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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (97253)	5/4/2003 12:10:45 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

As far as Cuba and "why they are leaving, if it isn't communism they are fleeing"....Why wouldn't they leave then and go someplace besides the US.... Maybe the folks would want to go to other countries like Mexico, South America, etc... Let me explain more clearly. Cuba is a third world country with a history of brutal and inept government. It currently has a Communist government. Haiti is a third world country with a history of brutal and inept government, currently with a non-Communist government. The two countries sit right beside each other, both fairly near the US, a first world country with a history of pretty good government (I’m not fond of governments in general, and “pretty good” is about as high an estimation as any government is likely to get from me). Many Haitians flee to the US, and many more would if they could. Many Cubans flee to the US, and many more would if they could. Haitians don’t flee to Cuba, and Cubans don’t flee to Haiti, though it would be easier than fleeing to the US. From this I draw a conclusion that is consistent with the data and with common sense: people who live in third world countries with brutal and inept governments will run to well governed first world countries if they can. I don’t see that the distinction between communist and non-communist governments is terribly relevant to this equation. I heard on the radio that CA was considering having medical cards and food cards for the illegal aliens who come to this country. Doesn't the word "illegal" mean anything to anyone??? What are they thinking? Here’s an amusing not-so-hypothetical case. We know that a city has a large population of illegal immigrants. We know that many of these illegal immigrants are infected with TB, a disease that is very easy to transmit and hard to cure. We know that these people are coughing on subway cars, etc., and risking the health of citizens in the process. We know also that if we set up treatment centers that require identification, nobody will show up, for fear of being deported. Do we set up no-questions-asked treatment centers, and try to reduce the number of potential disease vectors, or do we declare that spending public funds to treat illegal immigrants is unacceptable? What’s the best move? A cynic, of course, would suggest that the practice of tacitly accepting illegal immigrants, and even extending benefits to them, is motivated less by soft-headedness than by appreciation of the pool of cheap labor provided by illegals. Everybody knows that California’s harvests are largely gathered by illegal immigrants, but you don’t see too many raids on the farms come harvest time.