Illegal Invaders; Annex Mex! There has been a deliberate attempt by, for instance, opponents of Arizona's recent anti-illegal legislation to equate illegal aliens with legal immigrants. That is despicable dishonesty, and fools no one.
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The pretense is that any Hispanic, including people like my state (NJ)'s Senator Robert Menendez, if visiting Arizona, could be harassed by law-enforcement, with the blessing of state law. The reality is quite different. I very seriously doubt that local law enforcement, who especially in small border towns know who is local and who is not, would harass local U.S. citizens of Hispanic ancestry. And a white guy in an elegant business suit, even a mestizo in a business suit that obviously fits him, is not likely to be bothered. Who might be? The driver and passengers of an overcrowded pickup truck or van filled with poorly dressed mestizos wearing poorly made clothing of Mexican-peasant types (huaraches, ponchos). Any group of strangers standing outside a Home Depot looking for daywork, until those entitled to be here become known to local law enforcement. The suggestion that even after local law enforcers know full well that a given person is here legally, they will nonetheless harass them over and over for documents — and that the law would permit that — seems to me extremely unlikely. Yes, some cops are bigots and would love to harass Mexican immigrants in hopes of making them "go home"; but most cops know better. They know that they need the cooperation of local Hispanics entitled to be here in fiting drug smuggling, kidnapping, and the other evils that moved the State of Arizona to pass this 'drastic' legislation. The further assumption is that cops, sheriffs, and deputies are too stupid to recognize Mexican A as being different from Mexican B, or that the massive numbers around any law-enforcement officer would make it impossible for any one person to get to know who is here legally and who not. The reality, however, is that much of the border-enforcement activity will take place in small towns, not great cities. And even in larger communities, cops tend to become familiar with their part of town, and recognize the good guys as against the bad guys.
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So some of what people posit as potential problems would not develop in actual enforcement of Arizona's new law — or of any Federal attempt to detect and deport illegals, which the great preponderance of citizens want done.
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The United States accepts more legal immigrants than any other country in the world. We are not anti-immigrant, even tho legal immigration has in some cases done us demonstrable harm. The claim that immigration, legal or illegal, does no harm to Americans is pure, unadulterated bull*. Take two occupations: engineers and actors. U.S. corporations that do not wish to pay enuf to produce a flood of American students into engineering programs in U.S. colleges claim there is a shortage that Americans cannot fill, so ask for the right to bring in engineers from places like India, at salaries and benefits hugely below those that have heretofore been offered to Americans. The Federal Government allows corporations to use immigrants to undercut salaries and benefits for Americans, because the employers aren't the slitest shy about blackmailing the Government with threats simply to move all their engineering operations to India. Computer and other engineers, architects, computer programmers, etc., brought in under such programs of legal immigration are actively injuring American workers in those fields.
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Likewise, thousands of foreign actors are just allowed to march across our borders as if there was no such thing as a border. A very large proportion of all film actors at the highest salary levels in "American" films are foreigners, from Canada, Australia, Britain, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, and other places. Why? How did they get permission to enter the United States when there are at least scores of thousands and possibly even hundreds of thousands of American actors who cannot find work?
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The "American" film industry also outsources all kinds of productions, mainly to Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, even for films ostensibly set in the United States. That should be stopped, by making all foreign production expenses for films set in the United States ineligible for deduction as production expenses. Let all such expenses come out of after-tax profits, and we will see an end to this despicable practice. Let Canadians, Brits, and New Zealanders make their own damn films, at their own damn expense.
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The American film industry should benefit primarily Americans. That is not a revolutionary nor bigoted idea. Half of the "American" film industry's profits come from the United States, one country. The other half derives from all other countries of the world put together. So why are Americans relegated to utter unimportance by Hollywood? The idea that foreigners in Europe would not go to see an American film if all the actors were American, not Australian or other nationalities, is preposterous. Of course they would. Why hire an Australian to appeal to the tiny Australian market? There are only 22 million people in the entire country, which is only 2/3 the population of California. If Australians don't want to watch "American" films starring American actors, who cares?
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In any case, U.S. immigration laws are unfair to Americans, not to foreigners. There is no right of unrestricted access to the United States' economy, geography, and society to people from any area of the world not part of the U.S. legal realm: the 50 states, District of Columbia, territories (various islands), and Commonwealths. If the people of any other area wish to have the automatic right of access to our territory and jobs, they have merely to annex their area or country to the United States. We went from 13 states to 50; we can go to 100 or 150.
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Let Haiti end its hugely destructive independence and petition Congress for statehood. Let Mexico admit that it is a failed state as an independent country, and needs to be transformed by being annexed to and progressively altered by the United States. Mexican society is rotten to the core, and needs a total "Extreme Makeover: Mexican Edition".
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Mexico needs to eliminate the obstacles to social mobility placed in the path of hardworking, intelligent people. It needs to provide universal, quality education; universal electrification, sewage treatment, and water treatment systems. It needs to lift itself up from the doldrums of the sleepy, backward, unfair Third World. That effort would produce massive employment. But Mexico WILL NOT do that as long as it remains independent of the United States, at least not if the U.S. keeps providing an escape valve for the pressures for social change, by permitting a porous border to relieve Mexico of the responsibility to provide full employment at decent wages and benefits to its desperate classes.
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If Mexico's rich, and its naive nationalists, refuse to change Mexico drastically, in the direction of the U.S., by annexing Mexico to the United States and thus giving all its people the right to move to and work within the United States (and equally give Americans the right to move to and work within Mexico) the U.S. must deport ALL the illegals back to Mexico, where they will force the kinds of change that Mexico needs, or produce a violent revolution if the ruling elite refuses.
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If we force 6.25 million Mexicans to return to their country of birth, we can expect that that will so strain Mexican society that change will have to happen, peacefully or violently. Those who have spent a lot of time in the United States can be expected to demand the kind of legal and social rights that Americans have, and not consent any longer to be held back by social immobility. They might also form the core of a mass movement to annex Mexico to the United States, such that the 31 states and federal district of the United Mexican States become some lesser number of American states, say, an average of one state per 10 million people, for a total addition of almost 120 million people (including those expelled from the United States earlier), 3/4 of a million square miles of territory (which includes oil-rich areas), 20 or 24 seats in the U.S. Senate and 170 in the House of Representatives (which would be expanded to 605 seats to accommodate the new citizens from our new Mexican states). Mexico's very large oil and natural gas reserves would bring us much closer to "energy independence" than we now are, and from a secure, adjacent land area. No offshore drilling required; no Middle East oil embargo to fear.
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Until Mexico is annexed, the U.S. Government has the right, indeed the obligation, to enforce the border to protect Americans from the economic and crime hazards that illegal immigrants, from Mexico and THRU Mexico, present.
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People who attack the new Arizona law on illegal immigrants do so NOT because legal immigrants and native-born Americans of Hispanic heritage might be harassed, tho that is certainly possible, but because they do not want illegals to be detected, arrested, and deported.
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While it might be lovely if there were a world without borders, such an ideal is unattainable unless we have a democratic Government that can effectively provide services to all the world's peoples. There is no prospect of any such World Government any time soon. The United States' federal union can be enlarged over time to admit more and more of the planet's countries, and provide effective government over all areas brought into the Union. That is because democratic federalism allows people to control many of the operations of government closest to them, at the state and local levels, while contributing to the governance of the whole federal Nation. An effective federal democracy is infinitely expansible.
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Mexico is currently a nitemare, in large part because of impositions by outsiders and the transnational drug trade, which is destroying Mexican society due to the criminal activity of several million American drug users, who provide the demand that the drug cartels supply. The border isn't working for Mexico, because all the worst things from the United States pass the border easily. Mexicans are left with the worst of all possible worlds: everything bad about the United States affects, even controls them; none of the good things benefit them. The only way to get the benefits of the U.S. and neutralize the harms is to join the Great American Union, develop Mexico for the Mexicans (first and foremost), thru powerful state governments that use U.S. Federal aid to transform Mexico completely while retaining the good things about Mexican culture thru local programs to support and educate their citizens as to what is worth preserving from Old Mexico.
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Until Mexico becomes part of the Union, however, the U.S. must protect its citizens from disruptions and economic subversion by Mexican nationals. We could and certainly should revive the former bracero program, whereby Mexicans in search of temporary work, as in planting and harvesting American crops, would get legal permission to work here for a fixed period, then go home after they have made money in work the U.S. needs to be done, with all the protections of U.S. and state law relating to wages, working conditions, and worker safety. Comic and activist Paul Rodriguez advocated this on MSNBC's Countdown this past week, and it is an obvious solution to part of the problem of illegal immigration. Many Mexicans present in the U.S. illegally would be delited to go home if they could come here easily and legally in the future, and send money home. Others are here not just for the money but also for the quality of life, and the dignity accorded the person in an American culture that values individualism and merit above matters like race and family standing.
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People on both sides of the current border need to ask, "Why is this here?" and "Can't we do better together than alone?"
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,394 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:04 PM