The issue currently being trumpeted by the mainstream press is state sponsored racism. Add a leavening of Kentucky crackpot Rand Paul, and you’d think that everyone’s lost their minds. But it’s the accepted framing of the problem that begets an inaccurate solution. It’s a constant shell game our corporate masters, the Chamber of Commerce and others play to keep most of us looking at the tree directly ahead and not the forest of related ills that must be addressed simultaneously.
The President and Congress now speak of immigration reform. They talk of addressing the symptoms, not the causes. The biggest cause of undocumenteds being here is that they can’t survive at home. NAFTA took away viable farms. We know that now. US factories have shifted south of the border to pollute as they wish and pay steadily decreasing wages to their workers.
The Chamber of Commerce has been implacably opposed to laws that would call for fines and mandatory jail time for employers and landlords of undocumented workers. Capitalism’s invisible hand stays commonsense border protection measures, resulting in hundreds of needless deaths each year in the deserts of the Southwest.
Much is made of raids at meatpacking plants, hotels and construction sites where desperate parents are rounded up and jailed as their US born children sit home alone. Because of Arizona’s draconian new laws, people are terribly afraid to be on the streets at all.
What we’re seeing is our own version of a coming kristallnacht. Erich Roem would be proud. The press reports the sad stories but holds harmless the sponsors of the current dire straits and the accelerating dark clouds on the horizon. Goebbels would be proud. The propaganda machines are working very well indeed.
Maricopa County has a stalag out in the blistering Arizona heat. Will there be more? Our own county jail has expanded recently, using federal dollars, (our dollars) to house more and more non English speaking people that came here on a last chance shot, even knowing our economy is sinking. Their economy sank in the nineties. What would you do to feed your family?
No one speaks of the major acts that must be committed to rectify the problem. No leader in government proposes dismantling NAFTA and rescinding the other supposed "free trade" deals. No one has voiced support for worldwide wage parity and import taxing the differences for countries and corporations in non compliance. No one speaks to worker conditions and pollution of US companies abroad and how enactments must ensure the same compliance in Third world countries as they must in the US.
We don’t need hordes of poor desperate people stumbling daily into our country. We’re already stumbling ourselves. And soon, we won’t be able to take care of any more additional people. But until we address the causes, the symptoms will remain, regardless of any well meaning legislation.
Repairing the underlying causes however, would be a near repudiation of free market capitalism and the supposed American way of life. We can’t fix what’s wrong without fixing what’s wrong in Mexico, Central America and even to some extent the Orient and former Soviet Bloc counties.
People here illegally have to have something in their own countries to return to before it makes sense for them leave our shores. The policies of rampant greed in our international dealings have caused much of the whirlwind we reap. Isn’t it time to bring compassion to the world’s table?
Couldn't we just once do what's right instead of what's profitable?