Now Playing at Reason.tv: Dick Armey on Illegal Immigrants: "Bless their hearts"
Nick Gillespie | February 26, 2008, 3:40pm
At last fall's Reason in DC conference (October 26-27), former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) talked about how champions of free markets need to focus on for smaller and better government.
In this excerpt from his talk, Armey, now the head of Freedomworks, a nonprofit that promotes "lower taxes, less government, more freedom," takes a bold stand for one of the most pilloried populations in these United States: Illegal immigrants who come here to make a better life for their children and themselves.
"The biggest immigration problem we got in America is a government that's not doing its job," says Armey. "I don't like illegal immigration, but I'll tell you something: I don't run stop lights. But you put me out on the road at two o'clock in the morning on the way to the all-night drugstore to get medicine for my babies, and you give me a stop light that is stuck on red, and no traffic in sight, and I'm gonna go through that red light."
Click below to listen to the full excerpt (approximately three-and-a-half minutes).
James Anderson Merritt | February 26, 2008, 10:06pm | #
It really bothers me when people who come here to improve their lives and those of their families, and who break no laws other than the one that says they can't BE here (and the domino laws, such as, if you can't BE here, you can't WORK here, either, etc.), are treated as less than human by people who routinely drive over the speed limit -- a practice that actually DOES result in maiming and deaths on our highways. If everyone must obey the law, then everyone needs to obey it all the time, no exceptions. I actually believe that, but I admit that this is a ludicrously unattainable goal in modern times of the mega-state.
In the America of today, pretty much everyone is breaking SOME kind of law all the time -- some deliberately and some inadvertently. For the most part, we need to keep on the books only those laws that deal with true crime: when one person injures another, unjustly coerces another, or damages another's property.
Who is injured, coerced, or damaged by someone else coming across the border to make a better living?
Seriously, in order for the laws to be respected, they need to be respectable, and we need to have a lot fewer of them. Too many laws, too much micromanagement by the law, and too many "just because we say so" laws all breed contempt for the law, in citizen and "illegal" immigrant alike. Look in the mirror and say with a straight face that this isn't true.
Punish and/or kick out the criminals. Deny welfare benefits, healthcare, and school attendance to people who haven't followed some government legitimization process, if you must. But otherwise, leave people alone! What people don't seem to get is that, by putting in place the mechanisms and infrastructure to reliably keep people from coming IN (or being able to stay), they also put in place the mechanisms and infrastructure that will reliably keep THEM from going OUT. Just because some ruler hasn't hit upon that idea yet means nothing. Once the tools are available, it's just a matter of time.
