The idealist in me has a few word to say

Lately people have been expressing a lot of hatred towards illegal immigrants. All the hateful lashing out really bothers me.

I bet many of us, if faced with the same situation and opportunity would find ourselves doing the exact same thing. In fact, I have heard many people tell me, in all seriousness, that they would illegally run away to Canada to avoid a draft. Hypocrites......

Immigrants are people too. Not all laws stand for justice or truth- so the argument that because an action is "illegal" does not mean that it is wrong. Maybe there are more "ethically correct" alternative choices that people should make in their fight to improve their life situation- but many people are alone in their fight for basic survival needs. Not everyone has a government that is trying to help them and its not their fault.

We become so blinded by our own prejudice, stereotypes, and fear that all we can do is hate. I read a wonderful book called "Hate Work" in college. I believe the author is dead-on when she highlights the different causes for hate in our society. One of the biggest sources of social hatred is fear. Reacting out agains the immigrant situation through our fears that tell us immigrants are taking all our jobs away from us and undermining the foundation of our government and economy parallels our pre-emptive strike against Iraq (the recent one- not the one in 1992....).

President Bush's Administration defied UN resolutions and pre-emptively attacked a country out of the fear that the country had weapons of mass destruction. When we let our fear and our paranoia turn into hatred... people hurt, communities hurt, and the globe suffers.

Maybe illegal immigrants are wrong, maybe they are hurting our country- or maybe they are helping our country so that we don't have to start exporting hard-labor jobs (for which there is a shortage). The point is to not be guided by blind hatred and fear.

Personally, in a globalizing world where our survival increasingly depends on the health of other nations- we need to start seeing each other as members of the global community and not segregate ourselves by nationalism. Nationalism brought many good things throughout the 20th century (identity, cohesion of groups of like minded people, strength)- but we can also attribute it to factionalization, each World War, and pretty much every violent skirmish/war from South Asia, to the Middle East, to Eastern Europe to South Africa.

End of Ramble.