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 Immigration is here to Stay as Long as Exploitation and Poverty Co-exist!
My local congressmen seems to think that the biggest issue facing Americans in the coming election will be immigration. Yes, that issue ranks higher than the economy, high gas prices, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and way way higher than the issues those environmental extremists talk about, like global warming. My Congressman sees no problems with multi-national corporations moving here from other countries (or vice versa). He sees nothing wrong with goods flowing like water across borders . The same goes for intellectual property. And our military presence, well it also knows no bonds. But let people come to this country seeking work and all hell breaks loose! Our belief in laissez fare no longer holds. When it comes to immigration, controls must be imposed, strong controls with no holes in them. So we hire thousands of more guards to patrol our borders. We build higher and higher fences. Yet they still come, based on the law of supply and demand. There is a demand for workers in this country who will work for what our employers and growers want to pay. The supply isn't met with local workers who refuse to work so hard for so little. Thus the vacuum that nature abhors exists, and workers from outside our borders find a way here to meet the demand. And thus the first law of our economy is proved. But there are many, probably most, in our country who can't stand all these new people coming into our country to take advantage of all our services, our generous welfare benefits, medical care, freedom itself, and a huge market for all those drugs that the immigrants want to sell our teens. First of all, most immigrants don't come to this country for its welfare services. They come here to work, and the benefits they render to our cheap food, our landscapes, our construction and our service industry is worth much more than we may at times provide our newest residents in the form of education and medical benefits. Forget welfare; non-citizens aren't eligible for it. And as a humane country, the least we can do is to provide medical care when people would die without it. Plus, as much as we harp on students not being adequately educated, how dare us not educate all children in our districts! The drug pushers....yes, they are a problem, just as our own pushers are. However, again most immigrants coming into our country, even illegally, aren't coming here to push or transport drugs. They are here to earn an honest living just like us. Many come from strong moral families who abhor the drug scene even more than we do. They are drawn here by the words on our Statue of Liberty, which was given to us as a gift from a foreign country over a century ago. We also revere its inscription of "Give me your tired, your poor, your humbled masses yearning to be free." But we sure hate to apply those words to our neighbors down south who are poor, humbled, yearning to be free, but not too tired to earn their rent while here. I, as much as anyone, do not like the idea that our population is expanding. The more people we have, the more the globe groans, the more other species are crowded out, and the more all of us have to welcome closer neighbors, crowded roads and streets and more houses on the block. But what right do we have as Americans to make our country exempt from the growth that is happening all around the globe? In recent years, our country has refused to promote family planning and abortion counseling in countries outside our borders. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Our globe is reaching a tipping point, and whether those people live here in the USA or in Mexico or China or India, it is the same globe that feeds the masses and gives them a place to lay their heads down at night. I am reminded of the movie I saw at least 20 years ago. It was "No Blade of Grass," by John Christopher. In this movie, masses of people begin to move where their families can live because of extreme famine in their own countries. And even though wealthier countries have guards along their borders and even fences, the starving masses are still able to make their ways through, and the virus that started out only affecting countries where rice was the staple food, spreads into other grasses, and masses flee with one thing in mind: food. In a sense this is what is happening in our country now. Many countries in Central and South American can't (or won't) sustain all of their residents. The only option is to go where the food....or the money to buy food....is. We can waste our money on fences, on laws, on guards, on flights back for illegals, for jail space.....or we can somehow include people in our trade policy. At this time, we just want the money and the products of free trade, not the people that are also part of the equation. We as a country created this monster when we gave our corporations a free rein to move to other countries, take sustenance farmers' land, use cheap labor there, provide almost no services to the local communities, and expect people there and here to get by just as they always did. The cat is now out of the bag, and our corporations have to take the responsibility for their part in it. And we in the prosperous countries need to once again open our borders. In many ways many of us will be inconvenienced. We will see ourselves as a bi-lingual country. But eventually family sizes will decrease here as the new families accept that only smaller families can make it here. Those who leave their families behind will continue to work here until they make enough to ensure their families' viability back home for the longterm. We can export our richer families to outside our borders as they look for places where they can have more seclusion and where property is too expensive for the masses to live. Jobs will eventually gravitate to more regions around the globe. Wealth will do the same. No one country can exempt itself from this change. Only until the birth rate starts to go down and justice go up and exploitation stopped will we as citizens of the globe be once again able to value our solitary peaceful lives in the wide open spaces again.
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