It’s an election year, and politicians across the board are raising a lynch mob around the immigration issue.
Despite all the hand wringing from various public officials about “illegal immigration”, the system is actually working exactly as it is supposed to work. We impoverish people elsewhere, then those people desperate for jobs find their way here, and because they are illegal, they are easily exploited by unscrupulous employers who cheat them of their wages, charge them outrageous rents to live in shacks, kill and maim them with unsafe working conditions, poison them with pesticides and herbicides, charge high rates for transportation to work, and threaten them with deportation if they complain. Because of this cheap labor, we have cheap food in our stores. If the giant agribusiness corporations had to pay actual wages that people were willing to work for, food would cost more. People would complain, so the politicians keep the present system going. I tend to think that any politician, of any party, who claims to want to end illegal immigration is a liar, whipping up a lynch mob for their own reasons. The agribusiness corporations pay plenty of money to congress to make sure this little game continues.
Many of the people who come to the US from Mexico were driven here by US policies in Mexico. e.g., several years ago I had my roof replaced. During the lunch break, I chatted with the workers (I bought them all pizza). Between my pidgin Spanglish and their pidgin English, I managed to learn their story. All of them were from a village in central Mexico, where they and their ancestors had lived since presumably the days of the Aztecs. They were farmers. One day their own government showed up and told them they had to move, since this land now belonged to a US corporation. For many poor farmers in this world, the concept of “legal title” is an alien thought. They had always lived there, how could their land not be theirs? So suddenly this US corporation was now owner of their village, and the corporation offered to hire them to grow food to export to North America, but they offered cheap wages even for Mexico. So they went north. I quit buying frozen vegetables after that experience. People are going to go somewhere. If we make it impossible for them to live in Mexico, how can we not expect them to come over here?
Something often lost in the present debate is that an “illegal alien” is a human person. I tend to think that the term “illegal alien” is like the words once used for African Americans, the purpose of such words is to dehumanize them, depersonalize them, and make it easier for us to do what we want with them. We can exploit them at low wages, rape their women, sell their children into prostitution, torture them to death to make snuff flicks, and who cares, because, after all, they aren’t human persons, they are illegal aliens.
There is no political or criminal “solution” to this “problem” that does not involve turning the US into a police state, complete with residency papers, internal passports, no fly (and no travel) lists), and etc. The whole “Real ID” program is driven by politician trying to “do something” about “illegal aliens”. If we build a gigantic tall fence around our borders, we should remember that anything that will keep people out will also keep people in. I personally don’t care to live
behind an Iron Curtain. And even if we do this, we will still be faced with human migration. The Berlin Wall didn’t stop people from escaping from communism into West Germany.
The rise in political heat about this issue is entirely an artifact of the political class practicing divide and conquer for the purpose of continuing their reign of theft, corruption, violence, and exploitation.
As we fret and march and etc about people from Mexico, we are conveeeeeniently distracted from doing anything about the criminals on Wall Street and inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C. All the Muslims in the world are not the threat to our liberty, our resources, and our
future that our own politicians and financial leaders are right here in the United States.
If we want to “do something” about human migration, then we need to “do something” about the criminal politicians and financial leaders right here in the United States. We need to kill corporations who kill people to drive home the point that killing people is wrong. If we can
drive our financial and political aristocracies out of business and office, we will find that the problem of human migration will decline, because we will no longer be deliberately impoverishing the people of Mexico and elsewhere so there will be less incentive for them to move north in desperation for work. If we would repeal our stoopid drug laws, we would kill the cartels along the border that are driving the violence down there. If we would withdraw our troops from all foreign lands, we would stop creating new enemies of the United States who want to sneak in and do harm here along the home front.
Human migration is not the problem, it is a symptom. If we want the symptom to go away, we have to solve the problem. The problem is in Washington, D.C. and on Wall Street, and in the capitals of the various states of these formerly united States.
Everything is going along pretty much the way the criminal parasites in Congress (both parties), the Executive (present occupant, and all potential occupants of either major parties), and the corporate board rooms want things to go. We are complicit in our nation’s fall to ash heap of history inasmuch as we willingly participate in the ruling class games of divide and conquer.
I am not suggesting that we cure Mexico’s problems, only that we stop making things worse there. One of the reasons things are so bad in Mexico is because their elites connive with ours to keep their people in poverty. Until that stops, the human migration will continue. If we stop propping up the Mexican aristocracies, and if our corporations would stop stealing land from Mexican farmers, things would get better in Mexico on their own, without our “assistance”.
The amount of tax money spent on those coming here because of human migration is a pittance compared to the amount we spend on wealthy white bankers and the bank accounts of big corporations. Means-tested social programs, all added together, are less than the Pentagon’s war budget, and when we add in the subsidies for banks and corporations, not to mention interest on the national debt, its percentage of each tax dollar declines even further. The means tested social programs spending, according to the Statistical Abstract of the US, equal about $561 billion in 2009, out of total US government 2009 expenditures of $3.997 trillion, or about 14%. This isn’t all the social spending of course, but Social Security and Medicare are not means tested, most of their recipients are not poor. So it’s not spending on the poor that’s breaking the bank, it’s the Pentagon, subsidies for corporations/banks, interest on debt, etc, and social spending on the middle class and wealthy. But that’s not what we hear, and the reason for that is that it suits the interests of the aristocracy to pretend that the poor are somehow prospering at the expense of the middle class, when in fact, the poor and the middle class have a common enemy, and that is the aristocracy.
As long as the poor and the middle class are divided and fight against each other, then the aristocracy will prosper and eventually, there will only be the aristocracy and the serfs.
And that is the plan. Poverty for all, wealth for a tiny minority, all arranged not by the invisible hand of the market, but by the corruption of the political and market systems to take from the majority and give to the rich and powerful.
There is no danger of the US taxpayer being impoverished by any incidental services provided to migrants. We are in danger of impoverishment, there is no doubt about that, the process is well
advanced, but the culprits are mostly white, all very rich, and they have a strong sense of entitlement to everything we earn above the minimum amount necessary to keep body and soul together.
Regarding popular hostility towards migrants. . . Jesus said that those who do not welcome the stranger — xenos, which is Greek for foreigner — with hospitality would be condemned to
hell. He said that the poor were blessed, and the rich were cursed, and certainly in the US/Mexico equation, they are the poor, and we are the rich. I understand these are hard sayings, but I didn’t make them up, they are plainly there in the New Testament. I often don’t like them, because they make demands on me personally that I don’t want to fulfill, but irrespective of my opinion of them, they stand there in God’s Word, for all time, as a standard of behavior to be obeyed or
ignored, the choice of life or death.
The popular lynch mob against human migration is a symptom of the on-going collapse of our nation onto the ash heap of history. Things are going from bad to worse, and people demand answers. Politicians provide them in the form of easy-to-attack scapegoats, who are poor and without political power. We will see more of this going forward, and it may get very ugly. Given the emotional and political heat on this subject, it is often easier to just be quiet and to go along to get along, but look where that attitude got the Germans after the first world war.
One bright note, however, is that political attitudes towards human migration provide a method of discernment in politics. Any politician thumping the drum on “illegal immigration” should be dismissed as a stooge of Wall Street and the aristocracies of wealth who are stealing the productive effort of hundreds of millions of people.
