Here's the prompt to respond to:
What is Silko's claim?
Do you agree or disagree, or something in between? Why?
In what ways does she use ethos in her argument?
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22 comments:
Silko claims that people are forces of nature and the mass migration to the United States cannot be stopped. She goes on to say that the "Indian Wars" in the United States are not over and the native people are still fighting for their land and respect. Throughout her argument she uses ethos mainly by detailing multiple stories about the border patrol and her experiences with them in the southwestern US. She recalls a story where she was pulled over on a trip from Tuscon to Albuquerque and feared for her life as the officers looked for any reason to detain her. She also recalls stories of her friends who are of german, mexican, and asian decent being stopped by border officials. She uses no statistics throughout the reading but her stories add credability to her argument. I agree that within the United States race relations and immigration are problems that will never completely fade. She talks about the idea of building a wall seperating Mexico and the US and I agree that this is an idea that would do little to solve the current problems. More I.N.S agents will not solve the countries problem of immigration and they further the racial divide within this country. Comprehensive immigration plans and steps to gradual citizenship are necessary to regulate illegal immigrantion. Exposure the general public to different cultures and ideas is key to alleviating racial tension.
Silko claims that Border Patrol must be reformed. She suggests it must be reformed for two reasons,” the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Border Patrol have implemented polices that interfere with the rights of U.S. citizens to travel freely within our borders." (para.8) And secondly efforts to restrict immigration are ineffective.
I agree to an extent with Silko. In the context she puts it in, she told of the negativity of Border Patrol. Border Patrol is positive when it tries keeping drugs out of our country. Yet, when they treat people unfairly in a prejudice manner I do believe it really needs to be reformed. "No person, no citizen is free to travel without the scrutiny of the Border Patrol." (p.167) This is how the Border Patrol makes people feel. Their job isn't to make people feel scared, violated and uncomfortable. Their job is to watch the borders and they are taking their jobs to an unethical level. "...the fence along the border is a theatrical prop, a bit of pork for contractors." (p.168) Due to the way Border Patrol is handling their job people are not taking the "border issue" seriously. When the Border Patrol is not doing their job correctly and not taking it seriously, why should other people take it seriously?
Silko uses ethos- in her writing to show you, you are not the alone in these feelings and experiences. She tells and shows you that other people go through these racist remarks and acts everyday. Silko shows her audience we all have opinions on the Border Patrol issue and that is okay.
Silko claims that the United States needs to reform the Border Patrol. I agree with Silko that the Border Patrol needs to be reformed. Pulling over people who look suspicious is reasonable but to pull over citizens with valid identification and look for any reason to book them is ridiculous. Citizens should not be afraid to drive in their country for the fear of being detained.
Silko uses ethos in her argument when she describes the time she and a companion are driving from Tuscon to Albuquerque. They are pulled over by patrolmen and have their car searched by a dog. She describes the situation in a way that makes you feel like you are there and are terrified that you too will be detained.
Silko's claim is that she thinks that the border patrol must be reformed. I agree and disagree with Silko's claim. The border patrol does bad things, but they also do good things. I agree that it should not matter what color your skin is or what your race is. If one race gets pulled over to be searched, then all races should. However, when the border patrol searches for bad things such as drugs or weapons, then it is ok to pull over and detain people. Silcko uses ethos in her article to explain what happened to her when she and her friend got pulled over. She continues to describe the emotions between her and the borders patrols' dog. She talks about how it feels like to be interrogated and detained.
Silko claims that the Border Patrol is a problem that needs to be reformed. She believes that the way they deal with people is not proper and there is other ways for the Border Patrol to protect the borders. Silko does not think that they way they handle these situations are effective or moral. I agree with Silko's claim. The Border Patrol treats these "suspects" as if they are not humans. I understand it is there job to protect the U.S.-Mexico border but they need to do it in a respectable manner. In Silko's writing, she discusses the "wall" that some people want built along the border. I believe that this will not be an effective method. It could show that us in the United States do not want people from Mexico in our land. I find this inappropriate and discouraging towards those people. Silko uses ethos in the beginning of her writing. She gives the audience an example of how she relates to the topic she is going to write about. She allows us to believe what she is feeling is real.
Silko claims that the Border Patrol is corrupt and needs to be reshaped. They racially profile by stopping all the cars that have people that are any race but white, and search their cars without warrants or reasonable cause. Also, Silko fears for her life and remembers hearing about people that were found murdered by Border Patrol. I agree with Silko. I think that the Border Patrol needs to obey the law just like everyone else, and not abuse their power. Silko uses ethos by showing her firsthand account of the Border Patrol's abuse.
Silko claims that almost anybody can be detained by border patrol agents at least once, and this fact includes people from any color without exception.
I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with her argument because I never crossed the borders, and, until now, no border patrol agent has stopped me. However, I have heard of some of these events happening to other people.
At first, Silko uses her own personal experience to introduce us the argument of her paper. She uses narrative to approach a credible and non-exaggerated pathos. In addition, other facts, description of places and situations, and people's experiences gave a broader view of the issue that approached logos in a good way. Both of these elements, pathos and logos, summed up to have a good ethos.
In Silko's article about the border patrol, she makes a claim that the practices of the Border Patrol are reenacting the subjugation of native people. Her argument results in her wanting to have the Border Patrol reformed because their tactics interfere with the right of U.S. citizens to travel freely within the country's borders. I somewhat agree with her that reform is necessary because it is ineffective. I also think the Border Patrol tactics can be harsh at some times but with the problem of people trying to smuggle humans and drugs, the risk of officers being injured or even killed is very high.
The use of Ethos in her article is very apparent from the beginning. She establishes that she is a well known and respected author and that she has done research on the methods of the Border Patrol. She also states her own personal experience with Border Patrol agents along with others. She also connects herself with traditional American values.
Silko claims that the Border Patrol has been overwhelmed with power. She claims that it has got to the point that they enjoy detaining and harassing the people of color as well as those who fit the profile as carriers of illegal immigrants. My feeling towards Border Patrol in the way she expresses it is somewhat in between whether it's good and works, but also it has gone to far in the sense of harassment. The Border Patrol has been successful in some areas such as stopping the amount of drugs coming into the United States of America from Mexico, but also is demeaning toward the human population because of the way people are harassed based on fitting the profile of supected illegal immigrants. Silko uses ethos through the experience she had, and how it made her feel as an American or more so a human to be treated that way. She gives the details of the dogs eyes not wanting to comply with the officers, and how angry the officers were toward the dog for not finding any drugs or people or really anything. Ethos is further used by her to expain that this has been going on for years and has developed into a problem.
SIlko's claim is that the U.S. Border Patrol has lost sight to its real purpose and is reenacting the discrimination of the minorities that were thought to have been taken care of decades before. I agree with almost all of her claims because she used such strong persuasion and her pathos hit hard for me. I don't really have an opinion on the Native American side but that is just because I don't have the connection to them that she does.
Her ethos are made for one, just because of the fact that she is published. To make it even more clear her credentials are stated above the story. She enforces these by showing her knowledge of other related literature and her insight of the INS policies. Because of her credibility proven her personal experiences and other narratives are allowed to be used as credible pieces of information in proof of her story. To top it off her style of writing is easily readable. All these factors "ethos" make her story very credible.
Silko claims that the United States Border Patrol has, in recent years, been given undeniable amounts of power. This power leads to corruption in her mind. They have a certain power (and if they don’t have it they will pretend that they do) and this leads to abuse and neglect in many instances. She claims that certain individuals involved in this massive amounts of power can become addicted to interrogation, torture, and the murder that can follow.
I don’t happen to agree with what she is saying, I myself have a Mexican-American background and drive the road from I-25 to Las Cruces bi-monthly to see friends and family. I am stopped one time on this trip, a stop in which I am expected to declare my citizenship and then progress. Not once has a dog sniffed my car or anything of the sort. Furthermore I have an uncle who is a ranking official in the Border Patrol and judging by the amazing character I know he has, no acts like that would even be considered as being tolerable, nor would something of such magnitude ever feasibly go overlooked. I believe the United States border Patrol to be doing their job perfectly fine.
I do not think she uses ethos (what I normally consider to be the ethical presentation of an argument) very much throughout the essay. This I know is in part due to the fact that I don’t believe her claim to be a justifiable one in any sense. If it was somehow justified in my eyes, then the ethos that would prevail would mainly be when she is talking about people of any race other than white being oppressed; this is completely understandable and justifiable.
Silko claims that the "Indian Wars" have never stopped, but have merely
transformed to fit modern society. Silko uses ethos of a trustworthy
and upset citizen by telling us about her childhood and the values that were taught to her, and going even so far as admitting that she was carrying medicinal marijuana the night she was pulled over. Through these statements she gains the trust of her audience and places her trust in them. However, I both agree and disagree with Silko's claim. I understand that there are many people in this world that abuse their power over others, and it is a problem that is not usually talked about, but I feel as if she has generalized this thought too much by just saying the Boarder Patrol. This is a problem everywhere, however, there are good people in the Boarder Patrol. As far as people of color being discriminated against specifically, I would disagree to a certain extent. I am sure there are
cases where events as the few she described have occurred, but I don’t think it is to the extreme extent that she describes them as.
My father has worked in Silver City, New Mexico for the entire life. For sixteen of those eighteen years, he has been traveling on the exact roads that were the locations of Silko’s examples occurred. My mother is from Deming, New Mexico and lived in Hatch as a young girl, so naturally with so much family in the southern part of the state, my family and I have too traveled down these same roads. I have even traveled to Mexico and back on more than one occasion have had to go through a boarder check and I have never seen or experienced something like this. While I am fairly light skinned, I cannot say the same is true for all of my family members being a mix of Hispanic and Mexican American. In conclusion I feel this essay in itself included too much rhetoric writing and not enough facts to persuade me to agree with Silko’s claim.
Silko's claim seems to be that the border patrol and the government need to find a new way of controlling the " illegal immigration." Silko states incidences where the border patrol has made racist decisions on why to search someone like when Silko and her friend were pulled over on their way to Albuquerque and at a border patrol in Las Cruces they were pulled aside along with two other "dark" skinned males even though they had proper identification on them. The stories that Silko provide help her readers appeal to her character. I agree with Silko that there needs to be a refined way of finding illegal immigrants because constructing a steel wall ten feet high to span sections of the border with Mexico is just not going to cut it.
In "The Border Patrol State", Silko claims that Border Patrol officers misuse their power to infringe on citizens' right to travel freely within the United States. She introduces the topic by sharing a personal experience of how she felt the loss of her "sensation of absolute freedom" when she was pulled over by Border Patrol officers in New Mexico. Silko uses other examples of the abuse of power, such as being detained in Truth or Consequences, a professor from UCLA being questioned about her frequent travels between Los Angeles and Albuquerque, and a Chinese man that was stopped by Border Patrol just because he was lost. She concludes her essay stating that "borders haven't worked, and they won't work".
Though I do agree with Silko that Border Patrol officers can be overzealous in trying to catch illegal immigrants and drug smugglers, I do not agree with the tone of her essay. The manner in which she tries to gain the support of the reader (painting a monstrous picture of ANY kind of border enforcement as blood-thirsty and murderous) not only creates a hostile argument, but alienates any reader that does not share this sentiment. Silko tries to create ethos by establishing herself as a respected author, and sites research on the subject of Border Patrol issues throughout the essay. She also tries to garner the audience's trust and sympathy with her first personal story. I found myself disconnected from the author's plight when she spent an entire page painting herself as a victim of an unfair search, when, at the end of her story, she reveals that she was in fact carrying illegal substance on her person. Silko failed to take into account all possible perspectives when writing this essay, and in that capacity she failed to create credible ethos (and pathos as well).
In "The Border Partol State", author Silko urges the need for improving Border Patrol's policies and behavior. A narrative writer, Silko eases the reader into the story, making us more vulnerable as we read on because we feel that we have been apart of her journey across the desert from Tuscon to Albuquerque. Within the first paragraph, Silko brillantly began talking about freedom, something I feel each American has been taught to cherish, seeing as how we do live in "the land of the free". Using ethos and combining such a patriotic word while talking about Native Americans allows the reader to feel sometype of kinship with them because we too value our freedom and would never dream of it being taken from us. Reading this article makes us aware that even in law enforcement agencies, where we put our trust for safety and fairness, there are prejudices and unfair policies. Silko wrote "They are willing to detain anyone, for no apparent reason", and she did so to suggest that this could be anyone of us and for any number of reasons.
I agree with Silko's arguement that there needs to be a reform on the Border Patrol. I don't think anyone should feel threatened while being searched or disrespected because you are innocent until proven guilty~ but I guess the Border Partol might have it backwards. Obviously there are risks in working as a Border Patrol officer and they should always take caution, however that does not mean that they can treat the suspected men and women in front of them in such a horrid manor and neglet to aknowledge their rights.
silkos claim is that border patrol agents are abusing their power and violating peoples civil rights. she believes that anyone who wants to be in this country has the right to be here, and should not have to face harassment from any government authorities. she uses ethos in her argument by providing stories of different people in the past being harassed, abused, and even murdered, and even provides first hand experiences where she feels that she has been violated by border patrol agents. i disagree with silkos claim on the border situation. i believe that all U.S. borders including Canada and Mexico should be secured. people in this country should only be allowed in legally to ensure our country's safety, and economic stability, and it also makes it unfair for the people who enter this country legally. when someone enters our country illegally it shows they already have no respect for America or our laws, and makes it harder for people who do want to come to America Legally, harder because there is now less room.i believe the border patrol should use everything in their power to enforce this. if that means building a wall or conducting these searches of vehicles near the border. leaving the borders open would just be a free invitation for terrorists and drug dealers, and other criminals to come in and out of our country.if i was in southern New Mexico and the border patrol searched my vehicle, i would at least be glad that they are active in protecting our country and not just sitting around and wasting our tax payers money.
Leslie Silko claims that border patrol needs to be reformed. I agree with the fact that the border police cannot search and pull over somebody for their race. But if the person traveling is acting suspicious in any way then yes i agree that they have the right to pull someone over and search their vehicle. Ethos plays a huge part in her article she tells many stories of her own life experiences and some that are her friends. She really brought the reader into her story with how she felt and her emotions when they brought the dog out to search her and her companion.
Silko's claim was that even though the united states is putting all this money into border patrols and making all these strict laws, but even though all this is going on, people are still getting through. I agree, i think that even though the U.S. put all these restrictions and can stop people there is still no way that we can stop all these illegal immigrants. She uses ethos by telling the story about the older man who was stopped for getting lost and acused him of smuggling in immagrants. This was a good way to show ethos because alot of people always feel bad for older people because it reminds us of our own grandparents.
Silko's claim is that the border patrol programs result in the abuse of innocent people. She believes that the Indian wars of our history are still alive but have taken different forms. I believe that there is alot of coruption in many branches of law enforcement. The border patrol is in many cases wrong according to my ethics. Silko uses ethos in her personal account of the issue discussed. Her use of rhetoric was affective in order to draw simpathy from the reader
Silko's claim is that the border patrol must be reformed. Her evidence is the different situations she describes; for instance her and her companion being forced out of the car driving from Tuscon to Albuquerque, for an unnecessary K-9 search of her car and person. She feared for her live because of the fierce behavior of the border patrol. Also her friends father was pulled over based on his nationality. I completely agree with Silko's claim. The border patrol does not have the right to wrongfully search anyones car or person without a warrant. Basing their prosecutions on plainly their formed stereo types is appalling. I also agree with her statement that the Mexican border and all its surrounding states will not solve anything.
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