I’ve never been comfortable proclaiming that America is the greatest country in the world. It’s not that I don’t love the USA, or that I’m dismissive of the life and opportunities that I have here. It’s that I haven’t lived anywhere else, and so, it seems like a stretch to make this assertion.
It doesn’t stop other Americans, however, and I sometimes envy their certainty. But the logical problem is that any boast that we’re “the greatest” rests on comparisons to other nations.
In a recent post, I referred to “that infamous tool of totalitarianism – the public-opinion poll.” My point was that many Americans seem to think that civil rights are subject to some kind of popularity contest.
I could have added that polls are notorious for presenting a myopic snapshot of an ever-fickle populace. As such, yesterday’s strong opinion becomes today’s “just kidding.” And of course, Americans are well known for adopting contradictory opinions.
Apparently, Little Brother is watching you.
I know we were supposed to be afraid of the surveillance powers of an out-of-control government. However, it seems that our fellow citizens have taken it upon themselves to create paranoia and fear among the populace.
Recently, I wrote about the inaccuracies and myths surrounding the supposed crime wave that illegal immigrants have created in America.
I’m sure many readers said, “OK, Hispanic Fanatic, you displayed sound reasoning… even though you have a creepy way of referring to yourself in the third person, with an alias no less, and you remain obsessed with hourglass-shaped blonde women. But logically, you were correct.”
The Fanatic appreciates your vote of confidence.
As such, I will now address that other boogeyman of the illegal-immigration debate: the economic burden to our country.
By now, you’ve seen what happened to our old friend Dora the Explorer. No, it’s not pretty.
According to my pals at the Huffington Post, the doctored images of Dora “reveal some Americans’ attitudes about race, immigrants, and where some of immigration reform debate may be headed.”
I can’t keep track of the threats to our country sometimes.
At first, I heard every illegal immigrant was coming here to steal American jobs. However, according to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, most illegals aren’t crossing the border to pilfer an American’s livelihood. They are actually drug mules.
I was surprised to find this out. And it’s not like the beloved spokeswoman for SB 1070 to exaggerate or skew the facts, so it must be true.
But then a spokesman with the National Border Patrol Council said Brewer’s assertions were “clearly not the case” and that they “don’t comport with reality — that’s the nicest way to put it.”
Indeed, if most illegal immigrants were holding drugs when they were caught crossing the border, the prosecution rate for that offense would be much higher. And while drug barons do use mules, the overlords prefer to transport massive loads of the stuff all at once – as seen in this bust, where twenty tons of narcotics were jammed into a truck. Even the most obese and dedicated drug mule is unlikely to swallow 38,000 pounds of pot.
So we’re back to the right-wing talking point that illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs. Fortunately, talk-show host Stephen Colbert has found a way to undermine these cunning thieves.
Colbert has teamed up with the United Farm Workers of America to get citizens back to work. The new program, Take Our Jobs, encourages unemployed Americans “to apply for some of the thousands of agricultural jobs being posted with state agencies as harvest season begins.”
Every legal resident who fills out an online application is guaranteed a spot in the fields. Finally, we can put to rest the claim that undocumented workers do jobs that citizens don’t want.
After all, there are thousands of spots available, and I’m sure they will go quickly to any American who is willing to “expect long days” courting heat exhaustion while being “excluded from federal overtime provisions.” Well, it’s also true that “small farms don’t even have to pay the minimum wage” and that “fifteen states don’t require farm labor to be covered by workers compensation laws.” But that’s a small price to pay for a gig that “consistently makes the Bureau of Labor Statistics‘ top ten list of the nation’s most dangerous jobs.”
At long last, undocumented workers performing the enviable task of picking lettuce will no longer be taking an American’s job.
Of course, they’ll probably just become drug mules.
The good people of Arizona are counting the days. In just a few weeks, SB 1070 kicks in. At that time, every illegal immigrant in the state will be rounded up, processed for deportation, and kicked out.
Well, at least that’s the thinking among the anti-immigrant crowd.
However, Arizona citizens might be dismayed to discover that banishing all their undocumented workers will not cause rainbows to magically appear all over the state. Those who supported the law for economic reasons (ie, “Illegals get a free ride and cost us too much”) may receive a particularly unpleasant surprise.
According to the Arizona Republic, implementing the law will strain the state’s legal system and overburden the jails. If the same number of illegal immigrants are processed as in previous years, it will run Arizona at least an extra million bucks or so annually to take care of them. Keep in mind that “local police will presumably find more illegal immigrants than before.”
This estimate is just the direct cost of SB 1070. The Arizona Republic also reports that foreclosures may increase, because there will be fewer immigrants renting apartments and buying houses. That will not be good news for the state’s stagnant housing market.
Also keep in mind that many studies have pointed out that illegal immigrants often add more to the economy than they take. Adding these factors to the equation makes the new law seem fiscally insane.
However, maybe Arizona will still come out ahead. For starters, they may not be on the hook for all those processing and deportation fees after all. According to USA Today, SB 1070 “may be prompting a mass dispersion of Hispanics — both legal and illegal — from the state.”
Apparently, many Latinos aren’t in a big hurry to see if they get pulled over in Phoenix for looking suspiciously brown. So they’re taking off for someplace else right now.
Supporters of the law must be ecstatic at his news, anecdotal as it is, because it proves that all one has to do to get rid of a loathed ethnic group is pass a draconian law targeting them. Then they’ll flee.
Yes, it moves Arizona closer to the day when the state will consist entirely of old conservatives (mostly white), and rattlesnakes. I guess that’s the way they want it.
But wait, because there’s another kooky development on the horizon.
According to Newsweek, all this screaming and yelling is unnecessary, because the whole fistfight over illegal immigration will soon take resolve itself.
This is due to the fact that the birth rate in Mexico is declining rapidly. Along with the decrease in illegal immigration (and it has gone down, no matter what you’ve heard), it means that illegal immigration in the future “won’t be nearly as overwhelming as the deluge of the 1990s and early 2000s.” In fact, Gordon Hanson, an economics professor, says in the article that “I wouldn’t be surprised if Arizona starts pleading for Mexican workers who can help them in their retirement homes.”
And that’s the final twist in this ugly tale.
There’s a perverse irony to the idea that states such as Arizona will, years from now, be clamoring for young Latinos to immigrate. At that point, there will be a lot of “What SB 1070? We were just kidding.” It’s sort of like that scene in the otherwise shitty movie The Day After Tomorrow, where Americans rush into Mexico to escape the killer cold.
So Arizona, and the rest of us, can relax about immigration… at least until we get old and there are not enough young people (Hispanic or otherwise) to fund our Social Security and clean up after us.
But it’s best not to dwell on that one too much.
I haven’t written about immigration in, I don’t know, about nine minutes now. So despite my wish to move on to Latino-themed subjects that are more fun (i.e., wouldn’t a post about the chupacabra myth be cool right now?), events in the real world have conspired to once again force me to address this lighthearted, jovial topic.
You see, recently, the Supreme Court ruled that certain Constitutional rights don’t cease to exist just because the accused person is a noncitizen.
The cases didn’t even involve illegal immigrants. The Latino at the center of the first decision, Jose Padilla, has lived legally in the United States for forty years.
By the way, this isn’t the same Jose Padilla who is currently locked up for supporting Al-Qaeda. But maybe there’s something sinister about the name, because this Padilla was convicted of running drugs.
His lawyer failed to tell him that he would be kicked out of the country if Padilla pled guilty, and sure enough, deportation proceedings began against him. But the Supreme Court said that Padilla’s Sixth Amendment rights, which call for adequate legal representation, had been denied. The vote was 7-2, with that lovable duo of Scalia and Thomas dissenting.
In the other case, the Court was unanimous (a rarity these days) in overturning the deportation of Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo, a legal resident. The guy was busted for holding a miniscule amount of pot and then, a year later, was caught with “one tablet of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax without a prescription.” The Court said maybe this was not the aggravated felony that is required to kick out a legal resident.
The cases are basically reaffirmations that Constitutional rights are not reserved solely for citizens. This might not seem like it has to be emphasized every now and then, but another news event showed that some Americans don’t believe that immigrants deserve basic human rights, let alone Constitutional ones.
On Long Island, a man named Jeffrey Conroy was recently convicted of manslaughter for stabbing an Ecuadoran immigrant to death. According to prosecutors, Conroy was part of a gang that “targeted Latinos for assaults – part of a sport they called ‘beaner-hopping.’ ”
The fact that Conroy wasn’t convicted of murder is intriguing, as one must wonder if the lesser charge of manslaughter would have even been an option if he had stabbed, say, a white woman to death. But of course, Conroy and his thugs had no interest in attacking their fellow whites.
He was part of what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “a pattern of ethnic intolerance going back ten years” on Long Island. The Center adds that Latinos there live “in an environment of intolerance and violence directed at them. The atmosphere of intolerance was stoked in part by anti-immigrant groups and some county leaders, along with an indifferent police department.”
These events show that it will be some time before certain Americans agree that Hispanics have a right to live among them. And it will be even longer before a few others agree that Hispanics have a right to live at all.
In a recent post, I wrote about how violent crime is down in states that border Mexico. This is true despite the repeated fear-mongering of right-wingers, who insist that millions of illegal immigrants are swarming American cities to murder, rape, and desecrate at will.
As it turns out, however, this week offered a spectacularly bloody example of violence along the border. Unfortunately, the violence was committed by us.
You’ve heard, no doubt, that a fifteen-year-old boy was gunned down near Cuidad Juarez. A U.S. Border Patrol agent shot the teen, supposedly because the boy was among a crowd of Mexican kids throwing rocks at the agent, who feared for his life. Others have said that the agent freaked out and started firing into Mexico, killing a kid who was no threat.
The victim, Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca, was either “a straight-A student” or a “repeat juvenile offender” with a “history of involvement with human smuggling,” depending whose story you believe. Of course, it doesn’t really matter. Either the action was self-defense, or it was murder.
I don’t know if the shooting was legit. From this one video clip, it certainly looks like the Border Agent overreacted. But to verify that, we need an investigation.
One would think this is a fairly reasonable request. However, the opinion of many on the right is that even looking into the shooting is an unpatriotic travesty. We’ve heard that the agent should get a medal, and that questioning his decision to open fire is nothing more than liberal, hate-America, criminal-coddling demagoguery. But that’s not the most intense aspect of this story.
For that, one needs only to read the online comments posted about the shooting. My favorite was the straightforward “One down, 12 million to go.” We’ll set aside the fact that the boy was not actually one of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in America (his body was found in Mexico). The implication, of course, is that we need a systematic liquidation of the undocumented.
I have to assume that the commentator was spouting off and didn’t mean his post to be a call to genocide (of course, who really knows). But many others have posted similar sentiments.
The point is that regardless of one’s opinion of illegal immigration, it is beyond vile to gloat about a teenage boy getting a bullet in the head. It’s particularly grotesque that many of the people who post such comments consider themselves fine examples of American virtue and/or Christian compassion.
Just recently, I wrote that sending more troops to the border seemed odd unless they were authorized to use lethal force. And in such cases, “I doubt that all but the most hardened Minuteman will be indifferent to the inevitable sight of a gunned-down family.”
Clearly, I was wrong. Many Americans are so full of the milk of human kindness that it causes them not one pang of disgust to hear about a child shot down. In fact, to many, it may even be a cause for rejoicing.
I’ve written that the first step in immigration reform is to see the undocumented as humans, rather than as some virus that needs to be eradicated. This seemingly obvious statement, unfortunately, needs to be reiterated from time to time.
Again, when it comes to this case, I don’t know if the Border Patrol agent was justified or if he’s some trigger-happy nut. But it certainly isn’t un-American to ask the question.
Nor is it admirable to do online cartwheels when a teenager gets killed. And that’s true, as hard as it is for some people to believe, even if the kid is Mexican.
Individuals like me who object to Arizona’s new anti-immigration law point out that it could lead to increased racial profiling.
“Nonsense,” backers of the law have responded. “All that’s covered in the law’s wording, which makes it clear that no Hispanic legal resident or citizen will ever, ever be harassed. So nyaa.”
It seems, however, that we don’t even have to look to Arizona for proof of how confusing it can be when we set out to round up the undocumented.
