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BS ‘n’ About…
Information Age Immigration
America is a melting pot of many cultures, many races, and many faiths. Every time there is turmoil abroad, the opportunities here result in waves of immigrants washing ashore: the Puritans, the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, the middle Europeans, Southeast Asians, and Russians. Mix in a little bit of everyone else, throw in the Africans who were brought here against their will, and you have that unique mix that makes America what it is today.
Ronald Reagan was once asked what made America special and he paraphrased someone else by saying: “You can move to France and never be French, Japan and never be Japanese, but all you have to do is come here and you are American.”
Each of the waves of immigration alluded to above surged to our shores, then subsided as conditions overseas improved. Their offspring learned our language, attended our schools, assimilated themselves into our culture, and eventually cut their ties to the old country. Each tide changed subtly what it was to be American without overwhelming it. Great sacrifices were made to get here and assimilation was the goal.
Unfortunately, things have changed. These days, when we talk about the issue of immigration we are pretty much only talking about the flood of Mexicans pouring illegally across our southern border. We use it as a political hot potato, talk about building fences, and sit impotently by as our prisons, emergency rooms, and poorest-paying jobs are filled by people who aren’t even citizens and weren’t supposed to be here in the first place.
This latest wave of immigration has many factors that make it unique from the waves that came before it, not the least of which is that it is illegal. In the past we welcomed the concept of immigration, if not always the reality of it, to take advantage of our vast frontiers and unexplored opportunities.
We knew that the sacrifices made to get to our shores were a one-way ticket, with distance, economics, and assimilation requiring a cutting of ties with the Mother Country. We had our Chinatowns and Little Italys, but the immigrants knew that making a life here meant their children had to be educated to break out of the homogenous enclaves.
These days, some of our southwest cities have more Spanish speakers than English speakers. The schools teach in Spanish, the news is presented in Spanish, street signs are printed in Spanish, and the mayors even speak Spanish. Whole sections of virtually every American city are nothing more than suburbs of Mexico City with no real incentive to assimilate.
These enclaves of ‘Mexican-ness’ maintain strong ties to back home, exporting dollars, importing narco-terrorism, and moving back and forth across the Rio Grande with impunity: All this because the potential penalties for doing so don’t outweigh the rewards.
This must change. It is not the American taxpayers fault that the Mexican government and economy can’t provide a decent standard of living for its people. It is not our burden to bear that the average Mexican-Catholic family creates more babies than it can afford to raise.
America is on a pace to be overwhelmed by these excess babies. Every projection has us swamped by them by mid-century to the extent that they will become far and away the single biggest homogenous group in the United States. There will be more of them than all the English, French, German, Italian, Irish and other “white” people combined. There will be more of them than all the “black” people combined. There will be more of them than all the Chinese, Vietnamese, Pilipino, Japanese, and other Asian people combined. They will have come here illegally and they will be calling the shots. Is this the America we want to become? This is the America we are becoming.
This is not an easy subject to discuss, easy as it is to get sidetracked by accusations of racism, prejudice, and xenophobia. No wonder our politicians haven’t been able to do anything about it.
But it is not a qualitative issue. It is a quantitative one. Many of the same old arguments and fears have been trotted out as were used on past waves of immigration. Seemingly every wave of immigrants to hit our shores, from the Irish to the Vietnamese, was going to ruin America for the ‘real’ Americans. Eventually the influx stopped, the immigrants assimilated, and the furor died down.
That’s not going to happen this time around unless we take some serious measures to stop the flow of new immigrants from across our southern border and institute measures which force those already here to assimilate, to become Americans. As long as we are so much richer than Mexico, there will be an attraction to come here. As long as dollars keep getting sent back to subsidize Mexico’s social programs, their government will do nothing to help stop the flow. As long as penniless newcomers keep pouring into the barrios, they will continue to remain overcrowded, crime-ridden, and unassimilated enclaves of separateness.
It is even more in the best interests of the legal Mexican-Americans to stop this illegal flow than it is for the rest of us. They came here legally to escape the poverty, crime, and overcrowding of their Mother Country and it is just following them here.
So where do we start? Obviously what we’re doing isn’t working. The pundits are afraid to take a stand for fear of being labeled racists. Our politicians are afraid to enact any effective legislation for fear of getting voted out of office. Our Mexican-American citizens are afraid to take a stand because of the AK-47 toting drug gangs that rule their neighborhoods.
Let us start with the premise that we need solutions that will benefit everybody, and those solutions start by having the penalties for breaking the law outweigh the rewards. First, let’s provide incentive for ‘us’ to not want ‘them’ here. Second, let’s provide incentive for ‘them’ to not want to be here. It is really as simple as that.
Like most legal issues in America, the code is set up to come down hard on the little guy while slapping the wrists of the big guy. Since most of the illegal immigrants coming here are looking for work, the obvious first step in stemming the tide is to make it prohibitively expensive to hire them.
Fines don’t work. In America’s corporate culture, money is just numbers on a page. A million dollar fine? So what. The stockholders dividend check will be a few pennies smaller but the CEO will probably find a way of getting a bonus out of the deal. If hiring illegal labor is what it takes to get the harvest in, get the cows butchered, or get the building built on-budget, the choice is a no-brainer: the risk is miniscule compared to the potential reward.
Money is not important to corporate executives whose job is basically to play with other people’s money. Time is what is important to corporate executives, so that is how the penalties for their wrongdoing should be assessed.
Sentence the CEO to forty hours a week of running an inner city non-profit until it achieves certain objectives. Sentence the contractor to thirty hours a week putting up public housing on-time and on-budget. Sentence the field foreman to twenty hours a week organizing a food distribution drive. We would all benefit and effective incentive would be in place to not break the law. Job opportunities for illegals would dry up virtually overnight if those who broke the law actually bore the brunt of the penalty for doing so.
The above would go a long way toward removing the incentive to come here. However, there are other steps that can, and should, be taken if we hope to have any control over the future of our nation. Coming here should be hard, not easy. …something for the adventurous, not the faint-hearted. …something for those with something to give, not those just looking to take.
We need to bite the political bullet and declare English the national language. Our laws are written in English, our President addresses us in English, our history is chronicled in English. We need to force feed this national language into the Spanish, Chinese, and Russian-speaking enclaves to provide incentive to assimilate. TV, signs, billboards, bank accounts, and government documents need to be in English. The Internet will eventually turn all of us into English-speakers anyway, so we’d be doing these enclaves a favor, not a disservice. It won’t be easy, but it shouldn’t be.
Learning English needs to be a residency requirement with a timeframe attached to it. If you are here, you either speak the language, or you are spending a whole lot of your free time in school for it. In the long run, everybody benefits.
Our ancestors didn’t have street signs printed in Polish, German, Bantu, or Vietnamese for them. If they wanted to find their way around their new home, they had to learn the language. And they had to learn it as their first language. These days it is conceivable that ten generations could be born into enclaves in LA, Phoenix, or Houston without ever speaking a word of English.
Another of our laws that needs changed is the one that grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil. There is no longer an advantage for such a law and it provides incredible incentive for the have-bots from other, less-fortunate countries to endanger their as-yet unborn children by breaking our laws and sneaking into the country. We no longer need warm bodies for our farms, factories, and expansion westward. Should the child of two people who committed crimes to be here be rewarded with citizenship? It even sounds ridiculous.
The changes mentioned in the last few paragraphs would go a long way toward removing the incentives for the poor in other countries to violate our immigration laws. But they will still come, hopefully as a stream rather than a tidal wave. And when they do, when they break our laws, we will have to have a plan for dealing with them. The current practice of either deporting them or throwing them in prison seems to have very little effect and the price to the American taxpayer is staggering.
Our justice system needs to find a way of making lawbreakers pay for themselves. A good beginning would be to start charging the Mexican government for our war in keeping its own citizens within its own borders. There is nothing Mexico has that we absolutely need for survival. If we start withholding foreign aid and trade dollars, they would have some incentive to hinder the flow rather than foster it.
Another way to stop the flow of illegals in this direction would be to stop the flow of dollars being sent in the other direction. The Mexican government is never going to give more than lip service to securing the border as long as the cash keeps pouring in to subsidize its welfare programs. Every dollar sent there is a dollar ripped from the tills of the American businesses struggling to survive in the neighborhoods in which the illegals live and work: Latino neighborhoods for the most part.
Illegal immigration is everybody’s problem, with ramifications that affect our country in a myriad of ways, both short and long term. If a government can’t even do the simple task of securing its borders, doesn’t it then lose its very mandate as a government? Borders are the very definition of government, wouldn’t you say? Especially in these days when one unwanted terrorist could nuke New York. …one unwanted plague carrier could devastate Chicago. Never have secure borders been so crucial.
Jailing illegals doesn’t work. Deporting them doesn’t work. Like a dandelion, the problem will keep resurfacing until it is eradicated at the root level. And it is not just America’s problem. Europe too is being overrun by poor, angry immigrants from its south: Islamic immigrants. In a way, even China has as immigration problem as its rural poor flood into the cities in search of a better life.
Perhaps, in the end, the problem isn’t so much an immigration problem as it is an inequality problem. As long as the gap between the haves and the have-nots is Information Age wide and growing wider, the poor and the dispossessed will continue to take the risks necessary to bridge it.
America has an immigration problem. The world has an immigration problem. Governments have lost control of their borders. Civilizations have fallen for less.
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