Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock waiting for this election season to go away, you’ve heard something about immigration. This past week in particular has focused on the issue as the racist- I mean Republican nominee wavered on the issue for days before giving a speech on the issue. Nothing he said means anything. The reason people are angry about illegal immigration has nothing to do with the economic distress which fuels their anger.
I could point out to the rabid Trump supporters that the 12 million “illegals” that they wanted deported in December are now 11 million, but I won’t. Oh, wait, I just did. I won’t point out to them that the only border they care about securing is the one with Mexico. Oops. I mean, does Canada need a wall? What about the thousands of miles of coastline?
On the Right wing side, ALL illegals are Mexicans. Or Muslims posing as Mexicans and crossing our southern border. Does this make any sense? Some of the 12 no 11 million illegals might be models who came to this country on visas which expressly prohibit employment, but I just randomly selected another reason why someone may not be here legally.
Republicans like to criminalize “undocumented Americans”TM. They often refer to them as law breakers, even though the only law they broke is a fake. After We came here, we passed a law saying nobody else could. I’m sure the Native Americans wish they had thought of that.
I have written before that racism, at it’s core, is dehumanizing. They call undocumented people criminals which makes them less than human. They ask children of undocumented people if they are proud of their law breaking parents. Many on the right talk about how their forebears came here legally. They didn’t. They came here before laws were written to say I got mine go away!
Conservative policies do not work. Even if TrickleDown did work the middle class would only be left with a trickle. The problem is that the top 1% is so greedy that they are not happy letting go of even that trickle. So the Middle Class has gotten screwed for the last 35 years. One party would like to fix that. One party likes that. The party that likes it can’t admit it because they would never get elected. So they blame our collective misery on the desperate people coming here seeking a better life, like our parents and grandparents did. Only these people don’t look like our parents and grandparents.