U.S. Troops: The Real Illegal Immigrants

I'm about to say something that a lot of people are not going to like. In fact, some people might be offended by it. I personally don't see anything wrong with illegal immigrants. I don't see them as a "lesser people". The whole point I'm writing this isn't to compare American soldiers to people some would consider less than human who deserve no rights. I'm writing this to show the blatant hypocrisy of those who oppose illegal immigration, while supporting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

So how exactly are the troops and illegal immigrants alike? Well, they both cross borders, but really, let's first take a look at the opposing arguments against illegal immigrants. Americans list a whole number of arguments for keeping them out of the country: they don't speak the language, they are a drain on the welfare system and the tax payer, they take jobs that Americans need/want, they're destroying our American culture, and they bring violence into this country. With all of that said now, let's take those arguments, assume we're civilians in Afghanistan, and apply those to the U.S. soldiers occupying our country.

The first opposition is not being able to speak the language. Now, there are some illegal immigrants who speak English and there are obviously some soldiers in these countries that speak the local languages, but most are just strangers in a strange land. There are big problems when people don't learn how to speak the local language. If someone tries to ask me a question in Spanish, they're going to have a big problem because I don't speak it. If a soldier in Afghanistan asks in English to a civilian where the enemy is, he's probably going to get nothing more than a puzzled look. The problem is much worse there because when people can't communicate in war, there's a big chance that people could die. If someone can't communicate in America, sometimes it might be life threatening, but more often, it's just going to lead to someone not getting the information about something they're buying, or some other trivial thing. If someone does come to America, they're probably going to stay a while and it would benefit them to learn English. If a soldier goes to Afghanistan for just a few years, there's no reason they should learn the language, besides maybe a few phrases.

While I don't like the idea of people living off of government welfare, just because you were born an American doesn't make that a better situation in my opinion. If you want to be against welfare, fine, but I don't think punishing one group who takes advantage of it is fair, or is the right way to go about doing it. If you are against government welfare, then don't discriminate against people and pick and choose who is allowed to get it. If you really want to talk about a drain on the tax payer, let's talk about military spending. Now, I don't have much faith in accurate figures of how much things in the government cost, but according to Wikipedia, the military budget for the U.S. in 2010 is around $685.1 billion. Even if it were hundreds of billions less than that, which I doubt, if anything it's likely a conservative estimate, it would still be a lot. Also, when you figure all money spent to care for physical and mental wounds these soldiers are going to have after they come back from war, that's going to cost us even more. I'm not saying we should cut funds to current troops, vets, or troops who need medical help, but we don't need to expand our military and fund new weapons for enemies that just aren't there. We don't need to put us in a situation where we have a bunch of wounded troops, or war widows that need caring for. Under the Cold War, defense spending like this to protect us from an invasion might have made some sense, but we are currently fighting goat farmers. I don't think spending billions on air craft carriers, or stealth fighters is really needed...unless the Taliban get some spider goats. Just kidding...I hope.

Some supporters of illegal immigrants say they do jobs that Americans won't do and those who oppose them will say they take jobs away that lower class Americans will be willing to do. I personally believe in the free market and if the job pays well enough, or you get a person willing to do a job that needs to be done, it'll get done by someone. Government shouldn't be making decisions over what ethnic group, or nationality is best capable, or only able to do whichever job. The argument the war supporters make for us still being in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Korea, Germany, Japan, and all of these other countries is because the people there don't have the capability, or the resources to defend themselves. They are basically saying that we need to be in Afghanistan because the Afghanistan people are not willing, or able to defend themselves. To me, anyone has the capability to defend themselves. Those people got plenty of guns and explosives that they're using against our troops. It doesn't seem like they're having a huge problem with the will to defend themselves, or the resources. The way I see it, if they want to defend themselves, that's their job and we shouldn't take that from them. If they want our help, then fine, have them pay for our soldiers and if our soldiers want to help them out, let them. I don't think we need to pay to defend them and force our soldiers to defend them when it's their own country. If you want to buy a burglar alarm for your house and put a pit bull in your back yard, that's your choice, but I shouldn't have to pay to install that alarm and be the one required to feed that dog every morning. If you think someone coming over here taking a roofing job, or a job picking fruit is bad, how would we like it if all of the police in this country was replaced by Spanish speaking illegal immigrants? That's pretty much what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.



Now, you don't hear much of the cultural destroying argument anymore, since it does sound racist, but I think it drives a lot of these fears people have against illegal immigration. Personally, I think culture changes all the time on it's own and there's nothing really bad that I can think about the Hispanic culture that I wouldn't mind mixing into our own. It's not like they're ripping hearts out of people's chests on the top of pyramids...anymore. I think the main fear is that we'll lose the English language, which doesn't really matter to me. Languages change too over time too. If you go back a hundred years in America, people used words that you wouldn't know about and you use words they wouldn't know about. In these wars, I think the main cultural fear is over religion. They're Muslim and we're mostly Christian. These people have a strict Muslim culture and one that barely knows much about the modern world. They're now being exposed to not only new technology and ideas, but to new religions. Forget Spanish speaking illegal immigrants taking over our police. Imagine if all of a sudden, Muslims were put in control of our entire country!

The last argument people make against illegal immigrants is probably the easiest for this country to fix and the most obviously hypocritical for those who also support these wars. They claim that illegal immigrants are a violent threat to Americans. Now I'm not saying that there are no violent illegal immigrants whatsoever. However, the reason you have violence associated with these people is overwhelmingly because of the war on drugs. If you ended the war on drugs, you end the majority of this violence. As far as troops being violent...well, they're troops. We don't train these people to go over to other countries to offer peace and love. They're over there for one main reason, and that's to kill people we want killed. I don't know the exact number of how many people on both sides of these wars have died, or been wounded and I'm not sure how many people have died because of the war on drugs, or because we have closed boarders. Hundreds of thousands, or millions? To me, one death is one too many. The important thing to know is that these deaths could have been avoided. Starting wars and banning substances are not natural disasters, they're human made disasters...government made disasters to be more exact. We have done both before and saw the damage that doing both have caused, yet we make these same mistakes over and over. There will always be murderers in the world and there will always be people wanting to use drugs, but the violence in the drug war and the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan could end tomorrow if we wanted it to. Not only are our troops dying because of our choice to have these wars, but illegal immigrants are dying because they can't legally cross the border. They're dying so much so that at one point in this year, more illegal immigrants died trying to come to the U.S. than our troops died in Afghanistan.

Now some could see this, call me a hypocrite, and ask, "Well, aren't illegal immigrants like an invading army? Why would you support one and oppose another?" Well, I don't believe that immigrants are taking all these jobs, or are a big violent threat, or are more of drain on our welfare system than any other "legal" American. A lot of these are claims that those opposing illegal immigrants try to use on them. I go further into all of that here. What I'm trying to point out in all of this is the arguments that the people use to oppose illegal immigrants, better matches up against occupying troops than it does against illegal immigrants. Even though, there are some valid similarities, I think it's quite obvious that occupying a nation with an armed army that's bombing and shooting everywhere and costing us billions of dollars and thousands of lives is a lot worse situation than peaceful people coming to a country just to look for jobs.