Who wants to live in a burning house?

It may sound a bit condescending or arrogant, but I seriously doubt that most Americans generally know anything about “illegal” immigration. What people often read in op-ed pieces from their local newspaper may very well be interesting, but that doesn’t make any of it true. Thanks to the absence of any real dialogue and especially the lack of truth regarding immigration, it is no wonder that people as absolutely inept, inexpert and thoughtless as Jan Brewer, are elected to the office of Governor in a border state like Arizona – home of the luddites’  SB 1070 legislation which the Supreme Court so flaggingly tackled this month. It isn’t that amazing that so many pundits and jingoists are capitalizing on something so few know anything about.

Let me say that, based on the centerpiece provision in SB 1070, the “show me your papers” provision, I can’t help but think about the policies enacted by certain regimes throughout Western Civilization’s history which lead to the oppression of myriad groups of people based on skin color, sex, religious profession, class echelon, etc. Law enforcement is required to verify someone’s status if they have cause to believe that that person might be in America illegally. What sort of signs will they look for and, who will be the majority of their suspects? I can only wonder.

Many people have commented that the legislation passed in Arizona, Alabama and plenty more states is of the same nature as the legislation of Nazi Germany, which allowed the Nazis to identify certain groups and condemn them to certain death. Arizona and Nazi laws may be apples and oranges, perhaps, but one cannot argue they nonetheless stem from the same family of political thought. Martin Luther King, Jr. quipped decades ago that we must remember that everything they did in Nazi Germany was legal. He, of course, was not drawing any connection to problems of the border per se, but rather the Civil Rights issues with which he labored. But the point stands: even if what states are doing is by definition “legal”, it does not make it right or just or ethical or moral. States are not moral agents as Noam Chomsky reminds us. But how could America ever be likened to such a monstrosity as Nazi Germany? Who knows. Nevertheless, America absolutely ought to be judged accordingly when it starts to act like a totalitarian, tyrannical, despotic behemoth. Otherwise, if people don’t like it when their country is held accountable for terrible policy foreign and domestic, maybe they should live somewhere else, some place even less democratic than the US.

The truth is that I am a convert from America’s Conservative camp. I grew up admiring Bush the Younger, and hating the “terrorists” because they “hate what America stands for” and because they “hate my freedoms”. Nevertheless, once too many things were simply unbearable, too many untruths irreconcilable with what actually was, I was passionately rocketed to the Left. What is even more amazing about America is that there is no such thing as left at all! And, to commit myself knowingly and openly to the informal logical fallacy of assessing the makeup of the many by the properties of the few, allow me to say I feel that those who claim to be “on the right” in fact neither truly know what it is that they want, nor do they practice in earnest what it is that they preach.

One of my major qualms is the platform regarding “small government”. I am absolutely pro small government. I really do think that the hoodlums who call themselves libertarians and republicans in Arizona are not actually for smaller government, neither are they actually libertarians or republicans for that matter. “The Federal government isn’t going to tell my state what to do about the illegal immigration problem.” No, it isn’t; there is no need for the Federal government to be snooping in your home, car, and grocery cart when you are – at a state level – already sky-rocketing the amount of government oversight in everyone’s lives with backward legislation as is SB 1070. And thanks so much, for that matter, for the Patriot Act – way to show America that you really pine for smaller government. And, what of the speed-trap cameras on the state highways? It reeked of big brother and big government: way-to-go, Arizona! Voter registration ID: yet another extreme overture (albeit a farfetched pipedream) to bigger government. The hypocrisy and lunacy of what American conservatives do while calling their policies “measures” to protect us from the terrorists and the “illegal” immigrants (who they plot as the antagonists who secretly conspire to destroy America) is, nothing other than unconscionable. Does anyone remember when some tried to make the “anchor-babies” farce stick? Wow. Such hairebrained muckra gives me great pause and gives me no reason to believe most are even somewhat trully educated.

Let me also say not in my own defense but, for those who will continue to bury their heads in the sand anyway, American liberals are not beyond reproach. Furthermore, I seldom (if at all ever – unfortunately) meet a liberal or a democrat for that matter who is as critical of Obama as I am. We could have done what the underwhelming minority of conservatives did for the 8 years of Bush the Younger's regime: we could have held Obama so accountable that any opposition from the right would have seemed to be but a whisper, or, redundant at best. I wager that if you actually think Obama is anything more than a flagrant moderate, you need to recalibrate your political prism because you probably think that Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter actually believe what they say and write. You might just be a full-blown reactionary or a true-believer.

What most people think they know about the issue: “illegal” immigrants don’t “get in line” and come to America the “right way”; “illegal” immigrants come to America to reap the benefits of our wealthy nation without doing anything to “deserve it”; “illegal” immigrants “plug-up” hospitals and “take jobs” away from Americans; “illegal” immigrants create an unmanageable “burden” on states and public resources; “illegal” immigrants bring crime; “illegal” immigrants don’t pay any taxes and still receive benefits; anyone who enters the country “illegally” is a criminal; “illegal” immigrants are overrunning the United States like never before…. The list is comically extensive, and mythically untrue. If there actually existed a functional way for people to immigrate to the United States “legally”, ought it not to have worked by now? If you are someone who sounds giddy like Borat when you scream “USA, number 1” and never questions what that means, maybe you should start questioning whether or not “USA, number 1” means, “USA, best policy found on Earth”. It does not.

While I assume that many American shoppers don’t want their “roll-backs” at Wal-Mart to disappear, they do want the immigration “problem” gone, and as fast as possible. Let’s be honest for once at least. This desire for "illegal" immigrants to disappear means that there are people in America who equivocate the immigration problem disappearing with the disappearance and deportation of Mexican nationals and other groups assessed by ethnicity or "race". Unfortunately for most American xenophobic or otherwise, the thought of paying more than $5.96 for a package containing 6 pairs of socks is unthinkable. And the price of the average American’s socks has everything to do with immigration. The only way for socks and other goods to remain as cheap as possible is for them to be made where it is cheapest to make them. If this means creating business in one country only to disrupt and destroy lives (including in America itself) when that business and prosperity leaves, the consequences for immigration can’t be honestly considered unforeseeable by anyone with a thought in his or her head. Americans who don’t honestly think (or worse, who choose not to think) that the globalized world and globalize economy is driving – as it always has since America immemorial – immigrants to our borders and shores, are absolutely uninformed or just plain senseless.

Oh, you don’t want Guatemalans living “illegally” in Los Angeles? You don’t think the Chinese should be “illegally” migrating to the US through a small town just outside of Tijuana, Mexico? You don’t say! I have a piece of advice for the xenophobes among us then: read a book on how international political economy and trade and policy actually work in the world. When the Adidas factory that YOU, ME, Bill Clinton and CAFTA all decided should be in El Salvador moves to Korea because of changes in Washington’s whims regarding textile tariffs which all of a sudden favor them more, don’t act so righteous and feign such a narcissistically scandalized torment by the migration of people to the place where opportunity and jobs might still actually exist. I quote myself shamelessly from my last post: “Indeed, Latin America’s textile and clothing exports have increased over the years, enjoying not only proximity but also a history of trade preferences. Of course, after several barriers to Chinese textile exports were eradicated in the mid-2000s, Latin America’s share in the market declined with negative results for manufacturing in the region. Between 2000 and 2004, one of every four maquiladora plants left Mexico for China. The majority of the plants were textile and other low-value and laborious businesses.” Were the Mexicans just going to go to China to keep their jobs? Are most Americans just that madcap and quixotic when it comes to their world view of politics and economy?Or, do you not understand what capitalism actually is? And I don’t mean the theoretical capitalist pretext for the predatory plutocracy that America espouses domestically.

When will Americans understand that we are simply reaping what we have sown for so many generations? Why do we choose to live in a burning house while shamelessly fingering others for starting the fire?