Immigration

Immigration is a very controversial topic in many parts of the world. On October 23, 2005, the Nassau Guardian printed an article titled ‘On Immigration’ by Nicolette Bethel where she talked about the immigration situation in the Bahamas and told the readers how she feels about the topic. She begins her article by telling her readers that we need to send back all the Haitians to showing the audience that if you start sending them back we have to send every other foreigner back. Through the use of fallacious reasoning, Bahamian dialect, short sentences, question asking and the tone, Bethel captures the reader’s attention and ironically and humorously misleads the readers about immigrants.
In the opening paragraph, Bethel defines the term illegal immigrants as ‘…people who come here on boats, not jets, people who sail here from the south, not the north, and people who speak a different language and who worship a different way from us.’ Firstly, this is not the true definition of the term ‘illegal immigrants’, in actuality the term refers to people who migrate into a country in violation of the immigration laws of that country. Lastly, the false definition tells us that we need to read deeper into the meaning of what Bethel says throughout the remainder of the article and question the validity of her information.
Bethel makes sweeping generalizations when she writes ‘Suffering is not our business; send them home.’ She implies that the immigrants are the cause of suffering in The Bahamas and that if we send them away the suffering will end. What suffering is taking place? How do we know that these immigrants are the cause of this suffering? In order to make this statement evidence needs to be presented to say that immigrants are in fact the cause of suffering in this country. Bethel cannot assume that just because we send the illegal immigrants home that does not mean that whatever suffering is taking place will cease. Sounds facts are needed in order to back up