A letter writer in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section used his copy of the Newspeak Dictionary to mischaracterize what’s going on with the Trump administration’s deportation drive. He started out supposedly on the right path:
Like many others, I support deporting people who are here illegally and have committed serious crimes.
But that turned out to be merely his distracting lead-in to his mischaracterization:
Deporting people who have committed no crime—especially those who have been here for a long time—is morally corrupt.
The ones being deported have, though, committed a crime: they broke, or snuck, into our nation illegally. That crime stands whether the illegal aliens have been here a short time or a long time, and there is no statute of limitations on the crime of crossing our borders illegally.
Another reliance by this letter writer on his Newspeak Dictionary:
Millions of migrants work for low wages in service and agricultural industries.
They are not migrants. They ceased to be migrants when they entered Mexico or Canada illegally under those nations’ laws. Even if having legally entered those nations and thereby maintained a legitimate claim to be migrants, when they entered our nation illegally under our laws, they ceased to be migrants. Entering Mexico, Canada, or our nation illegally makes them illegal aliens. Full stop.
White washing the question, distorting reality via Newspeak-ism, counting illegal aliens as not illegal or as having committed no crime, is not the answer to our immigration problem; it merely encourages the flow of illegal aliens. The correct answer is two-fold: remove the illegal aliens, and streamline our legal immigration laws to enable faster vetting and to ease visa quota limits.
A first step already has been taken by Executive Order, but it badly wants codification into law (with a sunset limit in this case) by Congress. That step, emphasized again by HHS Secretary Kristi Noem at her Thursday press conference, is the offer to all of the illegal aliens currently present the opportunity to take themselves back to their home country, on arrival at which we will give them $1,000 of American taxpayer money, and then they will have the opportunity to return to the US legally, with all associated opportunities, including critically, no longer having to look over their shoulders for ICE, and being able to get onto a path to citizenship if they wish. The backstep here, though, is if they don’t take this opportunity and are caught and deported, their departure will be permanent; they will be barred from ever coming here again.