If we inhabited a crowded European country, illegal immigration would be a serious problem, but America is an enormous country with room for twice as many people that now live here. Most of the illegals are Mexicans and Mexicans are mainly mestizos that carry American Indian blood in their veins.
The argument is that they have broken the immigration law and are lawbreakers. Jingos see nothing wrong with breaking campaign finance laws, or bribing politicians, but they would jail you for stealing a loaf of bread. They can not examine the reason for such a mass migration of poor people because if they did it would expose the results of their passing NAFTA. Before NAFTA the economy of Mexico depended upon corn. Corn tortillas and beans are the staff of life for Mexicans. In Mexico, cattle and hogs are fed on corn, but imported corn from Kansas and Nebraska is subsidized by the American government and has destroyed this fragile economy. This is the reason for the exodus.
It is a new racism supplanting the racism that has been suffered by the American Black. One will get you ten that the White Canadians living here will not be jailed as illegal immigrants. Americans are now living in a neo fascist country. Benito Mussolini said that fascism should properly be called corporatism because fascism is the marriage of corporate power with state power. All we need is a new wave of racism to reach Sergai Dimitroff's definition of fascism. "The open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary and chauvinistic sectors of finance capital."
Most economists agree that Mexican immigration has been an economic plus for America. In Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath the "Okies" that came to do the work in California fields were stopped at the border by vigilantes, just as the vigilantes are attempting to do with the Mexicans. CNN's jingo Lou Dobbs who called for a war on "Islamists", is leading the pack of no-nothings who would jail illegal immigrants.
The words of Emma Lazerus on the Statue of Liberty read: Give me your tired, your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside your golden door.
How sad it is to be an American-we have the Guantanamo gulag, and send prisoners to other countries to be tortured. Torture has become a subject of debate in Congress. Once Americans were admired and welcomed but now they are hated and feared. The America of Emma Lazerus is gone. Will we ever get her back?
John St. John 84 years old ex organizer for Harry Bridges, President Eagle Lodge Number One Paper Makers Union, Member United Auto Workers AFL-CIO
