Random thoughts on the hot-button issue

Note: my weekend op-ed.

“¡Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!”
(Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!)
-Porfirio Diaz, President of Mexico 1876-1911

The issue of what to do about America’s huge population of illegal residents is again a hot-button issue.

Arizona has just passed a law requiring local authorities enforce existing federal law concerning illegal aliens.

Enforce the law, what a concept!

As a consequence, the people of Arizona are being called Nazis, Nativists, and worse.

The first thing I’d like to ask is, does anybody else see how seriously weird it is we’re even having this conversation?

Every country in the world, except ours evidently, regards their right to control their own borders as a given. It’s pretty much what “country” means, an area defined by a border. Our law on our side, your law on yours.

That said, I have to confess to some ambiguous feelings about the issue. We have friends who though legal, have an illegal granny who takes care of their kids. (Requests for details will be politely ignored.)

What’s the harm in that?

And in my long-term residence abroad… I wasn’t entirely scrupulous about work permits myself.

But we’re talking about an estimated 9 to 12 million people here illegally, with an estimated inflow of a half-million a year. That’s not immigration, that’s an invasion!

Yet several dozen communities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities,” forbidding their own police to enforce federal laws, or even inquire of people they arrest whether they are in violation of them.

The federal government then discovered a new-found respect for federalism. Rather than declare them in a state of rebellion and sending federal marshals to arrest the mayors and councilmen, it preferred to ignore the issue in hopes it’ll go away.

Again, in what other country would that happen?

I am married to a legal permanent resident, who by law must carry her residence permit with her at all times. We were separated for four months after I came back to the U.S., while our embassy in Warsaw made up their minds to let my wife and son in. And they weren’t always polite to her either. (You’d think a three-year-old child would have clued them the Fraudulent Marriages Act wasn’t an issue here.)

So what does that say about how you’re treated when you follow the rules?

But of course we’re mostly talking about Mexicans, so you must be a racist if you suggest we shouldn’t welcome the ongoing reconquista of the southwest quarter of the U.S. – formerly known as the northern half of Mexico.

I love Mexico and it’s people. The time I spent there was delightful, as most everybody who goes there without a gringo attitude finds.

But is it a favor to allow its corrupt (and by the way, overwhelmingly white) oligarchy to export its potential troublemakers so they can remain in power?

That Right-wing think tank Freedom House, founded by that Right-wing ideologue Eleanor Roosevelt (sarcasm alert,) noticed that of the countries they categorize as “free” or “partly free,” almost all have one ethnic group that constitutes at least a two-thirds majority.

We might be the exception. We’ve already assimilated lots of people from all over the world – though never that many from a single origin. And never from next door.

But if we want to try that experiment we’d might want to consider that once done, it probably can’t be undone.

So what do I think?

I think we’re going to be neighbors with Mexico for a long time. And since I began with an apropos quote, another occurs to me.

“Good fences make good neighbors.”

This entry was posted in Immigration, Op-eds, Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Random thoughts on the hot-button issue

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *