Dear Legal Immigrants: Amnesty Is a Slap in Your Face

Dear Legal Immigrant,

You should be outraged.

More intimately than anyone else, you know the struggles of facing the mountain of bureaucracy that awaits a person who embarks on the journey of legal immigration.

More intimately than anyone else, you know what it’s like to lack the money to pay for an immigration lawyer—forcing you to navigate the process almost entirely on your own—and surely guaranteeing that mistakes will be made.

More intimately than anyone else, you know what it’s like to be separated from loved ones while you wait for news.

More intimately than anyone else, you know what it’s like to sacrifice your hard-earned money to pay filing fee after filing fee.

My husband and I certainly know. So I know I can speak to what you lived.

And like we are, you should be outraged.

You should be outraged that President Barack Obama is willing to spit in the face of all of those struggles—only to give it to those who have come through the back door.

If you, dear recipient, happen to be a regular reader of my contributions to The Chris Salcedo Show via TheBlaze, you’ll have picked up on a pattern by now.

From the misinterpretation of Emma Lazarus’ words on the Statue of Liberty, to addressing the lie that being Latino means supporting amnesty; from wanting to sue the federal government for the time and money we put in to legally immigrating, to the importance of sovereign borders; from addressing actor Diego Luna’s demands that the same privileges given to citizens be given to illegal aliens, to the definition of real courage: facing the behemoth immigration system and doing it the right way... you’ve probably ascertained I’m not a fan of those who would steal what you all worked so hard to obtain.

That’s all this is—plain and simple. You are being robbed.

In office today (making it unequivocally clear that on Thursday, he will use his executive power in spite of our laws) is a man who is willing to set aside the fact that these individuals broke the law, and instead reward them with the very privileges you worked so hard to rightfully attain.

That’s what amnesty means. Latino activist Enrique Morones once tried to put me in a box by attempting to explain that the meaning of the word “amnesty” comes from a Greek word that means “to forget,” and that the last thing Latinos wanted to do about immigration was to forget about it.

Dear reader, Mr. Morones isn’t wrong—amnesty does come from that root. But it means to forget an offense.

That’s exactly what the president will do. He will in effect forget the offense that took place when each individual illegal alien came across that border without permission—when they broke the law.

And for what? So we can become everything that so many of you left your nations trying to escape?

I know that while my husband wasn’t escaping overt oppression, many of you were. What is oppression if not an absence of moral and judicious law? What is oppression if not an absence of order, and a predominance of chaos? What’s more, even if your intent was (like my husband and I) to simply be able to raise a family in better circumstances, the president’s affront to the rule of law threatens the very things that once made our nation great.

Yes, you should be outraged.

Moreover, if you happen to be a Latino immigrant, you should be further livid that for the entirety of his presidency, Barack Obama and his party (and to a certain extent the GOP) have banked on the fallacy that all your ethnicity cares about is immigration.

That is, like some kind of racial robot, you don’t care about jobs, or the economy, or your children’s future under this monstrous federal debt, or the threat of global terror.

Instead, you’ve been told that you belong in exactly one box: You’re Latino, and thus you must only care about immigration and you must support amnesty.

In the opinion of our politicians, does your status as an immigrant to this country somehow preclude you from a free-thinking mind?

Of course not. But somehow they think it has.

Prove them wrong. Speak out. Defend what you earned.

There will be those who tell you that by claiming you should be outraged over Barack Obama’s plan to grant amnesty, that I’m doing no different than the people who put you in the racial box I described above. The thing is, this isn’t about opinion or political persuasion. Though our very “gray” society would have you believe otherwise, this is simply about the stark differences between right and wrong.

If it's values that really matter in this country—and not color or race or creed—then all I’m doing is pointing out the obvious.

Can we all agree that our system is indeed in dire need of repair? I believe we can—and still stand for the moral fiber and rule of law that once made this nation so different from anywhere else. Instead, we're facing a constitutional crisis in which our leader has decided to once again take the law into his own hands.

And it’s up to those of us who have been through the gauntlet of legal immigration to stand up and do something about it.

Today I encourage you to be heard. Not in the way the National Council of La Raza would have you do (that is, demanding more lawlessness to deal with the lawlessness), but rather in resolute, righteous anger over what is nothing more than rewarding blatant, unabashed and unrepentant thievery.

Stand up for what you so tirelessly worked to achieve for yourself, and perhaps for your family.

Are you angry yet? Don't stay silent. And don't accept the lie that to perpetuate this great nation we must bend and break its laws.

Join me in protecting, preserving, and honoring the American Dream.

Mary Ramirez is a full time writer, creator of www.afuturefree.com – a political commentary blog, and contributor to The Chris Salcedo Show (TheBlaze Radio Network, Saturday, from noon to 3pm ET). She can be reached at: afuturefree@aol.com; or on Twitter: @AFutureFree

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