This was the phrase, according to legislator's on both sides of the aisle, that representatives of the Church used when speaking of legislation regarding immigration reform in the State of Utah. It made it into the paper, every year representatives meet with leaders of both parties and disuss upcoming legislation. Use compassion. What an interesting idea.
Immigration is such a short fuse topic today, I think made more so by some of the talking head imbecile's on the radio, but that is a different rant. Unfortunately, at least in the public square, there is nothing that even resembles dialogue. There are only shouted insults and aspersions cast.
I have very strong stances on the idea of immigration, but I'll save those for a different, longer post. I do, however, want to lament one move that our state legislature is making (or trying to make) in the current session. As it stands now, children who are not legal residents can still get in state tuition if the graduated after three years in a Utah high school. This bill seeks to change that and charge them out of state tuition. It is punitive, it is directed at the wrong segment of society, it fixes nothing, and does nothing but cause more problems.
The Deseret Morning News has a good story about it here. I don't really care what peoples stance on immigration is, or how they would propose to fix it. But, I think that a lot of the comments on that story sum up how many people feel, they say the have absolutely no sympathy for 'those people'. And that is the true shame.
If you think the girl in the story is getting what she deserves. You are flat out wrong. You have blinded yourself with partisan/philosophical catchphrases so much, that you cannot look at a situation and see it for what it is.
There was a call for compassion. Unfortunatley, compassion is one of those things that we do in our religious personality. This is politics.
1 comment:
The bigger problem with the hardline stance that ends with the person saying "...period!" is that there is no room for understanding the law, just enforcing it.
A child who has lived in the US illegally for more than 1 year (virtually all of them) is unable to obtain basically any type of visa for 10 years. Most of these children are unaware of this until they are adults and attempt to fix their legal status.
This is just one example of how it would be amazingly difficult for these kids to become legal.
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