Friday, May 26, 2006

one guy I can support

Jim Talent is a good man and deserves to be re-elected. Not that my puny voice really carries any weight. He actually has the guts to make a meaningful immigration package. He may look like a complete nerd, but he's a mensch in my book. Perhaps because he is from the Mid-west where the Latino pressure groups aren't as strong and where people still tend to favor actions over rhetoric, he can act for the good of the country as a whole.
He also voted against the McCain guest worker provision. For me, this provision is a bad deal for the States (millions of unskilled workers) and even more so for the workers themselves. It seems to me that the creation of a permanent unskilled class which only does our menial labor and never gets to become of member of the country is somewhat akin to the helots in ancient Sparta who labored to provide the citizens with the idle time to train for war. These helots had very few rights, could not become citizens and never grew rich. We were not based upon the ideal of Sparta, but on Athens where all citizens participated in the governance of the state (true, they had some slaves, but it is the ideal we hoped to emulate, not the total society). This provision would create a class of powerless, resentful and downtrodden people with no vested interest in our society besides that of a paycheck. It is not immigration, which I support, but the creation of something closely akin to slavery, which cost us 450K men to extinguish. We can do better and people wishing to come to this country deserve better.

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