ELLICOTT CITY, Md. — When lawmakers in Howard County, Md., a stretch of suburbia between Washington and Baltimore, declared their intention to make the county a sanctuary for people living in the country illegally, J. D. Ma thought back to how hard he had worked studying English as a boy in Shanghai.
Stanley Salazar, a native of El Salvador, worried that the violent crime already plaguing Maryland’s suburbs attributed to immigrant gangs would eventually touch his own daughters.
Hongling Zhou, who had been a student in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising, feared an influx of undocumented immigrants, and their children, would cripple the public schools.

At first blush, making Howard County a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants had seemed a natural move: The county has twice as many Democrats as Republicans and a highly educated population, full of scientists and engineers. One in five residents was born abroad.


But the bill met stout opposition from an unlikely source: some of those very same foreign-born residents.

In passionate testimony before county legislators, and in tense debates with liberal neighbors born in the United States, legal immigrants argued that offering sanctuary to people who came to the country illegally devalued their own past struggles to gain citizenship.

Some even felt it threatened their hard-won hold on the American dream.
Their objections stunned Democratic supporters of sanctuary here and helped bring about the bill’s demise in March. A similar proposal for the state collapsed this month in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats also hold a two-to-one advantage. Some of the same immigrants spoke out against it.

The failure of the sanctuary bills in Maryland reveals a potentially troublesome fissure for Democrats as they rush to defy Mr. Trump. Their party has staked out an activist position built around protecting undocumented immigrants. But it is one that has alienated many who might have been expected to support it.

What follows are the stories of four immigrants in Maryland who oppose sanctuary status — people whose voices have rarely been heard in the long debate over how to fix the nation’s immigration system.

Some supporters of sanctuary had dismissed them as white-collar professionals whose personal struggles could not compare with those of undocumented people now facing possible deportation.

But anyone who thought their journeys were easy, these immigrants said, has never walked in their shoes.

The Lawyer
Growing up in China, J. D. Ma shared a small room with his parents and sister in a communal apartment in a working-class district of Shanghai. They had to take turns with two other families — 14 people in all — to use a single bathroom.

His maternal grandfather, a history teacher, was sent to a labor camp in 1957 under Mao Zedong. The family eventually received a letter saying he had committed suicide.

But still, they considered themselves lucky: They lived in the city. They had running water.
From the age of 9, Mr. Ma was pushed to learn English by his mother. “Study harder,” she told him. “Score higher.” At 12, he won entry into a highly selective boarding school where he toiled for 13 hours a day.

Today, Mr. Ma, 45, is a patent attorney, living in a stately home in Clarksville, Md., after years of study at universities in New York, Utah and Virginia and a first career as a software engineer. His wife, also a Chinese immigrant, works for the National Weather Service. Two-thirds of their daughter’s second-grade classmates have parents from China or India.

Mr. Ma sees his whole life as a struggle to achieve his Americanness.

“Being in America is such a high privilege,” he said, sitting in his brightly painted kitchen. “As an immigrant I really feel it.” He added: “You cannot easily give that privilege to somebody without going through some kind of process. It’s like giving lots of gold for one dollar.”

Mr. Ma voted for Hillary Clinton. But hearing liberals talk about undocumented immigrants confuses him: The fact that their entering the country broke the law is somehow sidestepped, like a crude remark at a polite dinner party. Democrats oppose deportation on the grounds that it breaks up families, Mr. Ma said. But so do other aspects of the justice system — without setting off the same outcry.

“If a single mother commits a crime and has to go to jail,” he said, “we don’t say, ‘Oh, we can’t do that, because it will break her family.’”

This perspective baffled the sanctuary bill’s supporters.
Why, they asked, were naturalized citizens like Mr. Ma so threatened by the act of protecting people living in the country illegally — many of whom had worked just as hard, and put down roots of their own, thanks to years of lax immigration enforcement and an economy that depended on their labor?
Undocumented immigrants, after all, live much more tenuous existences. Mr. Ma said that a liberal friend had chided him for not understanding his own advantages, compared with “people who were here babysitting and doing all the cleaning and cutting grass for people.”
Mr. Ma has thought about this argument a lot. But he has concluded that it is irrelevant to the broader issue of legality.
Rather than treating the nation at large as complicit, he focuses on personal responsibility.
“Just because you are a productive member of society, working hard, mowing lawns, that should not be the reason to give you that gold,” he said. “You kind of jammed something down America’s throat. You said, ‘I understand you haven’t given me permission to contribute, but I want to contribute. So here I am doing it.’”

I hope link works
Link to other 4 views:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...pe=sectionfront&_r=0

It's only a surprise to liberals.

quote:

“Being in America is such a high privilege,” he said, sitting in his brightly painted kitchen. “As an immigrant I really feel it.” He added: “You cannot easily give that privilege to somebody without going through some kind of process. It’s like giving lots of gold for one dollar.”

Mr. Ma voted for Hillary Clinton. But hearing liberals talk about undocumented immigrants confuses him: The fact that their entering the country broke the law is somehow sidestepped, like a crude remark at a polite dinner party. Democrats oppose deportation on the grounds that it breaks up families, Mr. Ma said. But so do other aspects of the justice system — without setting off the same outcry.

“If a single mother commits a crime and has to go to jail,” he said, “we don’t say, ‘Oh, we can’t do that, because it will break her family.’”

Good points. It's a high privilege that shouldn't be handed out to those you skirt the rules.

They love their country & don't want it fucked up.

A guy who played by the rules and immigrated legally wants others to do the same. I am shocked.

So is he a racist? A xenophobe? Anti-Hispanic? What childish name will the Left use on him? Will they think up another new, sophomoric invective now?



.

The problem with the fucking commie Democrats, including their partners in crime the MSM, is that they completely lie, relabeling the fight against illegal immigration as plain old "immigration", and many of their followers/voters bought it hook line and sinker. These idiots truly believe Trump and those voting for him want ALL immigrants out of the U.S.

There were liberal French, British, even Asian idiots on TV after Trump won, all crying and frightened that the meat wagons were going to pick them up and either deport them or jail them

Now when legal immigrants give these morons the truth, of course they are flabbergasted; it's like throwing a wrench into their gears.

I have yet to meet a naturalized citizen who's not opposed to illegals being allowed to live here with full benefits.

quote:

Originally posted by Orguss:
I have yet to meet a naturalized citizen who's not opposed to illegals being allowed to live here with full benefits.

Add me to the list - Naturalised Citizen here - and pissed off with all the benefits the illegal ALIENS get ....

My wife is a legal immigrant. "Anti-illegal" does not even begin to describe her position. At times she makes me look downright moderate.

Q: If we build a wall, how are we going to deport people?

A: Trebuche.

These Libtards need all the illegal voters for next time.

I'm a legal immigrant as well

Last I heard it was about $15,000 to become a legal naturalized citizen.
Why wouldn't they oppose the illegals?

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
Q: If we build a wall, how are we going to deport people?

A: Trebuche.

I like your wife.

Add me to the list of people who doesn't know any legal immigrants that are for sanctuary. I met one, it only took 10 minutes to change his mind, and I didn't have to say a word 90% of the time. I asked him to tell me his story of how he became a citizen. He did. I asked him besides the efforts was it expensive? Yes. Then I asked him why someone who hopped a fence illegally should have the same privileges he enjoyed as a citizen. I watched the gears turn as he processed it. He replied he had never thought about it that way. Score one for the good guys!

Like in the NYT article I know of an Indian that had to miss a funeral because if he left the country it could affect his ability to stay here legally or become a citizen. He said it was a tough decision, but he wasn't going to throw away all he had worked for.

Being a citizen or a legal resident is not easy, nor should it be. It's a complete slap in the face to all that did it the right way for years to have these people get to jump the line. Even more disgusting is the legal ones bring skills, knowledge, and advanced degrees with them. Mexican's bring a paint brush and the shirt on their back.