BSODmyself

I thought that amassing large groups of non-citizens in American cities while waving the Mexican flag was a terrible marketing idea. However, this week in conjunction with congressional debate over illegal immigration legislation, a number of Latin American musicians will be releasing a Spanish-language rendition of the national anthem. To add fuel to the fire, “The Star Spangled Banner”, which they will call “Nuestro Himno”/”Our Anthem” will be in a style reminiscent of tradional south-of-the-border music. This is such an amazingly bad idea that, if the recording of this song gets the type of television coverage that the original protests received, the eleven million plus illegal immigrants in this country will be lucky if they all receive deportation instead of a brutal and harsh interment.Not that I support deportation or interment. I’m the same person who set up the extremist “declare war on Mexico” strawman argument that I then declared to be maniacal (see post from April 2nd: The Ultimate Solution to Immigration). I’m even, for all intents and purposes on social issues, a near bleeding-heart liberal. And now I’m starting to get really, really turned off by the thought of turning illegal immigrants into citizens (or guest workers or bald eagles or whatever).

See, it just seems like those forces that are advocating or pushing the issue of immigration reform have no idea what they are doing. Massive protests were organized. There’s nothing really wrong with protesting. Citizens have a right to do that according to the First Amendment to the Constitution. But illegal immigrants aren’t citizens. The average Joe American at home watching TV could figure that one out. But some of the people protesting are citizens, so that’s not that bad of an issue. However, what about all those Mexican flags? Okay, so it took a week or so to figure out that they should be flying American flags to show that they wanted to be citizens of the United States and NOT Mexico. Now we’re going to have the holiest-of-holies of traditional American songs done in Spanish.

I’m not sure how they’re going to undo this one, but don’t worry because May 1st will be the mother of all protests meant to shut down all of American industry (and on a Monday no less). In Mexico, there will be a corresponding one-day boycott of American goods and services termed “Nothing Gringo”. Irregardless of how these individual events succeed or end up flying over like a lead zeppelin, the true colors for this illegal immigrant movement appears to have been revealed.

The illegal immigration activists need to consider who their audience is. While they may be trying to convince Senators to pass legislation favorable to their agenda, ultimately they must consider current American citizens to be their primary audience. What? You didn’t realize that these major protests all across the country would be televised to average Joe American? If you want a Congressman to side with you, you got to make it easy for him. Don’t do something that’s going to get him grief from people who actually have the right to vote him out of office. People in Congress want to get that really bitchin’ pension plan and all the perks of Washington, D.C. life. They are even more scared of getting sent back home than most illegals are.

What Joe American sees when he turns on the television news is coercion. Coercion is force. It is the opposite of persuassion. Persuassion is based upon the free exchange of ideas. Through persuassion, those ideas that work are adopted, utilized and perhaps improved upon. Those ideas that are completely worthless are thrown on the scrapheap of failed ideologies and broken isms. While Joe American would rather have a six-pack and watch the big game most of the time, he does react to discussion and ideas that make some amount of sense. However, one thing that pisses off Joe American to no end is being told what he will do by a perceived outside force. Herein lies the base problem with the illegal immigration movement.

[Author's Note: Taking a suggestion that was made regarding the length of past blog posts, I have decided to break this post into two separate articles. One will be posted today. The other will be posted on or around May 1st.]

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Politics, Rants.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.