Pirate's Cove

It’s funny how this works. People spend lots of time and money, and have to follow every law, no matter how small, in order to earn the right to become an actual U.S. citizen, and they aren’t really fond of those who blow off American law by either coming here unlawfully or overstaying their visas, and then demanding that they be made citizens

Sanctuary Bills in Maryland Faced a Surprise Foe: Legal Immigrants

When lawmakers in Howard County, Md., a stretch of suburbia between Washington and Baltimore, declared their intention to make the county a sanctuary for people living in the country illegally, J. D. Ma thought back to how hard he had worked studying English as a boy in Shanghai.

Stanley Salazar, a native of El Salvador, worried that the violent crime already plaguing Maryland’s suburbs attributed to immigrant gangs would eventually touch his own daughters.

Hongling Zhou, who had been a student in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising, feared an influx of undocumented immigrants, and their children, would cripple the public schools.

At first blush, making Howard County a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants had seemed a natural move: The county has twice as many Democrats as Republicans and a highly educated population, full of scientists and engineers. One in five residents was born abroad.

But the bill met stout opposition from an unlikely source: some of those very same foreign-born residents.

It’s only a surprise in Liberal World, where they feel that immigrants who did it the right way, the legal way, would be supportive of those who did it the wrong way, the unlawful way.

In passionate testimony before county legislators, and in tense debates with liberal neighbors born in the United States, legal immigrants argued that offering sanctuary to people who came to the country illegally devalued their own past struggles to gain citizenship.

Some even felt it threatened their hard-won hold on the American dream.

It is a long process to become a U.S. citizen. It involves filling out applications and having many documents and photos. Have your biometrics taken (which get submitted to the FBI for checking). Learn English, and take an English and civics test. Take a naturalization interview. And, finally, take the oath of citizenship. This process can be stopped anywhere along the way for numerous reasons, like missing deadlines and, get this, breaking laws. So, yeah, simply giving illegals lawful status, even citizenship, devalues those who did it the lawful way.

Their objections stunned Democratic supporters of sanctuary here and helped bring about the bill’s demise in March. A similar proposal for the state collapsed this month in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats also hold a two-to-one advantage. Some of the same immigrants spoke out against it.

Stunned! If you spent a lot of time and hard work to get to a certain position in a company, earning it, and the company brought in someone who had no experience, hadn’t done the same time or hard work anywhere else, and gave them the same salary and title and responsibilities, would you be a happy camper?

The rest of the article are the stories from four people who followed the process and became citizens, none of whom are happy about how Democrats think about illegal aliens. They see being here in America and being a citizen as an earned privilege. They blow up the Democratic Party talking points on illegal aliens, such as the whole separating families argument. How this article made it into print at the NY Times is shocking.