Immigration Hell

If you want to know what immigration Hell is like, look at Gaza this week.
The conflict has all the markings of an immigration policy gone terribly wrong: a wall stretching endlessly along a border, punctured by armed checkpoints with long lines of immigrants seeking either to work in Israel or blow it up. They mass outside the gates in refugee camps filled to overflowing, lobbing rockets, a clear and present danger to Israel. It’s a bloody mess.
This could be our own southern border in a few years if some immigration opponents get their way.

Like the Israelis, Americans have always feared immigrant hoards that threaten our way of life: hoards of uneducated Catholics, hoards of Asians, hoards of Jews fleeing Hitler, and now hoards of Latinos from Mexico and Central America. We build walls; we invade factories and arrest thousands, we imprison millions; we deny amnesty.
Yet they come, perhaps slowed by our great recession, but still out there, ready to pounce at our slightest wavering. This very day there are hundreds of thousands signed up at American embassies to enter, and those are just the ones who follow the rules; others don’t and number more.
Still America isn’t Israel. It’s easier to protect a democracy than a religion. There are no refugee camps in Mexico, and our wall remains largely un-built. Mexicans don’t hate us or want to push out into the sea. No one has crossed over the Rio Grande to commit massive acts of terror (knock on wood). The 9/11 terrorists flew in from Canada.
So how would we fall into the Gaza trap? Simple: by adopting the extreme anti-immigration agenda. Adherents successfully blocked the administration’s immigration reform in 2007. And the agenda probably has even more followers today as the growing unemployed fear competition for jobs from immigrants.
The agenda calls for rounding up 13 million illegals, overwhelmingly Mexican, and dumping them over the border. Next we would spend whatever its takes to build the wall and arm and deploy the militia to make our border air tight. Then we would squeeze immigration permits to next to nothing to preserve American jobs for Americans.
Also deported would be millions of Central Americans, principally from Guatemala and El Salvador. It would be extremely destabilizing to these countries which lie to Mexico’s south, putting great pressure on Mexico as Central Americans seek refuge there.
To gain support for these policies we would demonize immigrants as drug traffickers, parasites, and aliens who would undermine our language and culture.
The result would be an explosion of slums in Mexican cities, especially along the border. They would look a lot like refugee camps. It would overwhelm the capacity of the Mexican government or of any government to provide basic services such as water and sewerage or schools and hospitals or the infrastructure that nurtures jobs.
Resentments would build among the growing unemployed and crime would explode, especially drug trafficking. Many of these problems already exist, but they would get worse fast.
Eventually the US would have to intervene just like the Israelis are doing now in Gaza. Impossible? We have already done it. One hundred years ago the American army raced across the border in hot pursuit of Pancho Villa who had shot up some American towns. General Pershing never caught Villa, but set the precedent for today’s policy makers. The Minutemen are ready to saddle up now.
But wait, this doesn’t have to happen. We should thank Israel for providing us an opportunity to look into the abyss. Like Dante we can learn and return to our world wiser. We can give the 13 million immigrants without papers a path to citizenship. We can adopt an immigration reform that controls future immigration in more comprehensive ways than walls and gun mounts. We can rely on the American economy to figure out how many workers we need. We can be a welcoming nation.

January 11th, 2009 by admin | Posted in Uncategorized, immigration | Comments (0)

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