Arizona Law on Illegal Immigration

Arizona has been given a really raw deal. Most of the fifty states don't have a border with Mexico, and none has the amount of crime, human trafficking, and drug smuggling that comes up through Arizona's border. It is WRONG for them to bear this alone, it defeats the purpose of being a part of the United States.

We need a reconciliation and mutual cultural assimilation with the immigrants. The latter is how America is supposed to work. We're supposed to become one people with our immigrants. Assimilation can't happen with people who can't become a part of society. The Catholic Church says that immigrants are supposed to respect and accommodate the laws of their host. So many things have already gone wrong.

I think this problem needs to be fixed soon and a solution needs to include equal measures of generosity and consequences for those who have entered the country illegally. There are some really dehumanizing aspects of this ongoing situation. I'm really tired of Congress failing to fix this decades old problem (but I also doubt that I would like any "solution" that this Congress would come to.)

I fear that the Democrats will be tempted to give amnesty to a broad swath of the illegal immigrants in a naked attempt to buy votes, which would be good for exactly NOBODY. This really wouldn't help illegal immigrants or us because I think becoming documented would price most of them out of a job. (Considering minimum wage laws, historically pushed by Democrats) But I can't be sure of this because I haven't heard anyone make this argument. Certainly, I think there needs to be an expanded guest worker program, perhaps one where they are allowed to work below the minimum wage (as many currently do).

I think some Catholic bishops are tacitly welcoming illegal immigration as part of an ongoing avoidance issue they have. The state of catechesis and the liturgy are pretty much in the crapper. American Catholics aren't passing the faith on to their children. They themselves don't even know what it is they have. The faith is often rendered so bland and inconsequential when Catholicism is rich and other-worldly in its natural form! Many bishops welcome these immigrants as a stop-gap solution to declining numbers of Americans in the pews, but they're going to see that if they don't fix their presentation of the faith, the immigrants' descendants will one day simply drop Catholicism, too.

Back to politics, I really believe in state sovereignty, America's AND Mexico's. Mexico needs SERIOUS reform but I don't know what we can do to help them without reaching in and violating THEIR sovereignty just as individual citizens of their country regularly do to us. We can't unilaterally fix Mexico. It needs to be a country where its own citizens can thrive, instead it's becoming something that can be described as a kleptocracy, a narco-republic, etc.