You've heard it all your life. It's not the land of milk and honey that folks desire. It is SIMPLY the chance to work hard and be paid a living wage. We will quibble with what we think a living wage should be, but for those who are paid $3 a week for back breaking work, if they are lucky, making minimum wage is a king's ransom. I can't say that NO one who comes here is just looking for a handout. No doubt there are some who get here and realize that there are other ways to make money. However, the vast majority of people who come over the border are hard-working people who want their children to have food to eat, an education and the chance for a better life. These are American values; it turns out they are values not just for citizens of the United States (we call ourselves Americans as though there were no other Americans on these continents), but for all citizens of North and South America. So they come.
The hunted
Women, children, and, yes, men, who want the dream we promise and threaten. Yes, we promise it. We promise it when we go to other countries and try to change their governments. We threaten it when we make "free" trade pacts with countries that ravage their common people while making some people's pockets on both sides of the borders fat. Mexico's government has long been guilty of treating its least as replaceable cogs in a wheel. But we have long been complicit in the forming of those governments. Read some history before you say that Mexico created this problem.
The dream/the hunters
Minutemen (and women) and other anti-immigrant groups lambast undocumented workers as felons; illegally living and working in this country is the subtext, "stealing" righteous Americans' dreams is the real crime. These words spoken by the poster boy for Minutemen encapsulate the sentiment:
“For your children, for our future, that’s why we need to stop them,” Mr. Barnett said. “If we don’t step in for your children, I don’t know who is expected to step in.”
Not to mention that all those folks who never became police but still like a little drama get to dress up and act like Texas Rangers, that is treat people poorly in the name of the law. These people are really dangerous with their guns and lack of sympathy, but I also blame the people like our governor and that police chief in Arizona who foment these groups to tactics that often lead to unethical, if not illegal, actions.
This NYTimes article describes rulings against descriminatory laws while pleading for federal action on immigration. While a laudable attempt to describe the inequities these kinds of laws propagate (and how they are unconsititutional), this op-ed fails to implicate the real problem that no federal laws will address: people in this country enjoy buying food and eating out for less than either of these are actually worth, not to mention clothing. We are unwilling to admit that our way of making and spending money is out of whack with reality. We buy more than we can afford and penny pinch on obvious but trivial items (food, clothing, menial labor) while not bothering to think about savings in real money or consumables (cars that don't burn as much fuel, more energy efficient appliances, etc). Essentially we think of our spending in price tags rather than in overall prices. We are also unwilling to critically examine our luxury buying -- and that includes eating out 5 or more nights a week to the tv in every room of our houses.
What We've Become
To be sure, immigration, legal and illegal, is a complicated and wrenching subject. On the one hand, except for the indigenous, no American would exist who did not have immigration in their family history. For most, if not all, there is no sense for whether their family "legally" entered the United States. Indeed, most people can't tell you how or why their families came to this country.
The tangled web of deception and acceptance is described quite vividly in this NYTimes article.
This saga continues, but my energy wanes. More later.
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