Factor 1: Latin American aristocrats hold a virtual monopoly on agricultural, educational and business opportunities. They like it that way. When the darker-skinned servant classes grow restless in their poverty, the golfers bless them then encourage them to go North and send back money to bolster the non-opportunity economy, much as Egypt's pharoah urged troublesome Jews to hit the road when old-school genocide lost its appeal.
Factor 3: Chamber of Commerce conservatives hire illegal migrant workers, who can be employed at a global market wage rather than an artificially-inflated North American wage. Plus, they can be returned. When old or sick, they can be cared for back home by the children they never knew, without burdening their employers with pensions. Out of sight and out of mind. The fact that commuting through a minefield of sexual assault and violent extorsion constitutes unsafe working conditions escapes these "positive-thinking" Republican community pillars.
Thus, Obama went to Texas fundraisers this week, even though this opened up a journalistic firestorm for not detouring to the border for a symbolic glance at future liberals crying for their families, for government food rations, and for someone who speaks their language to explain their refugee camp situation. All too unpredictible for a good photo-op.
I hope you can forgive me for being a cranky prophet in the wilderness. Out here in the wilderness, there just aren't that many other career options. I've traveled too much and seen too much to find much peace in the world as we have made it, so I've returned to the Garden of Eden, not because I'm righteous but because I'm a coward. Climbing active volcanoes I can do, but watching kids suffer for our sins I must leave to stronger or colder men. My books subsidize my teaching efforts to give impoverished Latino youth access to the global economy without swimming a river, plus they offer a politically-uncorrected view of the world. Thus, I shamelessly beg you to read them.
Children are those pure unflawed diamonds that heaven sprinkles on the planet to give fallen men their best shot at realizing what they once were and what they should aspire to be. Perhaps, this exodus of biblical proportions will inspire America to find her soul, to stand up for liberty and justice for all whatever the economic or political consequences. Perhaps, it will only allow a hand-washing Creator to feel better in shelving the once-great American empire next to the Mayans and Romans. Whatever the case, the greatest prophet in the wilderness told us to pray: "Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
It is a bloody mess all around right now with the border.
ReplyDeleteLyn, what you say is not too cynical. I'll go you one better in that dept and suggest that the original call for money for dealing with the not-so-surprising influx was doubled because Obama doesn't even want funding to be approved. He prefers to make this into an issue in his perpetual campaign.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, while the facts you lay out above are probably all correct, they don't account for the sudden spike now overwhelming the BP. That would be Factor 5: The word has percolated southward that the U.S. president will not enforce existing immigration law.
I know from experience that normal countries take their borders very seriously. The U.S. refusal to do so looks to me like national suicide, although of course the first people to suffer are these many thousands of displaced kiddos. I agree that they are suffering for our sins—or at least for the sins of those who created to the problem.
You're quite right, Stephen, that I didn't move beyond long-standing causes of the border run to the cause of the most recent wave. As most Sacred Ground readers know, I adopt a bombastic style, because it's more interesting than academic writing. However, I prefer to pontificate on things I actually know something about. I've learned to tolerate arrogance and incompetance, but I find the combination of both (e.g., CNN and much American foreign policy) to be truly annoying. So, I'm not yet ready to burden readers with my take on what additional factors have skewed the immigration youthward.
ReplyDeleteYet, if I were to take a stab... It's now common knowledge here in Mexico that entering the U.S. is much tougher, plus the quality gap between jobs available in the U.S. and Mexico is far smaller. More adult Mexicans are returning home and taking jobs than are going North according to the best stats and my recent experience.
Meanwhile, Central Americans have heard the Obama administration verbalizing the truism that children lack the full capacity to appreciate criminality and thus cannot be held fully accountable. So, while I'm astonished at the desperation of Central Americans sending children on a life-threatening journey, I must agree with their calculation that these are the family members least likely to suffer legal repercussions in the U.S. Jeopardizing a child's life in the hope of giving them a better one is bad judgement. (The mother of Moses releasing her baby in a basket on the crocodile-infested Nile?) Doing it to get votes or better lawncare is truly repugnant.
Furthermore, all the global media nonreporting in the world cannot wash the blood off the hands of many Mexican officials and citizens who are fleecing and brutalizing these migrants on their way. If any major news media outlet actually wants to know more about that shameful part of the story, contact me.
many who call themselves patriotic Americans seems to want everybody to believe that, of all nations on earth, we have the greatest, the most free and the most good.
ReplyDeleteBut also many others who have that label sticking to them also know that our nation is not perfect, it's not the most free and certainly there is bad here in paradise.
But their opinions do not reach south of the border. The only ones that make it are the ones who claim that it's the best place on earth.
Who is surprised that there are some who want to come here? Who are willing to risk everything for a chance to have some crumbs of that best and greatest for themselves?
genial
ReplyDelete