Aborting the Immigrants

I don’t get it.  Digby and others have mentioned a recent mind-blowing argument from conservatives which outright blames our supposed immigration problem on abortions; and that we wouldn’t have an immigration problem if all those aborted babies had been born and taken those jobs instead.  Digby brings up a valid point that the whole “immigration problem” is that they’re supposedly stealing all our jobs.  So where exactly do those forty million aborted babies come into that?  They’d only have made the problem worse.  Particularly if we’re talking about replacing twelve million illegal workers with forty million citizens.  Sorry, but I don’t see how that trade-off supposedly works for someone already worried about their job.

And that leads us to an even bigger problem with that argument: They’re arguing that they think that America’s economy should suck so much that Mexicans and others evil brownskins won’t want to come to our country.  That we’d just shoot things down the crapper so that there wasn’t any reason for them to come here.  Not that they say that specifically, but if they’re arguing that those extra forty million people would have filled-out the job market enough that Americans would be picking fruit, washing dishes, landscaping, and filling all those other jobs without benefits and for less than minimum wage, that’s exactly what they’re saying.  

Oh, and don’t forget another aspect of all this: If those forty million people really would have made America suck so much that the additional twelve million immigrants wouldn’t have immigrated, then isn’t that an argument against abortion?  Isn’t that to say that we should be glad that they were aborted?  That this helped our economy?  I personally don’t think things are quite that simple, but isn’t that what Colson’s point is?  That the forty million would have made the twelve million stay in their own country; and thus it was better for America that they were aborted?  Sure, the term “better” is subjective and perhaps Colson and his conservative buddies think America would be better if we had a larger population and thus more workers competing for fewer jobs; but that’s not really an argument that they’re likely to make in public.  At least not during an election year, when their supporters might still remember this kind of stuff on Election Day.  And so we’re back at the idea of Colson arguing in support of abortion.

And that’s what I don’t get.  That just sounds like a really crappy argument and is terribly embarrassing.  Are they really so sure that none of their listeners can think past the word “abortion” and will accept anything they say?  Or that their listeners aren’t capable of understanding a liberal when the liberal explains this obvious concept to them?   Do none of them have even a basic understanding of economics or the causes of immigration?  Oh, we’re talking about Charles Colson’s listeners.  Nevermind.

But that’s what’s so bad about this argument.  Sure, it sounds stupid on the surface, but it’s also stupid all the way down.  It doesn’t make any sense on any level, other than the “Immigration and Abortion are Bad” level; and that’s not really a level, so much as an embarrassing plateau you hit before saying “Oh yeah, that’s dumb.”  But then again, this argument does have the mind-numbing “WTF???!??” reaction that the wingnuts like to shut us up with, so I guess maybe they score a few points with that.  After all, there’s no better way to end a discussion than to say something incredibly stupid and embarrassing, and there’s no better discussion to end than the one you’re having with one of Colson’s listeners.  So I guess in a way, everyone wins.


P.S. Scratch all this.  I just figured out his point.  He was just saying that if we could give guns to those forty million people and lined them along the border…  It’d have to work!