from Amazon
Thursday, September 10, 2009
“You lie!”
Non-sports post.
It should be pointed out that the CURRENT system obligates the hospitals to treat any person in America, be it a citizen, permanent resident, visa holder, tourist, or otherwise undocumented person.
The definition of an illegal immigrant is itself impossible. An immigrant is a lawful permanent resident foreigner (i.e., green card). A non-immigrant is a lawful non-citizen who is in America temporarily (i.e., he’s here on a visa). The definition of an alien is a non-citizen. That is according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (US-CIS, which is half of the old INS, with US-ICE being the other half).
The word that should be used for what people complain about is ”illegal alien”, or “undocumented alien” (and I presume the only reason that the word alien is substituted with immigrant when politicians speak is because alien is not a nice word). Those are the people who enter without proper papers, or overstay their welcome. Those people have rights and obligations. They are required, for example, to pay taxes, and can be prosecuted on that basis for non-payment. They can also be prosecuted for living in America without proper papers. (This is why they stay underground. If they come out to pay their taxes, they may be found out. This is one reason to grant them some sort of amnesty… they can pay their taxes.) They are human beings, and therefore, obtain rights accorded to all humans living in the US.
Since only US-CIS or an immigration judge can make the final determination on the legal status of a person’s residency, it would be impossible to deny these people some services. The only way to ensure it is through an identification check. US employers for example are required to perform an ID check through the government on its workers. They will not perform an ID check on their spouses. The insurance companies, for example, will not go to the trouble of asking for proof of legal residency on spouses and children of legal workers.
I don’t know how the US government will administer the ID check of those who want to join the public option. In Canada, all citizens have a medical card (administered at the provincial/state level). So, you could prevent illegal aliens from obtaining insurance coverage, if they haven’t been given a medical card as certified by US-CIS or some other government body.
Regardless though, all children should be exempt, since any illegal alien child came here not through their consent (as non-adults, they cannot consent). They should be (but are not) in a similar category as refugees, who are accorded temporary rights as legal aliens.
In any case, Joe Wilson may have had the right thing to say on a technical level (had he used a complex and conditional sentence, not the two-word unconditional sentence), but it was the worst time to say it.
An utter embarrassment. John McCain spoke well regarding Wilson. There was this other congressperson however who, while acknowledging Wilson was wrong, pointed out how in his view Democrats were not well-mannered when Bush-43 spoke. This is the worst way to handle it, as it provides some level of justification and context for why Wilson might not be too wrong.
It’s a terrible practice to take an embarrassing episode and try to spin it the other way. Some people don’t know anything about apologies. You apologize unconditionally, and you make no excuses for it. And you don’t try to spin it against someone else.
Jerks.