Toll booth on the free-ride highway

Guns, God and Good Government | J.R. Labbe:

“Georgia's House of Representatives took a step last week to try to recoup some of the state's outlay for those services by adopting a surcharge for wire transfers. If passed by the Senate and signed by the governor, the Illegal Immigration Fee Act would impose a 5 percent fee on wire transfers made by anyone who can't prove they are in the country legally. The fee would be waived for people who can produce a pay stub or tax return that shows they paid taxes in Georgia. And please, don't cry for me, Argentina, if your economy goes mushy because the United States starts enforcing its immigration laws.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

Yet another case of exploiting the poor. The vast majority of the illegal aliens are nothing more than poor, hard-working people wanting only to labor to provide for themselves and their families. They come to the United States because the opportunities for work are better than in their home countries. Texas' history is full of immigrants. Sam Houston himself was an immigrant from Tennesee. So, too, was Davy Crockett, hero of the Alamo. Not all the early immigrants from the United States met Mexico's rather strict conditions for legal immigration.

If modern day Texas no longer wants immigrants, it ought to eliminate what draws them here. It ought to target the employers who exploit illegal immigrants. Georgia's legislation is the polar opposite. It just makes the situation worse. The employers are untouched. The poor's meager pay is docked even more, making them poorer and more desperate. Georgia is less interested in ending illegal immigration than it is in extracting yet more blood, toil, tears and sweat from our immigrant poor.

A century ago, America recognized that its greatness came from being the land of opportunity. America would do well to remember and live up to the sentiments expressed in Emma Lazarus' poem enshrined at the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

It's not Argentina that ought to be crying. It's America.