After all, his great-grandparents legally entered the country... At the time when undesirables, like Chinese, Indians, and the Polish were barred from entry.
But at least the Frenchmen came legally! Sure, entry was granted under an extremely racist immigration law, but the legality is what gives him the moral high ground to stand on.
Build the wall and regulate immigration so more Indians and Chinese come relative to their world population.
"Hurr, durr, build a wall to keep them out", and "Keep America Christian" does nothing to resolve it. If you actually give a shit about either, then backing Trump (Or the other big names from the 2016 Republican line) is backing the wrong horse.
Even more ironically, two of the other candidates (Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio) are the descendants of Cuban refugees... And any Cuban entering the US can immediately apply for permanent residency. No questions asked.
Strangely, they oppose the same privilege to people fleeing repression/drug cartels/terrible poverty in the rest of Central America.
If all our illegal immigrants were from Germany and Ireland, I am certain that there would be far less complaining.
In fact most of the angry people today would not be fighting to keep them out -- they'd be fighting for visas for them.
Very curious, on what do you base this certainty? Is it just a feeling based on personal experience?
The truth is that the people behind most of this anti-immigrant rhetoric can't see the humanity of someone who is not of their same skin color. When they call a human being "an illegal" -- it's dehumanizing, and it plainly reveals they don't see their common shared humanity. I've noticed it in the language they use, and they way they talk about other people -- and not just immigrants, but black Americans as well. They simply do not see other races as people like themselves.
I absolutely do not think that Luis Gutierrez is someone that is just looking out for "his own people", as you seem to be implying.
No, it's an accurate, dry, legal characterisation of someone present in the country illegally, much like referring to someone who has murdered someone else as 'a murderer,' or to someone who has shoplifted as 'a shoplifter.'
I'm actually philosophically inclined towards completely open borders (although I have some deep concerns about what that does to community & culture), but an alien who is present illegally is truly an illegal alien. Words mean things, and that's what those words mean.
I want to put this on the biggest billboard I can find, or put it in Nazca lines across the surface of the moon, so maybe we'll remember. Language lawyering is profoundly useless, and I've no patience with it.
There is a lot of implied sub-communication that comes with word choice in human languages. Only an idiot or a robot would take everything by its literal meaning.
If everyone is free to redefine words to mean whatever they damn well please, then it is impossible to have clear, effective discussions, because you get wound up wrangling about definitions - as we do habitually here, talking past each other.
Maybe they are angry because people are coming illegally.