Cruz: Yes, I'll Deport the Twelve Million Illegals Currently Here

It's not that I've gotten up late. It's that the news is still lingering in bed.

Cruz now embracing full deportation as response to illegals.

Cruz's position isn't really a flip-flop, nor heartless. But it sounds like self-deportation to me, combined with actual deportation.

Which is fine.

If E-Verify and other measures are put into place, such as requiring proof of citizenship or legal status for welfare benefits, a lot of people will self-deport simply because they have to. If they can't work and also can't collect welfare benefits, then the US is no longer the economic attractor it once had been.

The idea of gangs of black armor clad deportation squads trooping into neighborhoods in the night is a silly fantasia concocted by the Open Borders crowd. Yes, many will be forceably deported, but in any reform that actually stops illegals from collecting money in the US, most will simply leave. (As many have simply left on Obama's watch, owing to how bad the US economy is.)

There will be hard cases where the US public may wish to extend a form of legalization (without citizenship, and with conditions, such as "no welfare") to some of the illegals, those who would be, effectively, stateless persons should the US kick them out.

But that's a small part of this population. The Liberal position pushed by Rubio and the Open Borders crowd is that every illegal would be a stateless person should we eject them, or that enough them are so that we should treat them all as that.

But that's nonsense. There is a reason there are so many international call credit cards sold in neighborhoods where immigrants live. That's because they're keeping touch with family and friends back home. They still have homes in their native country, just as someone from the US who goes to work in Europe for five or six years still has a home in the US.

The idea that Hispanics (and we do seem to be talking about Hispanics here; no one ever says "How could you send those poor illegal Russian immigrants back home to Russia?") are simply incapable of finding a new apartment in their old stomping grounds is both wrong and kind of racist. The Open Borders crowd, for reasons of silly agitation, essentially casts these people as utter incompetents who couldn't possibly make it on their own if we asked them to go back to Honduras or wherever.

That's crazy racist. These people are rather daring and self-starting -- after all, it takes a certain amount of guts and initiative to pick up sticks for a foreign country whose language you don't speak and whose presence within will make you actually a low-level criminal.

Let me ask this hypothetical: How many of you would be eager to re-locate to Costa Rica as an illegal, while not speaking Spanish? Let's say there was a good reason for it, a good job, though an illegal one (in the sense that you have no papers, not that the job is inherently criminal).

It's kind of a scary thing to do.

Yet they did it.

But the weird assumption being pushed is that if we tell them to go back to the homey, familiar place they grew up in, they're going to go all to pieces because they just couldn't possibly hack that.

So I think these people, by and large, kind of have a sufficient amount of wherewithal to relocate themselves back to the land they know best after having come to an alien country just five or so years ago.

Have some of them been here so long that they essentially have no ties to their home country?

Possibly, but I'm tired of Rubio and the other Open Borders folks assuming that's anything like a large percentage of them.

We may have to make some merciful exceptions in some cases, but our policy, for those capable of it -- and most are capable of it -- should be self-deportation or, should that not work and they prove a nuisance, deportation by ICE.

posted by Ace at 01:00 PM

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