Immigration Ethics

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by lixluke, May 30, 2007.

  1. birch Valued Senior Member

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    5,077
    definitely disagree with the bolded. being too literal can also fray into unrealism. this is more a discrepancy between levels of proof. what people consider proof is easily defined by the concrete. still, i can have a thought and there be not tangible proof of it's existence, for example.

    still, ethics exist. just because something is not physically tangible doesn't mean it does not exist. it's like saying there is no such thing as fear, love, anger, hurt etc because you can't touch it or it's a process of chemical reactions. that's no different than saying a carrot is not a carrot but just a chain of molecules.

    in the absence of life, of course it wouldn't matter but it definitely exists as a component of life. but it exists because we are constantly in relationship with other life.

    if you can point to any example of a lifeform that does not have the desire to preserve thier life, then you can say ethics do not exist. that is not subjective creation but a reality. ethics is not just what you apply to others but your own survival instincts. this is really the basis of ethics.

    "thou shalt not kill" is an understanding of this survival instinct. whether it's feasible at all time or can be carried out is another matter. the root of this ethical understanding is real as anything.

    this is a good example of what i'm referring to. whether someone else is mean/dangerous to you is not the only issue of survival because on the same token people want others to be nice, considerate or caring to them as well. that's what they really want. people can settle for neutral in most cases but still that is not what is truly wanted or maybe needed to thrive. it's not just an issue of survival by your own means and you are an island unto yourself.
     
    Last edited: Jan 31, 2010
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  3. WillNever Valued Senior Member

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    Question: are you an illegal immigrant in the USA?

    I ask because you are suggesting legal Americans who respect our laws and object to their breaking leave in place of a wave of illegal immigrants who, in most cases, purposefully undermine our laws. There is something fundamentally wrong with that picture. If you are here illegally, it does much to explain your apologist attitude and your self-professed unwillingness to actively seek gainful employment.
     
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  5. WillNever Valued Senior Member

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    That expression just means that they have no unique role that is unfillable by another group of people in the USA, Doreen. It is not silly to classify them that way, because that is the truth.

    It is an addendum, not a strawman. Learn the difference.
     
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  7. WillNever Valued Senior Member

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    Nay fraggle, dislike of illegal immigrants isn't a temporary phase. Those other gorups of immigrants (Irish, Chinese, Italian) were legal and honest laboring immigrants who violated no laws in their migration to this country because few laws existed to restrict their passage. That was during a time when the country had great need to expand. That phase of the country is over and there are now strict laws in place that regulate immigration and that most people are perfectly cool with recognizing and respecting.
     
  8. lixluke Refined Reinvention Valued Senior Member

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    The only way US law counts is in the way of whether or not it is ethical. The fact that something is law doesn't make it ethical. The USA has no ethical rights to the land it occupies over anybody else in this world. Even if my designs or anybody designs, the question about what happens to the millions of citizens is less relevant that what happens to anybody else on the planet. If this land doesn't belong to any sort of collective, anybody in it may or may not move out at their descretion. Their wages are of no more concern than the wages of the immigrants. Would their wages go down with immigrants? If their wages don't go down without immigrants, what about the immigrants? They have as much right to good wages and this land as anybody else. The law is irrelevant to who is really entitled to this land.

    Maybe we should change the laws, keep the immigrants, and throw out all the dumb Americans who have a problem with it so that they can live in the forest with nothing to eat. That would probably be the best solution.
     
  9. lixluke Refined Reinvention Valued Senior Member

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    I'm a full blooded citizen of the USA. I could care less about dumb laws. You might like laws that are dumb, but not me. Dumb laws should be undermined. I think we should allow anybody who wants to undermine dumb laws to stay, and kick out you communist nazis who think you deserve to be here more than anybody else.
     
  10. WillNever Valued Senior Member

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    2,595


    How so? This is not their country. We wouldn't be allowed to migrate illegally into their countries either... so why should we let them benefit from our public services in OUR country? Illegals here benefit from the protection of a military, a police force, a firefighting force, and they get free public schooling... all of which is paid for by OTHER people except themselves. They should be thankful we tolerate their unlawful presence. If anybody is the communist, it is them. They are the ones who accept and desire those public benefits without paying for them.

    We do deserve to be here more. We Americans aren't "lucky" to be here. We were BORN here. This is the place of our origin, and we have made this country what it is today. Them wanting a piece of that without contributing because they do not like their place of origin is not okay.
     
  11. lixluke Refined Reinvention Valued Senior Member

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    9,072
    Only in a communist country would somebody be required to "contribute". There are few cultures with a more communist attitude than Americants. Americants created the idea of "hand-outs" as if it meant anything.

    This country doesn't belong to immigrants as much as it is not the country of those who were born here. All you are doing is claiming you have the right to something out of pure self-interest. Whatever you consider of interest to yourself is what is right regardless of ethics. So you justify it with garbage. You have some deluded sense of entitlement to this land, and illegals are threatening your world. So you warp ethics in order to suit your needs. So the only reason illegal immigration is wrong is because it affects "you" negatively. Anything that affects "you" negatively is deemed "wrong/unethical". Yet it doesn't affect the immigrant negatively. So right and wrong is what is right for you?

    If you're born some place, then you have some sort of ethical right to that place? WRONG. Ethically, those who own the land have the right to say who comes in and out. Yet Americants have ABSOLUTE ZERO right to own this land or say who comes in and out.
     
  12. birch Valued Senior Member

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    5,077
    it depends on how you define or justify it. you can argue that someone indigenous to a land more than another has more right to it such as africans in africa or europeans in europe or asians in asia. of course, there are discepancies but overall this could be argued.

    from this perspective, native-americans are more indigenous to america whether they migrated or not.
     
  13. Doreen Valued Senior Member

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    4,101
    Well, if that is all you mean. But you should know that when you refer to people as good for nothing - when also saying they give poor service - most English speakers are going to assume you mean something else.

    The difference is clear if the writer makes it clear. IOW same as above.
     
  14. Mrs.Lucysnow Valued Senior Member

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    9,879
    An example for Lixluke


    The UK has stopped issuing visas to students from northern india.


    Anita Kapoor supports the ban of visas from northern India due to immigration abuses. She says "Looking at some of the horror stories I think the decision was right, we have some of the greatest educational institutions in the world and we must not stop scholars and students from studying in them however when there is abuse of our system and our hospitality something needs to be done."

    http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/02/20102153322719465.html

    You see Lixluke there is a need all over the world to control immigration of all kinds. Unemployment and lack of jobs, even housing all come into play when considering immigration and it seems the UK will go for stricter immigration laws because they have to. You are wrong when you say immigration doesn't affect immigrants negatively. Immigration when the host nation is bringing in needed skilled workers etc to fill in a gap are generally welcome but if circumstances change in terms of available work then immigrants will find an increase in resentment from the host society and may even find themselves stuck in low paying jobs and housing without an avenue up the ladder of improvement.

    Would you support brain drain? Meaning that developing countries lose skilled and educated people to the West and elsewhere, especially when students leave for elsewhere become educated and then never return to put back into their own societies.

    Would you support unregulated immigration to the point that a host society can no longer accommodate the immigrants nor their own citizens?

    Would you support unregulated immigration so that criminals and the diseased are allowed to go wherever they please?
     
    Last edited: Feb 1, 2010
  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Nonetheless, they were reviled and treated like dirt, each in turn. In fact at one time special laws were passed that applied only to Chinese. Nobody knew that one day we would desperately need them to program our computers.
    Antipathy toward Mexicans has very little to do with their legal status and everything to do with them being merely the latest large immigrant group. People hated Mexicans when I was a kid in the 1950s, when the vast majority of them were legal (as they are today).

    As for "recognizing and respecting" our laws, you people have absolutely no idea what it's like to be on the wrong side of the border that represents the greatest disparity in per-capita GDP between any two contiguous nations on earth. They're down on the bottom levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, struggling to survive, looking at a country where the greatest nutritional problem among its poor people is obesity. If you spent a couple of years in rural Mexico with no job, education, electricity, roads, social services or medical care, I think you too would give the finger to the laws of the rich people on the other side of that fence who don't want you crossing it to take a job doing hard work their own children refuse to do, and send some money back to your family.

    Our government and the corporations who dictate its policies have been supporting the aristocracy in Mexico ever since the revolution. NAFTA only made it worse by putting so many of their corn farmers and the people who worked there out of business. At some point, what goes around comes around.

    Many of the people in other countries are hoping that this current economic downturn is the beginning of the end for the United States. They're going to laugh hysterically as our union-coddled "workers," our overpaid civil "servants," and our army of dropouts sponging off their parents try to emigrate to their countries where they'll be expected to earn an honest living.
     
  16. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    9,391
    And the not thousands, but millions of Indians that those Indians slaughtered in consolodating their various controls over the lands: how does that affect the picture?

    Also, given that the "we" who did that slaughtering was diseases inadvertently introduced by the initial Spanish explorations of the Caribbean, what bearing does that have on the ethical standing of the United States of America?

    Which Indians? You understand that "the Indians" are not some monolithic polity with an unbroken history of sovereignty right back to the first human inhabitants of the continent, right?

    Do you believe that nation-states are essentially ethical entites in the first place?
     

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