Upon arriving in Lafayette Saturday, I looked up one of my old friends, who invited me to a family gathering. His daughter, a freshman in high school, had taken third this weekend in a debate tournament at the state level. She complained that it was a terrible topic, State Security and Civil Liberties. I agreed in my mind that the topic was indeed terrible: high schoolers debating these kinds of things without the sense of perspective offered by living as an adult and securing a life? I know I wasn’t paying that much attention to those kind of things when I was a freshman in high school, and to the credit of my parents, I didn’t have to at the time.

One of the mothers asked if the topic of the Minutemen Project came up in her debates. Half of the family had not even heard of the civilian border monitors. I was meticulously neutral in informing them because I recognized that I had a bias, and as a guest I didn’t want to offend. The 12-year-old boy asked, “Why is it bad that the Mexicans are coming across illegally?”

Of course, there was one of those pauses where people appeared uncomfortable, so I took this one:

First, I want to say that you ask a good question, because it shows that you’re thinking. There are a lot of complicated answers, but I’ll try to give you the basics.

Most people come here because they will be treated better than they were in the country they came from, and that they can make more money here than elsewhere. There is a right way and a wrong way to come into this country. The right way involves telling us you’re coming, learning our language, and learning about the way our country works so that you can take advantage of it and better yourself within the rules we set for our country.

The wrong way involves sneaking across a border and not telling us you’re coming. These illegal immigrants come in seeking a better life at the expense of people who already live here. There are things that the law guarantees to be “free”, but we pay for them. When you go to public school, that seems free, but your parents are paying taxes to pay your teachers and build the buildings. When you go to the emergency room, medical care is “free”, but your parents and other citizens pay for it with insurance. When you go to the store, you don’t just pull something off the shelves, do you? No, you or your parents pay for it. These illegals go to the schools and the emergency rooms, but they aren’t paying for the education and the health care they receive here. It’s a form of stealing.

(I then ask if he’s heard of a minimum wage) Well, in this country, businesses are required by law to guarantee that they will pay you a certain amount of money for the work that you do. When the illegals come, businesses see an opportunity to pay them less. If they complain, because they came here illegally, the police can come and take them back across the border. So not only do the Mexicans, when they come here illegally, break the law, they are an incentive for other people to break the law.

I asked if I had confused anybody enough. The relatives approved of this explanation, so I didn’t want to go further and discuss the lack of will to enforce existing law, the possibility of terrorists coming across the border, the potential political advantage in buying their votes with amnesty or a guest worker program, or the economic effects of the minimum wage, public schooling, and emergency room health care. My first economics course wasn’t until I was a senior in high school. :)

Some of the adults discussed the issue further as an aside, but I’m not sure if my friend’s daughter actually answered the original question about the Minutemen. It was also time for a more present discussion; dessert!