Jay Lillie

The man asked, “Why are Mexicans who steal across the border in the night illegal aliens, while the Cubans who make it to Florida by whatever means they can are not?”

I thought it was a good question. The answer that the moderator of the radio talk show I appeared on that morning gave the caller was that the politicians in Florida want the Cubans to be permitted in no mater how they arrive, because Castro tries to keep them from coming here. It’s hard to argue with that position even if it’s not really logical. It points up one more absurdity involving our Cuban policy.

Over the past 10 days we’ve seen Mexicans in California and other places within the U.S. doing exactly what the Cuban/Americans in Miami have been doing for decades – lobbying for their countrymen and women to be able to stay here. The numbers involved in the case of Mexico are large and those from Cuba small by comparison. Maybe that’s the difference.

Also the Cuban/Americans pretty much run south Florida politically and no Mexican can make that statement for California – not yet anyway.

So what’s the point? There isn’t one really – just that a caller on one of my talk shows asked what the difference was in our treatment of citizens from two quite similar Latin neighbors.

Even that isn’t anything new. Our immigration laws have been skewed in favor of people from one nation over another, back and forth, for generations. Perhaps when Congress gets around to doing something about immigration it will have the statesmanship and courage to reorganize the whole and not just do a patch job for Mexican illegals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.