A TV commercial I’d like to see about illegal immigration

On illegal immigration, today’s young people cannot understand what “the rule of law” means. But maybe you can phrase it in terms they understand….

People standing in line illegal immigration analogyOne of the most devious tactics the Left is using lately is to conflate legal and illegal immigration. Most conservatives (like me), support the former and hate the latter. My hostility to illegal immigration arises, in no small part, because supporting illegal immigration destroys the rule of law in America. A country without the rule of law starts to look remarkably like Putin’s Russia or half the countries in Latin America.

If you try explaining the rule of law to a Progressive or to a young person raised in a Progressive environment, you usually get a slack-jawed, blank-eyed stare. They no longer have the mental equipment to understand these concepts. Thinking about those people, I came up with my idea for a commercial.

The scene is a movie theater on the day a much-anticipated movie is opening. Teens have been waiting in line for hours to buy tickets. Suddenly, they notice that a door far to the Left of their line is open and that a steady stream of people is jogging down the sidewalk and ducking into the theater through that door. After a few seconds of incredulous silence, those standing in line start speaking up.

“Hey, what’s going on here?”

“That’s not fair.”

“They don’t have tickets.”

“They didn’t stand in line.”

A representative from the movie theater comes out to address their concerns.

“I know you find this upsetting, but the fact is that our movie theater made the decision that it’s not fair that we make everyone stand in line and buy a ticket. After all, everyone wants to see the movie. If people are willing to break the rules to get into the theater, especially because some of them don’t have nice theaters or any theaters at all in their neighborhoods, we shouldn’t stop them. [This last point is an especially nasty blow if the movie theater in the commercial is in a marginal neighborhood, in which honest people have still stood in line to pay.]”

A voice from the crowd rings out:

“But what about us? We’re following the rules. Why are we being punished?”

The representative answers. “To be honest, you’re just not as interesting to us now.  We already have you on a leash, so to speak. It’s in our interest to get those line-jumpers in here so that we can teach them some other cool tricks. You know, like standing in the street and screaming really loudly so that film distributors give us the best movies first. Or going to shareholder meetings for the film distribution company and pretending to own shares so that they can vote us more and better first-run movies. That kind of thing. You guys have already proven that you’re not willing to get down and dirty.”

Looking at the line, he sees that some of the people are planning to bolt to the opening door.

“No, no. I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop you. As I said, you’re not really the kind of people we want now. And we do still need your nice neat lines to hide from the film distributors the fact that we’re gaming them. So . . . pay up or leave.”

The sequel to this commercial would be about the fact that those who got into the movie without paying refuse to leave — and that the movie theater management is okay with that. As the representative says, “Hey, fair’s fair. They may not have paid to get in, but it just seems cruel at this point to kick them out. Heck, some of them even brought their children with them and it would either ruin their movie experience or make them too upset to enjoy it. We really hate to see children cry.”

With the obvious rebuttal from the ticket payers being, “But why don’t you hate when our children cry because they can’t see the movie?”

There are a lot of possibilities here. Every American teenager has stood in line for a movie and many have had fights over seats. Some have jumped lines, so they know what motivated them, and all of them have been very angry at line jumpers at some time in their lives. This is an analogy they can feel, rather than a public policy debate they’re incapable of understanding.

And if you’re wondering why the line-jumpers’ country (that would be Mexico) is so in favor of its people breaking rules, here’s an idea. A friend sent me a link to an “immigration” counter, which purports to track data tied to illegal immigration in the country. The numbers are impressive. That which impressed me most is the number showing how the corrupt Mexican government uses illegal immigration to protect itself from the economic effect of its terrible policies: Illegal immigrants in American have sent almost $235,000,000,000 home to Mexico since January 2006.