Should I make this a regular sort of column?

Here’s a real question a real White Dude posted, of all places, to my Facebook page:

Why should illegal immigrants have rights?

Thanks for making it easy for me, White Dude! Because all human beings have rights. Done!

You can discover this mysterious concept in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The word “universal” is a helpful hint, confused White Dude!

For further clarification, let us examine the issue. Permission to stay and work in America indefinitely is extremely hard to come by, and will take years, possibly more than a decade, to come by, if ever. But usually, one’s status as an American national or a national of another country is arrived at by dumb luck: whose womb we happened to pop out of. Official permission to stay in America is not granted on a basis of merit. It is granted by luck of birth, and sometimes it is granted to people with enough money and influence to get around the rules.

There are many, many legitimate reasons why someone not born in America would like to live and work here. These reasons are amply examined in many places on the interweb, and I do not feel like reinventing that wheel here.

So, White Dude, unless you believe that dumb luck is a good method for determining who gets human rights and who is treated less than human, let’s play it safe and remember that all humans have rights.

Also, White Dude, never call a human being “illegal” in my presence again, mmmkay?

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