Painting by Morenci Arizona's Ted DeGrazia used as UNICEF 1960 holiday card.
''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
- George W. Bush advisor
There are those who do not believe in reality. They believe that if they say something and pursue actions based on their internal thoughts that they can change the universe to conform to their wishes. Fact free policies applied to immigration and war have been deadly.
The thought of deporting over 11 million people over half of them of Mexican origin is one of those insane policies. It is not going to happen, and should not happen. The people of United States and Mexico have a long shared history. Individuals have been crossing the border in both directions for hundreds of years. Mitt Romney ancestor's twice moved to Mexico, once to Utah when it was part of Mexico and then to Chihuahua so they could keep their polygamous family together.
I grew up as an Anglo in Morenci, although I later became white by moving to Pennsylvania. Morenci's history has stronger links to Mexico than to England or Germany. The main road is called the Coronado Trail because Francisco Vázquez de Coronado went through over half a century before Jamestown was founded in search of the Seven Cities of Gold. The Clifton-Morenci area was settled by miners who were hardly aware that there was a border between the states of Sonora and Arizona.
Linda Gordon in a wonderful book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, about the 1904 kidnapping of 57 infants from their Hispanic foster parents by Anglos in Morenci describes the history of the area below:
Despite these loyalties and longings for homeland, settled Mexican communities evolved in the mining camps. Migrant men began to create an alternative, binational gender system in which men with American jobs and experience could claim higher position in the male hierarchy. These binational men did not need to choose between their Mexican villages and their American jobs. In fact, Mexican village land actually became increasingly concentrated in the hands of successful U.S. migrants, because they used their earnings to outbid those with less cash. They saw their homeland not only as a land of recreation, not only as a place where their success would be appreciated, but also an investment opportunity.
Women’s and children’s presence planted settlement in Clifton-Morenci. The towns were growing extraordinarily rapidly, doubling in size between 1900 and 1910 from about 2,500 to 5,000 each, and a significant part of this growth was created by the in-migration of women and the in-migration or birth of children. By the 1900 the Clifton-Morenci Mexican workers were far less migratory than their Anglo supervisors knew, a misunderstanding that was to prove costly management, who expected dissatisfied mineworkers to quit, not to stay and organize for higher wages. Not only were there many settled families in this in this Mexican camp, but proportionately more Mexican men lived in families than did Anglo men. The adult female population is a good index, because in mining towns the lack of women’s jobs meant that few women came except to be with husbands. In Clifton-Morenci there were proportionately more Mexican than Anglo women. More Mexicans than Anglos lived in couples. And the proportion of children in the population was by no means as low as that in stereotypical mining camps with a primarily itinerant male population. For example, in the 1880s the Montana, Idaho, and Arizona camps had 10 percent or fewer children; Clifton-Morenci in 1900 and 1910 had 32 to 37.5 percent children. More Mexican couples had children (82 percent) than did Anglos (70 percent). To these we have to add the female-headed households, typically headed by widows, the great majority Mexican. The overwhelming majority of Clifton-Morenci Mexicans lived in family households.
It would be hard to say when the copper workers shifted their sense of “home” when the trips south became “visits” instead of “returns”. Probably the travelers themselves could not pin down the moment of the shift unless it occurred through a sacred event such as marriage or a birth.
The state of Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora have similar climates, terrain and peoples. The cultural disconnect comes not from those who come North looking for work, but from the East where people come in and try to return to a time that never was.
It is weird a Massachusetts native whose parents were born in Italy is now a famous Sherriff running around Arizona harassing brown skinned people he wants to deport when to my view he has a more foreign culture than the one I grew up in.
The border exists. Laws should be enforced. Movement of peoples across borders must be orderly. However there has always been and it is the normal state for there to be significant numbers moving across the southern border and establishing families and lives in both countries. Deporting all undocumented people could be done if we have the will to do it. It is estimated to cost about $285 billion dollars. As Media Matters puts it:
In these challenging economic times, spending a king's ransom to tackle a symptom of our immigration crisis without addressing g root causes would be a massive waste of taxpayer dollars. Spending $285 billion would require $922 in new taxes for every man, woman, and child in this country. If this kind of money were raised, it could provide every public and private school student from prekindergarten to the 12th grade an extra $5,100 for their education. Or more frivolously, that $285 billion would pay for about 26,146 trips in the private space travel rocket,
Beyond the straight dollar cost however it would require swarms of the proverbial black helicopters swooping down day and night to every corner of the nation with citizens and non-citizens alike being constantly required to prove their legality. Since deportation has less protections than even a criminal system which produces the largest prison population in the world there would be mistakes. The mistakes would be mostly confined to the poor and mentally ill.
To those who expect there to be mass deportations ripping apart the American that is; I would like to ask, not in ridicule, but in genuine concern for you - Are you fucking crazy?
Some profit from making life hard for immigrants, which allows them to depress wages and commit wage theft.
Note: The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is an interesting story about an Orphan Train from New York to Clifton Arizona. The good people of New York thought the abandoned children of the Papist, drunken, criminal scum from Ireland should be sent away. Fifty seven of them were loaded on a train and sent across country. On the train ride somewhere between St. Louis and El Paso the children were transformed from Irish rabble to White people. When the Anglo's in the area discovered that the Catholic Church was giving white children away to Mexicans they swooped in and grabbed the children. This was all reviewed by the courts and found to be just. Read it if to get a chance to discover ignored history.