Yes, billionaires like Donald Trump and his effete allies in D.C. have pulled "the immigrant problem" completely out of the air. And they've done it precisely to paper over the fact that they themselves, not the poor, are the cause of our genuinely distressing economic and social problems. It's all a familiar diversionary tactic to keep us from seeing how the rich are screwing us over every single day.
Think about it. What troubles us aren't immigrants and refugees who are somehow alien. Indeed, if we're not Native Americans, every one of us comes from immigrant (not to say "invader") stock or from slaves brought here against their wills by immigrants. Every one of us!
No, our problems are persistent low wages, the emergence of the gig-economy, withdrawal of worker benefits, destruction of unions, police brutality towards people of color, lack of decent health care, deteriorating infrastructure, underfunded schools, impoverishing student debt, disappearance of retirement prospects, a bloated military budget, the threat of nuclear war, climate change denial, voter suppression, mass imprisonment of non-violent offenders, and a nation-wide drug problem induced by Big Pharma.
That's the short list of our country's real dilemmas. They are caused by the filthy rich who give themselves the very tax breaks that rob our common treasury and necessitate the austerity measures the wealthy prescribe for the rest of us.
Nonetheless, those plutocrats want us to take our eyes off that particular ball. Instead, they'd have us believe that the very refugees whose homes and jobs, schools and hospitals have been destroyed by the one-percent's endless wars in the Middle East are somehow attacking the rest of us. Similarly-guilty, they say, are those fleeing the chaos and gang violence produced by the illegal counter-revolutionary wars waged by "our" country in Central America throughout the 1980s -- and by Washington's support of the more recent coup in Honduras. The same for simple Mexican farmers displaced by NAFTA provisions favoring U.S. corn over locally-produced maize; that's what's made them poor and jobless.
As a result, all of those just mentioned -- victims of our unjust wars and one-sided trade policies -- along with their children, have been excluded from entry to the U.S. whose borders, our "leaders" tell us are somehow sacrosanct as if created by God. So, (we are told) we must pay for a multi-billion-dollar wall to exclude the victims the billionaires have created and characterized as rapists, gang-members, drug dealers, and criminals.
Thing is: borders are completely arbitrary; they're fictions the rich would have the rest of us worship, while they pay them no mind. That's another thing to think about.
In historical perspective, current demarcation lines dividing countries are totally artificial and changeable. Many of them, for instance in Africa and the Middle East, were drawn up in a field tent by basically ignorant imperial generals.
The colonial outsiders' overriding interest was accessing the resources of the areas in question. So, they formed alliances with local chiefs, called them "kings" of their new "nations," and drew those lines I mentioned describing the area the nouveau royalty would govern.
But the colonial conquerors did so without knowledge of traditional tribal habitats, shared languages, or blood connections between families their random lines separated. As a result, from the viewpoint of the groups divided, the problem with borders is not that people cross them, but that the borders cross peoples.
Closer to home, that ironic crossing phenomenon is best illustrated in the cases of Texas, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. Before 1848, all those states were part of Mexico. Then following the Mexican-American War (1846-'48), the U.S. border crossed Mexicans in those new states and they suddenly became foreigners in what previously had been their own country.
In 1848, ordinary Mexicans viewed the entire process as highway robbery. As a result, their descendants often speak of contemporary Mexican migration to "America" as a Reconquista -- a justified re-conquest of lands stolen from their forebears.
Nevertheless, 170 years later President Trump wants to solidify America's unlawful annexation of huge swaths of Mexico by building a wall along this relatively new line of separation. His argument is that borders are holy, and that people who cross them are "illegals" and criminal. But that just raises questions about his rich confreres' attitude towards borders.
So, let's consider that second point.
Fact is: The rich disrespect borders in two principal ways, one questionably "legal" and the other completely otherwise.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
6
6
4
