This phrase hits me squarely between the eyes in all you wrote.
Why so? I wasn't implying that you, or even all immigrants were criminals.
I was merely stating that those people who have to scrape by to survive often wind up performing desperate acts to do so. Whether it be smuggling, money laundering (hawala), dope dealing, up to violent crimes like robbery.. etc).
It would be no different were I an uneducated American emmigrating to Mexico or elsewhere.. Were I unable to find a job and no one would take care of me, then I would be forced to engage in non-lawful activities just to survive.
As for Anecdotal, I have several years worth of personal experience dealing with foreign nationals working in the US, most of whom are upright (as far as I could discern), but many of whom I've caught with their hands in the "kitty" stealing from their employers.
I can give you one particular example. In many cities you'll note that many parking garage attendants are Ethiopian and Eritrean (at least here they are). It's a low-paying, thankless, job, but with the ability to make some extra tips from retrieving vehicles.
However, there is also a thriving "business" in employee theft amongst them. Not properly accounting for parking vehicles, or issuing used tickets to short-term parkers, pocketing the $5-7 for themselves.
Now according to several sources within those two communities, I was able to learn that much of that money was being shipped back home to purchase arms to fight the war that was going on between the two nations. I found it rather amusing to think that the war in the horn of africa was being funded by parking garage attendants in the US...
But nothing in my comments should be construed as some form of blanket racism. It's just a fact of life that often times people will do things that they wouldn't normally do, merely in order to survive.
Just look at the trade in Chinese slaves and indentured servants here in that US and Europe... Chinese pay their life savings to escape China, pledge several years of service to their "masters" and are forced to work in dreadful toil, or in the case of the girls, as prostitutes.
That's what I want to see stopped. There are enough people who legitimately want to gain access to the US that we can be "picky" about who we grant resident status to.
Hawk |
