Perhaps this is a bit long, but I took care to really deal with an important issue, which I see no one else really attempting to. I would invite you to engage in deep reflection with me.
Here's an underlying premise in my work: Progressives have to learn to think in terms of long term effect, and developing a real strategic impact that can change the course of history, rather than waiting for something to protest. Neo conservatives have been driving the agenda and that really is what needs to change.
The immigration issue is paradoxically, not about the border itself, nor necessarily even about immigrants.
Look:
If something like 3/4 of a million people (every year!) are risking their lives to overcome difficult obstacles in a forbidding journey north from some place in the hemisphere south of the US border, then there are deeper questions we should be asking - but aren't.
Each one of these is a person - just as worthy as you - who wrenched themselves loose from a community they belonged in, with roots in the soil going back into the mists of time, to enter into a life and death struggle in which they could suffer painful and dire consequences. What would it take to force you to leave with whatever you could carry for hundreds of miles over rough country and go on the run?
3/4 of a million individuals - per year.
What is this really all about? What is really driving this?
Who is driving this?
I offer my own experience in observing parts of this issue, which I have been thinking about in an effort to figure this out, dating back to the mid seventies.
Two data points: Indian communities, and multinational banks.
I lived for four years in the central part of the Navajo Nation, on the flanks of the Chuskas where the meltwater enters Canyon de Chelly. The communities were all Indian communities and many of the people we knew were involved in traditional religious observances, as was the educational community at the tribal college (Dine' College.) This was just inside the Arizona border, across the Chuskas from New Mexico.
From within the four sacred mountains, we looked out to the world at large. It was an interesting view.
A friend that I had long conversations with grew up as a migrant farm laborer in the Texas Rio Grande valley. She and her husband, a local school teacher, now have their own little corn farm. She cried as she recounted an emotional argument with her mother, who found it extremely traumatic to own up to her Indian blood. An insistence that a necessary distinction between Hispanic and Indian must be maintained, came from pressure to deny any tribal legacy in order to escape a measure of prejudice. Yet, families maintain relationships that are regional in scope and transcend national borders both in terms of miles and in time. These go back into the millenia. The idea of a border is not an indigenous concept.
What is distinctive about the Arizona situation, is the deep prejudice against Indian people. When you get to know people well enough to be good friends, to be invited to weddings and Baby's First Laugh ceremonies and to family pot lucks, you begin to hear stories that are sensitive and painful about the prejudice they experience. "They like our money well enough when we shop in Flagstaff, but they sure don't like us." The stories are really shocking if you are unaware, as I was, that this side of Arizona exists. This is the old frontier culture, with attitudes passed down from grandparents and great grandparents. Newcomers tend to adopt these attitudes with newly bought cowboy boots and stetson hats.
What a lot of people miss is that the Arizona immigration law is really about things that are profound and that many people prefer not to think about beyond radio talk show sound bites and talking points. On one level, it reflects an attempt to hold back a future with a more Hispanic and Indian majority, literally to hold the line. The border is a metaphor about cultural boundaries that some perceive.
But the real dynamics that nobody grasps are actually on an international financial level, which are beyond the environment of media.
multinational banks
I got a glimpse into this back in the mid seventies. I had hitch hiked out to San Francisco and spent a year doing temp work in big bank buildings. For a few weeks I was in the International Loan Syndication office of Wells Fargo's international headquarters. You can Google this term. Banks can't put more than some small percentage of the entire capital that they have in one loan, so if there is a need for a massive mega-loan, they can be stitched together in a syndication. There may be 40 or 50 banks involved. Your little local S&L or credit union is most likely invested in this.
It happened I was assigned to tend a file drawer with Wells Fargo's syndications in it. These ranged from a few hundred million, at the time, to a half a billion. By now, they are much larger.
The payback period on these was over 200 years. I was told that they preferred to do business, not with democratically elected governments, but with oligarchies, because they considered them more stable. (one might note that subsequent overthrows that have brought to power leaders such as Evo Morales have shown this thinking to not be endowed with overarching genius.)
By now, the trillions of dollars in loans that are out there represent a huge spaghetti bowl of interconnected financial interests that have developed over time. This is far more powerful than any of the governments involved, including the US government. I got a chance to ask the top executive how he saw the President or the US government as a whole in terms of these financial deals and I basically got a sympathetic look for being young and obviously naive. "We don't see the federal government as having sufficient perspicacity," is what he said. (But asking such questions got someone interested in reviewing my temp agency file. As soon as they discovered that my last job had been as a reporter and weekly newspaper editor, I was out the door. My God! A reporter going through that file drawer all day long! Alors!)
What people have to get into their heads is that these dealings are led by those who vacation in Monaco and on megayachts and who live in a very different reality. They see millions of people uprooted and entire countries (including the US) thrown into economic chaos in the entire hemisphere from Chile to Canada, as externalities and abstractions against long term financial imperatives. A cost of doing business.
There is no difference from this perspective, between a paisano hoeing a field in Guatemala that the banks and the oligarchy have now confiscated, and someone in Ohio whose savings was wiped out as the stock market tanked.
If these financial elitists think they are above accountability, they are right if the public does not care to connect the dots. And, by and large, the public does not. We prefer more tangible distractions, so we never quite offer to challenge this thinking. This adds to the tranquil atmosphere of the upper floors with the expensive vases, sumptuous carpeting and fine art on walls with highly cultured, beautiful decor to go with the fabulous views.
Just to walk through the setting is to feel very elevated. The people that work there are wonderful folks with truly great educations who have traveled widely throughout the world.
This is the same overall situation that led to the Wall Street crisis - and is the true cause of the immigration crisis.
Immigration may affect ten million or so people, but it is still just a symptom. All these people are just a kind of externality - something that doesn't compute in the financial equations.
What it means on the ground is that if subsistence farmers that have worked in a traditional indigenous community are moved out of the way in order for a large scale cattle operation that makes more money for the rich by selling burgers to Burger King, or any other agribusiness instead of subsistence farming, there is a potential for large scale profit under these multinational loan deals. If global warming is contributed to because forests were cut down to create grasslands, that is just another externality, another unconnected dot.
If those local paisanos complain, they can be scared off. Shoot a few of them, or just threaten to and see how many of them pull up stakes, give up and go north to cross the US/Mexico border. The memories of the Guatemalan civil war, the death squads of El Salvador and repression all over Latin and South America are still fresh.
The general trend causing this exodus didn't begin this month. This has been developing through many decades, and in fact, for over a century. The cold war era contra actions, death squads, and military sweeps may not be continuing in a dramatically obvious way, but the reverberations continue. For the trend to actually be reversed will take addressing the conditions that exist for individuals and local communities in every country south of the border, through a number of means - and it will take years and decades.
The political reality is that these uprooted and disposessed farmers become a pool of ultra-cheap, easy to exploit labor in the US. If immigrant labor is used to bust unions and drive wages down, that's what a multinational strategist might call a win-win, looking at the map of the Westerm Hemisphere.
Why doesn't CNN or one of the news networks cover this? They have the people, the cameras, the ability to travel anywhere and put the story together. But they don't. One must remember that news gathering is very expensive and based on advertising revenue, which must be dedicated to promoting full speed ahead consumerism. Anything that sheds light on the dark side of what makes it all work has to be avoided or downplayed through disconnecting the dots. It would be bad for business. We have recently seen what the rise or fall of consumer confidence means in real economic terms. Besides which, this has been ongoing for a very long time. Therefore it is not news.
Another reason people have generally never heard of Loan Syndications is that, when the debt forgiveness issue arose awhile back, most likely any money lost by the local S&Ls was never noticed by depositors because of FDIC coverage, so it was an invisible and silent bank bailout.
Connecting the Dots
The role banks play behind the scenes is one essential reason that the problem continues without any solution. The amount of money involved here is hugely powerful. So powerful, not very many people even want to look at it. We look at the most irrelevant aspects instead. We are divided and conquered by our tendency to get caught up in issues like race, or debating whether or not some desperate soul breaks the law by crossing the border or whether we ought to spend billions on fences.
The immigration exodus from Latin and South America north, has essentially the same root causation as the banking crisis of 2008.
NAFTA might be a part of this whole big picture, but the problem is really much bigger than NAFTA.
We ought to take off our brand name blinders, look at the big picture and see it clearly. And we ought to demand that our political leaders do the same. Given the scope involved, this paradigm can only be addressed by a President and Congress that are moved by an aware public.
The dots, not connected, represent a crisis that is not addressed, but which continues to grow in scale in proportion to our ignorance of it. We ought to have learned that lesson from Vietnam. America still has failed to look at the history and economics in regional and international terms in order to arrive at a correct analysis.
Our ignorance is what is driving this, ultimately.
We ought to look at how led we are by our consumption habits. We are literally slaves to our apetites. 5% of the earth's population, consuming 25% of the earth's resources. Our comfort buys our minds.
We are the reason that this story does not get told and why all the focus is on the person who pops into existence as he or she crosses the border without any prior existence and with no reasonable cause except just to set off an argument about racial prejudice.
It all depends on the consciousness that we have about this, whether the politics will be smarter and the solutions found actually have something to do with reality instead of mirages reflecting what we would rather believe.