Marietta Daily Journal

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Inger Eberhart/Letter to the Editor: Illegal aliens debase sacrifices of civil rights leaders

The late Barbara Jordan was the first African-American Congresswoman elected from the Deep South.

She stated, “‘We, the people.’ It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787 I was not included in that We, the people. I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.'”

How appropriate that the first black congresswoman elected from the Deep South would have this sentiment. During Black History Month, we celebrate the contributions and accomplishments of African-Americans. A people sold into slavery by fellow countrymen whose ancestors survived the Middle Passage to arrive in a foreign land. In the span of 300 years we have gone from the birth of a race to an integral part of the U.S. culture.

As part of Black History Month, we also celebrate the Civil Rights Movement. The movement that caused institutions to recognize African-Americans as citizens of a country that we helped build, fought and died for.

For more 300 years we were considered strangers in our home. We were citizens of a nation that did not recognize us as citizens. Finally, in 1965, we were granted the rights and privileges of citizenship. Civil rights granted to citizens of a nation.

Advance 21 years to 1986. The US grants “one-time” amnesty to 3 million illegal aliens within our borders. With that amnesty, these illegal aliens received the rights and privileges of citizenship, including civil rights.

Fast forward to the 21st century. More than 3,000 are killed in the terror of 9/11, some 1.2 million illegal aliens are apprehended at the border while more 4 million cross without apprehension each year, businesses are basing their financials on an illegal alien workforce, 12 Americans per day are killed by illegal aliens and thousands of illegal aliens are marching in the streets of some of the nation’s largest cities demanding the rights and privileges of full citizenship.

Ms. Jordan was also the Clinton-appointed Chair of the Commission on Immigration Reform. She stated that, “To make sense about the national interest in immigration, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law, and those who violate it.”

Illegal aliens have violated the law by choice. Illegal aliens chose to leave their homeland, separate from their families, and enter the U.S. illegally. They are, then, caught, jailed and subsequently deported. As such, they are treated as the non-citizen criminals they have chosen to become. They have chosen to leave a place where they have civil rights to a place where they have none.

As an African-American conservative, I value and appreciate the strength of the civil rights movement activists. They fought for civil rights for citizens. It debases the sacrifices of these civil rights activists for illegal aliens to demand something that does not belong to them.

Inger Eberhart

Acworth

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