Immigration Ignorance

How a Country Founded by Immigrants Got Immigration So Wrong

We’ve all heard it, “We are all immigrants”. Those words have been spoken so often they have lost their meaning. But since the dawn of man, human beings have been migrating. The Native Americans the Spaniards encountered along the Rio Grande from Brownsville to Northern New Mexico, migrated to those places. Many of them from Asia across the Bering Straights all the way to Taos and further south.

None of us on the face of the Earth were “planted” in the place we find ourselves today. So it would do us good to have a better understanding of the difference between migration and immigration. Why? Because one is a natural behavior of animals and humans. The other is based on the arbitrary establishment of boundaries by people.

Migration vs Immigration vs Refugees

Migration is the natural movement of people and animals. Mostly it is related to the changes in the environment or the pursuit of livelihood. For example, when herds of reindeer or Monarch butterflies change locations based on the changing of the seasons, or when humans flee from wars or natural disasters. When it is due to seasonal issues we generally refer to it as migration and the people who are on the move we call migrants. When people flee draughts, political turmoil, or violence such as wars seeking refuge from occurrences beyond their control and threatening their lives, we call them refugees.

Jesus and his disciples generally wandered around the region referred to as the Middle East. Paul would travel as far east as Iran and back to Judea on the Mediterranean. Nomadic tribes are historically documented through time. These are migrants.

People who seek to relocate from one country to another to set up residency are referred to a immigrants. Immigration is a legal term that usually involves formal application to relocate and the approval to do so by the country to which they are immigrating. People immigrate to seek education, employment, or retirement.

Most sovereign countries in the world have immigration rules or laws and implement them with a set of procedures and bureaucracies. These are often backstopped by security personnel along borders or at ports of entry.

This is true of the United States. However for more than 30 years Immigration Reform has been a hot topic for every presidential administration and Congress. Illegal immigration from Mexico was largely due to economic issues as Mexicans came over to work in our agriculture and construction industries, but then expanded into other area where low paying jobs were in abundance.

The Impact of Illegal Immigration

There were many upsides to illegal immigration. First it created a plentiful supply of cheap labor that allowed Americans to avail themselves of relatively inexpensive agricultural produce, lower construction costs of homes, high rises, and highways as well as affordable personal services like house keeping and lawn care, and clean rooms at the Holiday Inn. Who wants to give that up? As long as these workers were considered “illegal” and under threat of arrest and deportation they would continue to work for cheap wages and keep their heads low. It was to our advantage to allow it to continue.

Then, Congress , under pressure to make some immigration reform, passed laws to hold employers accountable for hiring illegal workers. That gave rise to the fake documents business, where an undocumented worker could obtain (for a price) fake identification, counterfeit Social Security cards and drivers licenses. They used these to get jobs resulting in billions of dollars being withheld and paid into Social Security with the understanding that the workers who paid in would never draw the benefits of that withholding. Thus a windfall for Social Security. Cheap labor and free money for SSA. Studies have been done that account for the taxes paid by illegal immigrants and the services they draw upon. In each study the result is that they pay in much more than they take out. What’s not to like about illegal aliens.

For 50 years of more the US provided foreign aid to countries around the world. We sent money to Mexico and other countries in Latin America for their governments to use to offset the factors driving their citizens to seek refuge in the US. Money to boost agriculture, to fight illegal drugs, and to ward off Communism and guerrillas terrorizing the populations. While foreign aid was subject to corruption and opposed by many in the politics of America, it must be noted that the corruption was probably no greater than that we experience here in America, but that doesn’t prevent the packing of pork into every appropriations bill passed by Congress.

Eventually the foreign aid money was reduced and now virtually eliminated. As these funds dried up the flow of people out of those countries and into the US increase exponentially. These refuge seekers are not migrants or immigrants but a third category….refugees.

Where We Got It Wrong

Administrations going back to Reagan and before had been urging Congress to reform our immigration laws and dramatically increase resources to process people wanting to enter the country; to sort out the immigrants from the refugees seeking asylum. In all that time, our leaders have managed to dodge the issue preferring instead to have it be a political wedge issue to use each election cycle. But, perhaps the biggest misunderstanding is that immigration is an issue that you deal with at the border. Refugee issues are best handled at the place where they originate, the home country. By not reforming immigration and by abandoning outreach to foreign countries we have exacerbated the problems leading up to our borders being overrun and our insufficient resources being overwhelmed. This problem is one our political leaders have created.

Now we find ourselves with leadership that resorts to indiscriminate mass deportation tactics to round up people in large nets. Much like the enormous nets commercial fishermen use that indiscriminately trap dolphins with tuna and shrimp, ICE and other immigration law enforcement are taking large numbers of people using only appearance and ethnicity to satisfy probable cause. Herding them into inhumane detention centers reminiscent of cattle pens. [Recall that Jews were transported to concentration camps in cattle cars of trains.] And they are deprived of due process as is guaranteed by the Constitution. Remember the Constitution?

If you are a person who thinks immigration is at the top of the list for political action then shouldn’t we hold our politicians accountable for addressing the issue legislatively instead of standing by and letting a small gang of apparently racially and ethnically biased leaders employ police-state tactics to cleanse the country of people with dark skin. [Apparently there are no caucasians in the Alligator Alcatraz.]. These souls will soon be deported. Some to their countries of origin, some to gulags constructed to house people for life, others to countries in other parts of the world engulfed in civil war.

Tyranny is Not the Answer

These tactics are all trademarks of tyranny. Brute force and instilling fear into populations are classic authoritarian government maneuvers. Our Constitution was designed to safeguard against it. The only way it could happen in American is if Americans choose to let it happen. All of these crises are of our own making and the demise of our democracy may just be as well.

Happy Birthday Woody. We Need to Hear Your Words Again

Monday July 14 was Woody Guthries birthday. He was not one to mince words. He wrote the song Deportees (Plane Crash at Los Gatos) to memorialize another time when we rounded up immigrants, transporting them back to their place of origins. In this instance the immigrants perished when the plane went down. The souls on the plane identified in the accounts merely as deportees. I have written my own song about immigrants. One of the lines reads: “Once I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Now you’ve locked the door and thrown away the key.” As Kinky Friedman said during his campaign for Governor of Texas, “I used to be for the border wall, but then I figured we might want to get out someday”.

Reject Tyranny!