Where has this country's sense of personal responsibility gone? A recent New York Daily New opinion headline recently spoke volumes about the missing sense of personal responsibility: "Immigration laws are breaking families apart, deporting too many parents with US-born children", a piece by Albor Ruiz.
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/07/09/2009-07-09_immigration_laws_are_breaking_families_apart
_deporting_too_many_parents_with_usb.html
In this "opinion piece" Mr. Ruiz weaves a bit of a fantasy - that evil U.S. immigration laws are the only reason his protagonist is being separated from his children. But U.S. immigration laws have nothing to do with why the father is being separated from his children (note, he has a child in Jamaica from whom he is separated while living in the United States). The reason this man is being deported has to do with a series of poor decisions he made, starting with the decision to come to the United States illegally, continuing with his decision to violate drug laws (for which he was convicted) and the decision to father four children in the U.S.without obtaining legal U.S. residency. It is these decisions that the deportee made of his own free will that is resulting in his deportation, not U.S. laws.
If we were to buy Mr. Ruiz's argument that the U.S. should not deport this man, or enforce our immigration laws because to do so would separate a father from his children, then why should we enforce other laws against parents as to do so would separate them from their U.S. children? For example, if a parent were convicted of bank robbery, extortion, theft or murder, under Mr. Ruiz's argument, if would be heartless and cruel to send those parents to prison, since to do so would separate them from their children. Such a result would not only be ridiculous, but unfair. For example, laws would then be applied more harshly against those who never had children than against those who did.
The deportee made his choices all by himself and now he must deal with the consequences. He needs to explain to his children about his wrong and foolish decisions - decisions he made to violate more than a few U.S. laws - the U.S. government and the legal citizens of the United States do not.
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1 comment:
Responsibility is a lost virtue anymore. The only people that want to accept any are the ones who generally do the right thing...work hard, abide by laws, etc... It's the deadbeats that always want to blame everybody else for everything. It's sickening.
By the way, loved this post! :)
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