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I'm so productive · Mar 30, 02:13 PM by Amberlee

Yes, I know. The shock of the fact that I have updated and it hasn’t been a month or more must have you running for your bottles of nitroglycerine.

In spite of the fact that my doctor has requested that I go on such a low carb diet (30 or less total carbs – not net carbs but total carbs – a day) that I am a cranky tired woman on a constant basis, I am being fairly productive. I’ve begun work on the next chapter of my original project. I have the billing and invoicing for the business up to date. I have entered in all of the credit charges for the business and I’m even reconciling those and the bank statements so that I am 100% spot on for up through the start of March. I have gone through the business files and retired all the non-2006 documents for the letter A today and I expect to get through at least D before I leave the office. I have also administered two certification exams and expect to do another before days end.

Woot! Go me! I will feel absolutly no guilt whatsoever that I am about to spend from 6pm tonight until god knows when doing nothing but playing Kingdom Hearts II. I expect I will surface some time on Sunday to do yard work but I’m not going to bet on it. I have now done enough that I feel no need to give anything of myself to society at large until KH is done.

In other news, I was listening to NPR on the way to the office today and they had someone doing an OP/Ed thing on immigration issues. Since it’s been proven that no one really cares about the gay marriage thing as a political football (and the popularity of Brokeback in this country pretty much told the Republican party to drop that as a topic like a hot potato) now they are ragging on immigrants to push the fear buttons of conservative middle America. My white-haired mother, father, and step-father all spend loads of time these days complaining about immigrants of all shapes and colors: they are dangerous, illegals should be deported, they cost too much money, they pay no taxes, they aren’t intellegent, and oh, btw, they take jobs from American workers. This from people who are on Social Security and haven’t worked in more than five years. Yeah, the influx of Mexican’s in New Mexico and Arizona really hurts you guys and you’re ability to get a job washing dishes, doing hard labor in your yard, cleaning your houses, watching your kids, and taking care of your trash. I’m sure you’d love to come out of retirement to do construction. And I know that you’d be happy to see all of your college-educated children give up their day jobs in the nursing, technology, and education fields to take jobs cleaning toilets in office buildings. That’s why it’s so hard for you in Indiana and why our taxes are going up to cover services for immigrent workers and their children in this state. Not.

Don’t get me wrong here. There are some serious problems with immigration right now in this country. In many of the southern most states there are some real public health, education, and tax issues involved as the result of illegal immigration. Back when they did the last amnesty for illegal immigrants they gave aboutu 2.7 million of them a by and let them get citizenship. Note that it did nothing to solve the problem. Now we’ve got more than 12 million that they are trying to legalize. While I don’t, on some levels, have a problem with that idea (most of these folks are contributing to our society and have paying jobs, even if it’s not legal) I do think that it sends the wrong message.

The essential question that people need to ask is: why and how do these people keep coming here? We have laws that are supposed to keep people from employing individuals without immigration papers. Only 3 companies in the ENTIRE COUNTRY got fined last year for hiring illegal immigrants, yet we have over 12 million of them here? What’s wrong with that picture? The IRS has the ability and databases available to companies to ensure they are not getting bogus social security numbers from people. Obviously, neither the IRS or companies are doing their job in this regard. As for those that complain that the influx illegals from countries to our south takes work from Americans, I say this: Americans don’t want those jobs anyway. I’m not saying that it isn’t important that legal immigrants and citizens have a fair shake in the job market (and I think it is totally unfair that people go unpunished for breaking the law and hiring illegals) but I am saying that even if these jobs were not being filled by illegal immigrants I doubt they would get filled by citizens. How many people do you know that would take a job in a slaughter house if it were offered to them? How about cleaning out sewers? I challenge you to watch the show “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery Channel and to ask yourself if you would do something like that if it was the only thing you could find to feed your family or if, instead, you’d rather be on the dole (as they like to put it over the pond in the UK).

The true problem with immigration has nothing to do with giving people amnesty and everything to do with enforcement of current law. If we dried up the source of jobs, cracked down on giving driving licenses to illegals, and put more manpower into patroling the border I think you’d see a heck of a downward trend in the number of illegal immigrants you find in this country. These people are here because they can find work, and get paid well for it. If they can’t get funds, can’t get housing, and can’t get services they will either leave or turn to crime. One would hope they’d just go home instead of filling our jails but I suppose that’s something we’d just have to wait and see.

In addition, enforcing current laws will also reduce the bigoted complaining that people like myself have to listen to from people like my parents. One of our employees is hispanic. He’s in college. He is a citizen. His mother and his grandparents are citizens. However, because his last name is Garcia he constantly gets looked down on and given a bunch of crap. And we’re in Indiana. He moved up here from Texas so he figures things are a lot better than they were but still. From profiling to snide comments this poor guy has to deal with a whole lot of crap. It’s totally unfair.

And, while I have largely focused up to this point on the issue of immigrants from Mexico and Central America and made some blanket statements with regard to jobs and education, don’t think that I’m one of those people that thinks all immigrants are nothing but low-wage earners and uneducated people that can’t speak English. I’ve known Frenchmen that have moved here. I’ve known Englishmen that have moved here. I’ve never known a Canadian that moved here (and why would they want to?) but I’ve met people from Africa to Australia and Prague to Peru that have come to the US to live and work. The majority of these people have college educations and work high-paying jobs. They pay their taxes just like everyone else and have a strong sense of pride about living in the US. For the entire debate about immigration to focus only on low-wage jobs (instead of enforcement, immigration limits, border patrol, and visa issuance) is short sighted. For that matter, a lot of people come to this country to get their college educations.

Have we got a problem? yes. Can it be solved without new legislation? Yes. But having my mom say crap like, “Soon we’ll have riots like France if they don’t deport all these wetbacks” is just so offensive and pisses me off so much that I had to do a brain dump about it here. Hopefully this will keep me from doing anymore than frowning at her and writing my Senator and Congresspeople. I mean, geesh. Can’t we all just get along!