right to have the trespasser removed from your own property. What I object to is the claim that you have a right to throw immigrants off other people’s property, even if those other people are perfectly happy to let the immigrants stay for love or money. Each American has every right to decide who does or does not stay on her own property. Only belligerent busybodies, on the other hand, think that they ought to have a say in who can or cannot stay on their neighbors’ property.

Jim: Is it considered “assault” to deport illegal immigrants back to their home countries?

Yes. Deportation doesn’t involve a nice man from La Migra walking immigrants back home. It involves using force, or the threat of force, to throw people out of homes that they have been welcomed onto, against their will and against the will of the property owner. Using physical force against people, when you are not defending yourself, is assault. Using assault or the threat of assault to take someone away from their home by force is abduction. The fact that the assaulters and abductors have badges on does not legitimize the attack.

Randy: 1850? Good point. And remember what happened in 1861 when the compromise fell apart.

The compromise actually fell apart in 1854. Not that the aftermath of that was any more pleasant.

Pleasant or unpleasant, though, the compromise fell apart because the terms of compromise were absolutely unacceptable. If your model for desirable political compromise is the god damned Fugitive Slave Act, then I think you need to think a lot harder about what it is you desire and why.

Randy: Peaceful people? That’s an interesting interpretation, but it entirely rejects the arguments of those who are opposed to uncontrolled immigration. The problem for you is that there are a great many such people.

The fact that many people have deluded themselves into thinking that they are being attacked by an Evil Alien Invasion is not my problem. It is theirs.

Randy: At this point in time, the only real alternatives are controlled immigration or mass deportation.

Why in the world do you think that these are the only alternatives? I’m not interested in either form of ethnic cleansing, thank you.

Randy: It is irrational to be upset by the details of a compromise when a compromise is clearly necessary.

Hey, Randy, 1850 called. They want their argument back.

Nativists are calling for peaceful people to be rounded up, restrained, confined, exiled, or shot if necessary, and for real people’s livelihoods to be destroyed, when they have not violated a single person’s rights to person or property. Bush is suggesting that we escalate that violence to the tune of 6,000 soldiers on the border, while implementing a program that will allow a few more people to sidestep that kind of systematic violence against peaceful people.

There is no need and no room for compromise on this issue. Peaceful people should not be assaulted under any circumstances. Anything else is just more of the same old bullshit.

SemiPundit, I’m not claiming that G.W. hasn’t been a very bad President and indeed a rotten person. He has.

I’m asking for some historical perspective. Several of our early Presidents were personally slaveholders and fought politically for the advancement, protection, and perpetuation of chattel slavery. Several engaged in direct campaigns of genocide against various Indian nations during the early, middle, and late decades of the 19th century. James K. Polk, a large-scale slaveholder and leading fighter for the Slave Power, also fabricated a war of aggression with Mexico on grounds no less destructive and duplicitous than Mr. Bush’s war on Iraq, which ended with the conquest of half their territory. Woodrow Wilson, a militant white supremacist who instituted Jim Crow in the federal government and imprisoned and deported political opponents (including feminists, anarchists, civil libertarians, draft opponents, etc.), dragged us into one of the worst wars in world history after running as a peace candidate in 1916.

Acting like Bush’s (genuinely rotten) tenure could even plausibly qualify as the worst, compared to slavers, genocidaires, and the rest, either displays remarkable myopia, or else trivializes what can only be described as crimes against humanity.

Worse than Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder and the perpetrator of genocides against the Seminole and the Cherokee?

Worse than Franklin D. Roosevelt, the four-term President who built concentration camps on American soil?

Worse than Harry S. Truman, the only President to engage in nuclear warfare?

Worse than Dick Nixon, the race-baiting, domestic-spying, nearly-impeached, bomb-dropping butcher of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia?

George W. Bush is only even a plausible candidate for the worst President in history if history only goes back about 20 to 22 years. Perspective, please.