The Immigration Bomb

May 24, 2006

If you ever wish to get better acquainted with misery, then take a long bus trip through the Mexican countryside.
Here, you’ll find many small towns distinguished by three things: their ubiquitous Coca-Cola billboards, dusty soccer fields, and homes built of cardboard and corrugated roofs with the hot wind flying in and out that wouldn’t qualify as decent chicken coops in Northern Michigan.
I remember one town on a bus trip down the length of the 700-mile Baja Peninsula. A collection of cinder block buildings, it was surrounded by fields of tomatoes growing under plastic sheets. The people doing stoop labor out in the 95-degree sun looked up as the bus purred into town and then went back to work.
It looked like that was all there was to do in that town: pick tomatoes, play soccer and make babies. I shuddered to think of what it would be like to be stuck there for a single night.
But what if you were stuck there for life? No opportunities, no future, nothing to do, no money, no hope. Picking tomato worms off the plants all day, breathing in shit dust, fertilizer and chemicals and frying in the sun... And there are many towns in Mexico where picking tomatoes isn’t even an option. Many places where $5 per day is considered a good wage.
But even these lowly towns have television sets broadcasting tales of riches and romantic adventures beyond imagination across the U.S. border. Watch American TV from a foreign country and you get the feeling this place is just one big American Idol show with everyone living in homes as nice as those on Wisteria Lane.
It’s no wonder we have an immigration problem.
Currently, Congress and President Bush are wrestling with how to appease Mexican-Americans and their 12 million illegal relatives. Both Republicans and Democrats hope to win Hispanic votes in the coming election.
Do we need 6,000 National Guardsmen and a 2,000-mile, electrified, barb-wire fence and trenches along our southern border, or just some friendly “guest worker” cards that promise more political problems down the road when our “guests“ want the vote and citizenship?
We could solve this problem tomorrow if we had the political will. All it would take would be a national I.D. card and a mandatory two-year jail sentence for any gringo employer who hires anyone who can’t produce a card -- including congressmen who hire illegals for nannies and maids.
Just round up all of the Northern Michigan farmers who employ illegal migrants and clap them behind the steel bars of Oaks Prison. Illegal immigration problem solved; major new problem launched.
But that’s not what we really want because food prices linked to migrant labor would go sky-high.
Talk about hypocrites: Many Americans, who expect cheap fruit and veggies from migrant labor, are furious that their quasi-slaves (who can’t even sing the National Anthem in English!) are receiving medical and welfare services. Heavens, illegal migrants even want drivers’ licenses.
Many Americans want it both ways: the cheap fruit, juice, wine and produce from migrant hands, but a punishing attitude towards those who do the work.
A frequent refrain is, “Why don’t they just fix their own country instead of coming here?”
Good question. And if we had the answer, none of us would be here today.
Consider the days when our ancestors were the “Mexicans” of their time: refugees fleeing to America from poverty and religious terror in the Old Country. Ask yourself why the following people didn’t just fix up their screwed up countries...
• German Americans: Many fled severe poverty and the religious intolerance that was the outcome of the 30 Years War which ended in 1648. The Napoleonic wars and harsh conditions sent more Germans our way in the early 1800s. “Severe depression, unemployment and failure of a liberal revolutionary movement in 1848 sent about 4 million Germans to the U.S. between the 1840s and 1880s,” writes one historian.
• The Irish: a virtual slave population of renters and peasant farmers whose diet depended on the potato. The potato was a slave food, like the banana or the breadfruit, introduced by their English overlords. But when the black, rotten potato blight of 1846-1848 occurred, no help arrived from Britain. The Irish ate grass (or each other) and died in ditches by the road. Within 50 years, half the population of Ireland had fled to the New World.
• The Scandinavians: again, poverty, religious tyranny and a shortage of farmland brought them here.
• The Italians: poverty, vineyard blight, political strife, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and overpopulation.
• The Indians: even the First People came from somewhere else. One claim has it that the Chippewa were driven to Northern Michigan from the east coast by tribal warfare. The Ottawa were driven out of Canada’s Ottawa River region by the Iroquois.
The point is, history tells us that people move because they have no other choice. It’s easy to say that the Mexicans should just fix up their own country and leave ours alone. But if our ancestors couldn’t do as much, how can we expect the same of them?
The problem really is ours. If we’re serious about ending illegal immigration, we have to be prepared to send American employers to prison (wrecking American agriculture in the process), and pay much higher prices on fruit and veggies.
Either that or quit our hypocritical, mean-spirited talk and find a reasonable solution. ... And good luck on that score.