I don't support the idea of a lot of immigrant children being indefinitely housed in the United States, or of a lot of them getting U.S. citizenship.

July 23, 2014

While they are in the United States, they should be housed and treated decently.

What I wrote about this issue at my WordPress blog, "endtherapeofchildren," was that the countries from which they fled should be made to take responsibility for improving the conditions in those countries.  There's no reason that the United States can't help and work with those countries to improve those conditions; the United States should do that.

There is no reason that the United States should be considered to be the place where everyone who wasn't born here should want to live.  There is no reason that the standard of living in places that don't have what the United States has shouldn't or can't be improved.

I support human rights; everyone has those, even when they aren't acknowledged.  To be honest, the term "immigrants' rights" sets my teeth on edge.  That could be because I have lived much like a refugee in the United States, the place of my birth, since 2010.  It could also be because of all of the people who are obviously not from the United States who have harassed and stalked me during that time; many of the janitors at the MBTA and employees of places throughout the Boston area
meet that description.  They are free to use their employers' time and resources to harass and stalk me, while finding and keeping work is fraught with abuse and other difficulties for me.

I think that people who want to be U.S. citizens should have reasons that are more important than "I feel like it," or "I can make a lot more money at a low-level job in the United States than I can where I was born, and that's the height of my ambition (and ability)."

Employers in the United States also shouldn't be allowed to hire immigrants just because they'd rather hire people whom they know will take more abuse than people born in the United States would take.

Copyright L. Kochman, July 24, 2014 @ 9:09 p.m.