Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Ugly Xenophia?


What started as an issue of national security and national sovereignty is slowly morphing into an ugly campaign of xenophobia. To boycott Mexican goods and culture on Cinco de Mayo is xenophobia. What’s the next stage? A Kulturkampf against TexMex…”use Ketchup, not Salsa”?

There are 12-million to twenty-million people with families undocumented or with false papers in the United States. Ten-percent of the citizens of Republic Mexico are here in the United States legally or illegally. The tens of millions of Mexican-heritage live here legally as immigrants or citizens have relatives south of the Border. Hundreds of thousands of the illegally-resident Mexicans have US citizen-children or spouses. You can’t just “build a wall” right through the heart of this trans-border society. Nor can you “just” deport them. The last Western society that attempted to round-up 12-million “outsiders” from within it’s own borders and culture ended-badly. Are we to become yet another enlightened-yet-doomed culture with dreaded “knocks on the door in the middle of the night” and “ihre Ausweis, bitte”?

And it’s not just the Mexicans and the Salvadorans. There are 500,000 Chinese here illegally, including tens of thousands that have been found but China refuses to repatriate. Here in New Jersey, the Mexicans account for approx. 75,000 of the 355,000 undocumented or “irregular” residents. Shall we round-up the Canadians, the Irish next?

If the issue is natinal security, then we shoud concentrate on regularizing their status, not deportations and crushing fines. The greatest danger to our lives and way-of-life are the Islamofascists, not the stoop-laborers and the office-cleaners. If the way to enter the Unitesd States as a guest-worker or potential immigrant were easy and efficient; then they would not have to cross the borders in the middle of the Arizona desert. Or risk death by suffication in trans-Pacific shipping containers.

We must find the way to get them registered, biometrically-ID’d, on the tax-rolls, and licensed and insured. If they have legal status, it eliminates the means by which they are exploited…and eliminates the means by which their employers unfairly compete economically. And once the system is in-place, we shoud have a strict, vigorous campaign against the employers who contine to use “illegal workers” outside of the system.