Friday not-so-funnies: Get behind me satan

In what seems like a farce, the Utah Daily Herald published an article on the recent convention of the Utah County Republicans, who closed their recent meeting with a debate on Satan's influence on illegal immigrants. I kid you not.

Read on:

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants “hate American people” and “are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won't do.”

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to “destroy Christian America” and replace it with “a godless new world order — and that is not extremism, that is fact,” Larsen said.

At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. “by self invasion.”

Um, self invasion? Frankly, this just makes me laugh – and laugh – and laugh. Rather than take the article seriously and waste my time commenting on this hogwash, I would like to defer to Washington Post columnnist, Sebastian Mallaby, who so eloquently takes the “nativist nonsense” apart, one ridiculous argument at a time.

Mallaby notes:

The livelihoods of millions are at stake, yet most immigration pronouncements are nonsense.

People accuse immigrants of gang violence, drunken driving and a general contempt for the law. But in 2000 the incarceration rate for immigrants was just one-fifth the rate for the population as a whole, according to Kristin Butcher of the Federal Reserve and Anne Morrison Piehl of Rutgers University.

People say, contrariwise, that immigrants steal jobs from native-born Americans. But economists have patiently explained for years that there is no finite “lump of labor” in an economy. The presence of migrants causes new jobs to be created: Factories that might have gone abroad spring up in Arizona or Texas. Hasn't anyone noticed that California, where fully one-third of the adult population is foreign born, has an unemployment rate of less than 5 percent?

I urge you to read Mallaby's article in full, as a vivid reminder of the important role that immigrants play in sustaining the American economy, all while largely living without full access to rights and benefits. And then laugh again at the line “…illegal immigrants (were) are Marxist and unter the influence of the devil.”