Unless you've been comatose for the past few months you know that, in addition to the normal influx of illegal immigrants, we've had tens of thousands of kids sent to the US by....their parents?....their home countries? Who knows? And the situation is getting worse by the day.
If their stories are to be believed, they are fleeing Central America because violence, likely drug cartel related, and dire poverty, are forcing parents to push their kids north, hoping for a better life for them.
I don't know if that's true or not, but what I do know is we have thousands of kids, dirty, many of them sick, sleeping on floors inside chain link cages, in totally inadequate, unsanitary conditions.
The heartless among us are fighting tooth and nail to keep these kids from being humanely housed, even temporarily, in their communities. They've actually thrown up roadblocks and threatened violence to keep these kids out of their sight.
I think that's shameful!
If there are mangled bodies littering the scene of a horrific highway crash, the first order of triage is to care for the victims. There will be plenty of time later to determine what happened, who's at fault, who should pay for the damages, etc. But first you provide care for the injured.
Can you imagine yourself as a 10 year old, away from your family and everything else you know, a thousand miles from home, regardless how pitiful that home might be, and you're being snarled at by people who think of you as scum?
We need immigration reform. How should it be structured? I have no clue. But these illegals are here now anyway. It is simply impossible to round them all up and send them home.
We need to find a way to bring them into our system and make them useful, contributing, tax paying members of our society. Sure, weed out the criminals and those who are here just to scam our system, but then welcome the rest and put them to work.
The Democrats want this and the mainstream Republicans want this, too. The latter's traditional base, corporate interests, definitely wants this. But rank-and-file Republicans are petrified by the extremists on their Tea Party right and refuse to face reality. The "problem" isn't going away. We need action.
S
