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Monday, May 01, 2006
A day with immigrants
Despite my efforts to remain oblivious to current events, I noticed that today (courtesy of the radio announcers talking instead of playing music) was supposed to be a day of protests, walk-outs and boycotts by immigrants: "A day without immigrants". As I've previously mentioned, I'm the only one in our lab who isn't an immigrant; so you might expect that I'd have a lonely day today.
Well, not so much. Everybody was there, and not protesting about anything other than the experimental results (although there was a boycott by the experiments of any successful results, but that's another story for another time).
So, I did a little digging online. Apparently, this was about illegal immigrants protesting the fact that the government wants to make them more illegal (although the vast majority of the articles I saw referred to them as undocumented, not illegal).
WTF? The logic here seems somewhat confused. X is illegal, but still lots of people do/are/use X. Government response - make it more illegal.
I'm reminded of a quote from one of P. J. O'Rourke's chapters on drugs laws [1]. "Get serious." Either make something illegal and enforce it, or legalize it.
I don't know what to do about illegal immigration. I assume that both of my maternal grandparents were legal immigrants, because their last names were changed (mis-spelled) at Ellis Island. I don't know about my paternal grandparents, seeing as when the people I could've asked were alive, we had other things to talk about (slides and legos, given how old I was). And I don't know what to do about bizarre government/legal logic. But I do know what to do about news like this...listen to the tape player instead of the radio [2].
[1] From "Parliment of Whores". Good book; read it even if you don't agree with his politics
[2] Which I can do that it's warmed up... when it's cold, audio tapes get distorted. Yes, this is crawling partly back under my rock; but that options appear to be laugh, get annoyed, or ignore it.
[3] yes, I'm foot-noting blog-posts. Sad, isn't it?
Well, not so much. Everybody was there, and not protesting about anything other than the experimental results (although there was a boycott by the experiments of any successful results, but that's another story for another time).
So, I did a little digging online. Apparently, this was about illegal immigrants protesting the fact that the government wants to make them more illegal (although the vast majority of the articles I saw referred to them as undocumented, not illegal).
WTF? The logic here seems somewhat confused. X is illegal, but still lots of people do/are/use X. Government response - make it more illegal.
I'm reminded of a quote from one of P. J. O'Rourke's chapters on drugs laws [1]. "Get serious." Either make something illegal and enforce it, or legalize it.
I don't know what to do about illegal immigration. I assume that both of my maternal grandparents were legal immigrants, because their last names were changed (mis-spelled) at Ellis Island. I don't know about my paternal grandparents, seeing as when the people I could've asked were alive, we had other things to talk about (slides and legos, given how old I was). And I don't know what to do about bizarre government/legal logic. But I do know what to do about news like this...listen to the tape player instead of the radio [2].
[1] From "Parliment of Whores". Good book; read it even if you don't agree with his politics
[2] Which I can do that it's warmed up... when it's cold, audio tapes get distorted. Yes, this is crawling partly back under my rock; but that options appear to be laugh, get annoyed, or ignore it.
[3] yes, I'm foot-noting blog-posts. Sad, isn't it?
