Self-deportation cruel and unjust

In Monday's GOP debate, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney stated that when it came to illegal immigrants, he favored a policy of "self-deportation" rather than federally-mandated programs or policies that would, in effect, round up these people and return them to their home countries.

"The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can't find work here because they don't have legal documentation to allow them to work here," Romney said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Basically, what this means is that the government would make life so miserable for these people that they would actually be forced to leave the country. According to Mother Jones, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies explained how the United States might implement a self-deportation program in 2005: "Among the other measures that would facilitate enforcement: hiring more U.S. Attorneys and judges in border areas, to allow for more prosecutions; passage of the CLEAR Act, which would enhance cooperation between federal immigration authorities and state and local police; and seizing the assets, however modest, of apprehended illegal aliens."

However, Krikorian went on to state that these already overwhelming measures would not be enough. Instead, "virtual choke points" would have to be created, working much like firewalls in computer systems, that would only allow those people with legal citizenship status to pass through. This would include restrictions on employment, medical treatment, education and housing, making it as difficult as possible for illegal immigrants to remain in the United States and live a normal life.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the federal government experimented with self-deportation under the Bush Administration. In 2008, the government gave illegal immigrants up to 90 days to leave the country. The program lasted only two-and-a-half weeks, and only eight volunteers stepped forward. Following the failure of the program, immigration officials said that they would intensify their efforts toward removing illegal immigrants from the country.

Never mind the social and moral implications that a plan such as self-deportation would have.

Never mind the fact that you are basically hounding and bullying other human beings, removing what dignity they have while causing them to suffer until they eventually break, and all just because "they ain't from ‘round these parts." And adults aren't the only ones to feel the sting - children will also be suffering, because their parents will be too afraid of their status being questioned to take them to school or to the doctor, regardless of whether or not the child was born in the United States and is therefore a citizen.

In response to the growing movement for self-deportation, which sounds a lot nicer and cleaner on paper, as long as you don't mention all that nasty stuff about making it hard for people to obtain even the most basic needs, an organization called Patriots for Self-Deportation has sprung up. I admit, at first I was a little taken in because the creators of the group certainly know how to employ rhetoric, but after an investigation of its website (www.selfdeport.org), I was glad to discover that it was all a clever satire.

Purporting to be a group of patriotic citizens who so love the United States and all it stands for that it would help others who discovered an illegal immigrant in their ancestry return to the motherland, the group actually calls attention to the absurdity of self-deportation, and honestly, deportation in general.

The group states on its website that it "believes that securing our borders is not enough. We must make sure that all residents and ‘citizens' have a true right to be in this great land. We believe our current laws must be changed to abolish anchor babies, whose children, throughout history, should have never received automatic citizenship to this nation. If the Federal government will not take action now, then it is up to us, We the People, to put an end to the invasion and internal decay that threatens to destroy the fabric of the USA."

If anything, the internal decay has a lot less to do with the fact that people come to the United States in search of a better life, and more to do with the fact that we live in a nation where bills that allow legal bullying of homosexuals can be seriously introduced. Or that this is a country where the government is more concerned with people sharing files over the internet than combating real issues like unemployment, poverty or the inaccessibility to decent healthcare for all.

After all, it's so much easier to fall back on fringe issues to look like you're working on creating a better nation than admit that there are serious problems and you have no idea how to fix them.