Let's start with Maria the Illegal. She claims that she doesn't want to break American laws, but she does so with what seems to me to be a rather cavalier attitude. I love this quote near the end: "I try to do things the right way," she said. "But if you don't give people a way to do things without breaking the law, what do you expect them to do?" Maria, we expect you to respect our laws and not come here. That is what we expect you to do. I'm supposed to feel sympathy for Maria because she has a $2000 debt that she racked up while engaging in her illegal activity. I'm sorry, but I don't...she made a choice to break our law and she has to live with the consequences of that choice. If she doesn't like breaking our laws, she ought to go home. Maria is not some poor case. She came from the middle class in her country and she probably had a better life there than she does hiding in the shadows here.
Shifting focus to Ezra the Public Servant. Ezra tries to do his job. He really does. But he just can't seem to divorce himself from upholding the law and having feelings about "his" people. Ezra's family immigrated legally, so I have no beef with him but I must confess that I don't understand why he protects people who make his life more difficult. He claims that proposed state laws that enforce federal laws are racist, but is unwilling to condemn the criminal activity that created the need for these laws in the first place. Ezra fails to understand that border security and the enforcement of our immigration laws is vital to public safety. How many violent crimes would have been prevented if there weren't any illegal aliens in our country? Racist? I don't think so. We are a society that relies on law enforcement to insure that we remain a civilized society. The Broken Glass Theory of law enforcement works and that means we need to enforce all of the laws including the ones involving illegal aliens.
Courtney the Lawmaker. I can't do any better than what was written:
On a summer day, two years before Maria came to Columbus, a 9-year-old girl was kidnapped off the streets of Hamilton in southwestern Ohio and raped.Rep. Combs gets this issue. And we can't discount the fact that the motivation for proposing this law is to deter violent crime.
The police suspected a Latino living in the country illegally.
That unsolved crime in Combs' hometown motivated him to put the squeeze on those who break immigration law.
"Do I think it's the state's job to do this? No. It's the federal government's job," he said. "But they aren't doing it."
By the way, Maria the Illegal's brother...he got a DUI and was deported. He could have killed somebody in a car crash. Anybody who gets behind the wheel when they are impaired risks that, but there would have been no risk at all if Maria the Illegal's brother weren't here. And that is the point.
In the end, Combs says it best:
"I want to know who they are, where they are and if they have a criminal background," Combs said. "It's been seven years since 9/11, and you can still smuggle into the country. I do not want to wake up to another tragedy and hear that they came through the (Mexican) border."We can't let that happen. Courtney Combs is doing his part to make sure that it doesn't.
