"Day Without an Immigrant"
2 May 2006
Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and their supporters played hooky from school, laid out of work, refused to shop, and took to the streets in protest all across America. Their protest, which they called “Day Without an Immigrant,” was suppose to show our nation how it cannot survive without illegal aliens in our schools, workforce, and checkout lines. Although their protest failed to bring America to a screeching halt, as they had predicted, protesters still hope that the sheer number of demonstrators taking part in yesterday’s “Day Without an Immigrant” will be enough to persuade politicians to suspend our immigration laws and grant amnesty to the more than 12 million illegal immigrants already in our country.
Aimee Hernandez, one of more than 400,000 demonstrators who took to the streets of Chicago yesterday, said, “I think we’re just too many…How are you going to ignore these people?” Many Americans, on the other hand, feel that the size of yesterday’s protest must be ignored if our country is to preserve its rule of law. Take for example Jim Gilchrist, one of the founders of the Minutemen, a group of volunteers who patrol the United States-Mexico border. According to Mr. Gilchrist, “When the rule of law is dictated by a mob of illegal aliens taking to the streets, especially under a foreign flag, then that means the nation is not governed by a rule of law—it is a ‘mobocracy.’”
While we readily acknowledge that many of America’s illegal immigrants have fled from Latin American countries with corrupt governments that condemn their people to eking out miserable existences in abject poverty, this heartrending reality is not reason enough to suspend or cancel our country’s immigration laws. A man may steal a loaf of bread to feed his hungry children, and though our heart goes out to so unfortunate a soul, we must not become so silly in our sympathy as to revoke our country’s laws against stealing, lest our nation become a land of rogues and thieves. Likewise, we must not become so sympathetic toward illegal immigrants, as well as so impressed with their and their supporters’ sheer numbers, that we ignore the rule of law, lest America cease to be a country ruled by law and become a “mobocracy.”
Don Walton
|
