Is Civil Discourse Too Much To Ask For?

As I am pretty certain everyone reading this blog knows, I am an active participant on several different blogs, many of them related to religion, politics, education, and social issues. In a recent blog post at By Common Consent, a Mormon blog, about immigration, a nugget was posted by a (to the best of my knowledge) drive-by commenter, ranting and raving about "illegals" ruining our nation. Here is the verbatim post:

Do illegals pay social security? Millions of dollars are sent back to Mexico to their families. And their are jobs besides farm jobs that that citizens haven’t done because wages have been depressed by importing them at a cheaper rate. A condition of higher unemployment means that any race, Irish etal takes opportunities from those who first deserve them. Eventually, the citizen would take any job to survive if they hadn’t already been taken by then. If no citizen needed that job, then I wouldn’t care about that aspect of it. But their is a coverup of statistics on unemployment and crime because the corrupt portion of the Republican party(and big bussiness) and the Democratic party to foster the socialist vote. These traitors exploit illegals of any race to undercut the citizen. But the illegal has better than he had and the citizen worse. We speak as though the issue is of employment alone but the illegal garners medical and other social benefits of welfare supported on the backs of the citizen. Stolen identities along with voting privileges make a an illegal vote for more socialist programs. More negatives than the social security they’ve been touted to bolster. I can’t speak for Indiana but what I see here makes those statistic seem to be a sham. But when you look at the Banks and bussiness that support and encourage them and you see how they tabulate the unemployment stats you realize it’s all biased reporting or a whitewash. It’s not that certain conditions never existed for immigration but this aint one of them and if it were it would only be right if it were legal immigration which checks a multitude of problems. The H2a visas are a way that already exist to rightfully moderate this but for the church to approve of a breach of federal law in the form of a state law contravenes it’s own rule of honoring and sustaining the the law. Are You ready to retire pretty soon so that the illegals would be paying your social security or are you young ? If you are young would you mind having your wage reduced or your job replaced by an illegal knowing that ,even though you were out of work, your social security payments would be there some day? Even if you couldn’t get hired? Well, if your young and you think that you are totally deceived if not self deceived. Our country is so negatively funded that you think immigration will fill a blackhole. The world is filled with disinformation about the true dire status of the economy. Forget about all this trash on racism. The principle is that ANY race outside that impairs the conditions of the citizen (which could themselves be any race) they should obey. But the really bad people who are traitors support them.

Things like this cause me to seriously worry about our nation when I realise that these kind of people live, work, and vote here. The current debate in our nation about the problems with our immigration system does not benefit at all when people start discussing the issues in this way. I don't think there is a single coherent argument in that entire wall of text. It is just nasty rhetoric, which is exactly what we do not need more of in our nation. Is it asking too much to see civilised discourse finally make its way to our nation?

For those interested, the entire blog post and all 175+ comments can be found here: http://bycommonconsent.com/2011/03/15/immigration-lolz/

It is in response to the recent news that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially supported recent immigration reform laws in Utah. See here: http://newsroom.lds.org/article/a-principle-based-approach-to-immigration

Comments

I'm surprised you countenance such illiterate foaming at the mouth with a response. Now if you want to read an intelligent, well-reasoned, well-written rant against immigration, I would recommend Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia. Very well done book on this issue.
I gave no response, because no response is possible. Rather, I shared the illiterate rant so as to see what others would say of it.

I view any discourse that is against immigration as lacking in intelligence or reason, as immigration is, and always has been, the lifeblood of this continent.

Illegal immigration, on the other hand, is a considerably different matter.
I think intelligent arguments against immigration can certainly be made, but they are likely to be founded on pragmatic economic and social concerns. The person you quote might seem like he's expressing such concerns, but really he (or she) is voicing unfounded and highly emotional arguments that could easily drift into racism, xenophobia, and even violence.

When you get a chance, read Mexifornia and tell me if you think Hanson should be classed with your ranter. I should tell you that Hanson is a historian who was born and raised and lives still on the land his ancestors first settled in Southern California, so his thoughts on and against immigration are informed both by an academic (and therefore reasoned) consideration of the problem and a first hand experience with it. It's an excellent and short read. I assign it in my American history courses.
I'll read it eventually, but I'll point out that even if Hanson lives on the land his ancestors settled, he still comes from immigrant stock. Anyone who lives in the western hemisphere came here from a different place. The only people on earth who are not descended from immigrants are the people living in Mesopotamia whose family lines go all the way back to the beginning.
True, Hanson is himself an immigrant, but in time-honored fashion of all immigrants, there is a distrust or dislike or at least a certain displeasure or lack of feelings of welcome for the next in-coming group. It's kick the cat writ large.

Since you trace our ancestry to Mesopotamia, does this mean you disavow the LDS interpretation of the location of the Garden?

And for that matter, given our origin myth, we are all immigrants to this muddy ball of rock, aren't we?
I do not disavow the LDS belief of the location of Adam-ondi-Ahman. But we also believe that Noah ended up on Mt. Ararat which is clearly in the Fertile Crescent. Besides, we don't believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible in terms of the timeline of human existence. I'm not a young earth creationist.

And yes, I do believe that we are all immigrants to this rock, which is why I find it ridiculous for anyone to claim that immigration is a bad thing.
Also: to add to my earlier thought. Immigrants also don't care much for the people who they find in their new home. Some forms of immigration in history were accompanied by conquest, persecution, destruction and marginalization of the populations already living in the area in question.

I can think of the Romans, for example, or the Mongols; even the Americans in the post-1848 Southwest. The Germans, the Russians, too. Oh and hey don't forget the Spanish and the Portuguese.

If we go far enough back we might add the Poles and Slovenians to that list of marauding newcomers who pillage, rape, and finally settle into a new territory and intermingle with their predecessors.

It's a human thing, after all.
Define "young earth creationist" for me. That's a new term. Does that mean one who believes the earth was created in seven actual days 5 or 7 thousand years ago?
Yep. Immigration, with all of its positives and negatives, is a part of the human existence. I don't think it is possible to label it as "good" or bad" - it is just a part of what makes us humans.

We can, however, have civil discourse on what we can do to make the immigration process more positive and less negative.
I'll let Wikipedia give the fuller definition, but the short answer to your request is: both.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism
We've discussed in another venue one aspect of making immigration a more positive experience: assimilation. I still believe that humane policies of assimilation are the best way to integrate outsiders into a population. The quicker and more kindly the integration, the better. But that means shucking past practices: it means learning English, not living in ethnic ghettos or neighborhoods, giving up certain garb, no bi-lingual education, homogenization of belief systems and practices, and certainly no resorting to the laws of the immigrants' homeland or religion. That seems a small price to pay for the freedoms offered in this country -- or any other democratic society.

But hush, we've been down this road.

BTW: Ararat is rather north of the fertile crescent, at least according to the maps I consulted.

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