The Immigration Lawyer’s Blog

This is why we can’t have an honest discussion about immigration reform and race in America:

Jason Chaffetz is running for Congress in Utah and proposed housing ICE detainees in tent “cities” pending their deportation.

Here is what Mike Honda, a Japanese American House representative from California who had been imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II said about Chaffetz proposal,

Jason Chaffetz’s comments are more than just offensive and embarrassing to all Americans; they demonstrate a blatant disregard of the need to be vigilant in remembering the lessons learned from a disgraceful chapter in U.S. history.

Honda also said Chaffetz’s plan will “fuel resentment towards ethnic groups.”

Chaffetz defended himself,

Where these guys are overstepping the line is saying that it has anything to do with ethnicity. They absolutely should apologize for that. That has never been my position, and it is terribly unfair and inaccurate. If you’re breaking the law and you’re a fugitive, I want to go after you and put you in jail. I don’t care if you’re from Russia, Japan or Guatemala, it doesn’t matter to me.

Welcome to the world of politics by destruction, Mr. Chaffetz. You think that’s bad, wait ’til Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, Janet Marguia of La Raza (laughably, she regularly attempts to silence her opponents by calling them hate-filled bigots yet she is the only one who represents a group whose very name means “the race”), and Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez get a hold of you.

Chaffetz’s Tent City Proposal

Mr. Chaffetz is merely proposing a solution to the problem the sporadic, decentralized detention of illegal immigrant detainees of which civil rights and open border activists have been expressing so much outrage (much of it righteous, most of it shrill and agenda-driven) over the last several months.

Critics of Current ICE Detention Conditions Should Favor Proposals that Would Improve Conditions

If the critics are right about the inhumane nature of ICE detention facilities, you would think they would favor a proposal that would improve those facilities and the detention conditions of deportees. But the truth is, the U.S. government could arrest illegal aliens and house them in the Waldorf Astoria honeymoon suite and still be charged with civil rights abuses. The fact that ICE wants to do anything at all about illegal immigration is an affront to open-border’s activists.

Slanderous Comparisons to Japanese Internment is Agenda Driven

Chaffetz plan isn’t remotely similar to the arbitrary internment of Japanese citizens and legal residents during World War II and Honda knows it. The Japanese internment was clearly a violation of the civil rights of U.S. citizens as the Supreme Court so found in Korematsu v. The United States. Chaffetz’s plan, on the other hand, would merely result in the centralized detention of illegal aliens – people who are present in the United States in violation of Federal law and are already detainable for that reason. It does not target members of one ethnicity, but rather all illegal aliens of every race, creed, color and nationality.

But, alas, if history has taught us anything, we know that the open-borders crowd will, whenever the opportunity arises, try to marginalize their political foes by making the public believe they are vile, bigots on the order of Herrs Hydrich, Eichmann and Himmler.

FDR’s internment of the Japanese was, of course, a fearful (I thought he told us we had “nothing to fear but fear itself”) kneejerk reaction to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. But, there, most of the internees were American citizens who happened to be of Japanese descent or who “looked” Japanese.

Congressman Honda’s comparison (and I am quite certain he knows this) of Chaffetz tent city proposal to the illegal, and unconstitutional internment of innocent Japanese Americans during World War II is not only absurd but condescending and cynical. Honda is confident that the average voter will neither bother to read the details of Chaffetz plan nor research the nature of the 1940’s Japanese interment.

Honda doesn’t want people to delve deeper into the nuances of Chaffetz’s plan (or the opposition to illegal immigration in general) because that would reveal that it is not ethnically motivated at all. He would rather they just read his inflammatory soundbites equating the proposal to erect new detention facilities to the World War II ghettoizing of hard-working, loyal Japanese-Americans merely because of their ethnic background.

Honda won’t gain any new converts to his cause, but what he has done is cheapened the memory of every single Japanese man, woman and child who had been illegally and immorally detained during World War II.

Imagine for a moment a Holocaust survivor comparing the incarceration of, say, the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, with the marching of Jewish women and children into Zyclon “B” showers at Auschwitz.

Shame on you, Mr. Honda.

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