Quote:
Originally Posted by Dean Thoreau
I am sure if I were an illegal in korea they would pull me over on my rickshaw pretty quickly tho!
Sometimes it is just geography.....land borders on the USA are mexico and canada....the border areas more likeley to have...illegal immigrants....
water borders i.e. flordia which is close to cuba, haiti, dominican republic, more likely to see infulux of illegals from...
We have laws, we have immigration laws,,,they need to be followed by all,,not just a few.
Dont like the law work to change it,,,not ignore it!
|
Dean:
I'm curious. How would they know you're an illegal? How would an American illegal alien in Korea look differently than an American soldier off duty and off-post in Korea? It seems to me (and I might be wrong although I can't recall my sister talking about being randomly stopped and one of my colleagues actually was over in Seoul as recently as two years ago courtesy the US Army) that you would look like a soldier on leave. Now, I'm talking about South Korea which is, (more or less--recently more than less), a democracy. You are certainly correct that in North Korea you would be pulled over very quickly. Of course, in North Korea if you didn't praise the Great Leader on cue you would also be 'detained'. Which Korea are you suggesting we emulate, South Korea (which didn't have an election that could be called free and fair until the 1990's) or North Korea?
Secondly, I'm curious if you think that a *KOREAN* citizen (and here I’m talking about South Korea) would expect to be pulled over because they *might* be Japanese or Han Chinese? I am willing to bet that if a SK police officer, pulled over a Korean citizen, and asked for her papers because she *might* be Japanese, there would be words exchanged. It might go hard on that officer (there is no love lost between the Koreans and the Japanese).
I think you are missing a very salient point here:
someone who is of Hispanic descent, whose family is descended from the Mestizo who were in the region long before your ancestors thought about coming here, is going to be phenotypically
indistinguishable from someone who just came over the border last week. The issue is that *citizens*--not people in the US undocumented but citizens--whose genes have never been more than 200 miles north or south of the Mexico/US border in the last 8,000 years are going to be caught up in this. THEY will be stopped.
Now, perhaps because it is vanishingly improbable to ever be *you* or someone you are genetically related to you are sanguine about this. But if *I* were from a family whose bloodline has trod the soil in Arizona since around the end of the last ice age were stopped and asked to prove that I was a citizen of these United States, I would take issue with that. I would probably want to say something along the lines of "really? You have got to be kidding me! I'm a citizen as was my mother before me as was her mother before her. Hell the last one of my ancestors who *wasn't* a citizen woke up one day and found out that she no longer lived in Mexico but was now in a country called the United States and she didn't move an inch! My ancestors didn't cross the border, the border crossed my ancestors!"
But perhaps, that's just me. Perhaps I have a certain sympathy for this because of an experience I had when I was younger.