Arizona's "Paper's Please" law is the latest in a series of recent political events that underline the decline in empathy in the United States. Americans increasingly resist the simple act of imagining themselves in the shoes of others. This resistance is serious business; its natural consequence is dehumanization. When you don't quite believe others think or feel quite like you do, it's much easier to jail or even torture them.
The contempt for empathy came out of the closet during the hearings of Sonia Sotomayor. I suppose it undercuts the rightwing attachment to American exceptionalism--the idea that we are inherently superior just by virtue of nationality. Frankly, such adolescent thinking makes me laugh. All those people believing being born here or speaking their maternal tongue constitutes some sort of accomplishment. Such delusions are the empty calories of self-esteem. Since the status they confer is counterfeit, they require classes of people to look down upon, to see as fundamentally less than. "Yes, it must be hard to pick fruit in the 90 degree sun, but they're used to it. They're not quite like us."
The inadmissible truth is that we would do exactly the same thing if we were them. If you can only feed your kids once a day, you don't pay a lawyer to get a visa or sign up for English lessons before you go to where the jobs are. You do what you have to do to take care of yourself and your family, to give your kids hope for a better life. This is what human beings do--unless they are lucky enough not to have to. I was born into the white American middle class, so I don't have to. That makes me lucky, not superior.
Exercising my capacity to empathize with the undocumented doesn't mean I'm blind to the real problems caused by too much unchecked immigration. Mexicans who come here to work end up not agitating for necessary economic change in their own country. But their continued presence here is also symptomatic of our addiction to cheap labor. You can't have it both ways. If you want Mexicans to stop coming, you have to pay American citizens a decent wage to clean toilets, pick fruit and bus tables. That means more unions, not less. It's no coincidence that the decline of organized labor has gone hand in hand with the rise in illegal immigration.
As for the criminal element, the rise of the Mexican narco-state is the most basic expression of the free market. Americans want to get high and will pay a great deal of money to do that. The War on Drugs has created a vast criminal class and filled our prisons to the breaking point. Marijuana should be legalized and taxed. Gangsters should become legitimate businessmen, just as they did when Prohibition ended. There should be a treatment bed for every addict that needs one. Addiction should be a public health issue, not a criminal one.
Concerned about illegal immigration? Then agitate for more unionization, not less. Support an end to the War on Drugs, not feeding the prison/industrial complex. But stop demonizing people for making rational economic choices. You would do no differently--just ask your great-grandparents.
Follow Mark Olmsted on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MarquisMarq
Incidentally, immigration and the incarceration for profit scheme go hand in hand. They are running out of locals to jail so now there are more and more immigrants being held in detention. They have to fill all those new prisons somehow.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14333
How illegal immigration will destroy the US as you know it in ~ 40 years or so.
This Lecture was done in 1999. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM1YU-Ni_84
Looking at the chart when he gets there,
What they estimated in 1999 for 2010 is spot on what actually happened.
[Estimated in 1999 it would be just over 300 million in 2010.]
When he gets to the gumball demonstration keep in mind the large jar represents the people in the world that are WORSE OFF than Mexicans.
Because of illegal immigration from 1999 to present we've had to:
Build TWICE as many schools.
Build TWICE as many roads.
Build TWICE as many sewer plants.
Build TWICE as many power plants.
Build TWICE as much about anything else.
Had to add twice as many cops and firemen and teachers. [Or leave areas under serviced.]
And use TWICE as many trees and other natural resources.
Anyone that thinks illegal immigration isn't a significant load on our economy and natural resources is a moron.
If you don't want every city in the US to become a giant LA Slum within our or our children's lifetimes then it has to STOP NOW!
~
Link to just the chart. [Sorry about the quality.]
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/files/imagecache/fpage/files/cck_images/population.jpg...
Perfect example of anti-illegal hysteria. He's fighting for our country and has to worry about his wife being deported
In addition, his administration has been guilty of covering up the abuse of immigrant detainees, has created secret unmarked detention facilities, and moves immigrant detainees far from their lawyers and their support networks to frustrate their defense.
Moreover, since Obama has been elected I have NEVER in my nearly 15 years of practicing immigration law seen more obstacles put in front of business immigrants who apply for visas to come to this country. This administration has made it increasingly difficult to obtain visas because of bureaucratic incompetence and potential business immigrants are now choosing to avoid the United States altogether, because the obstacles at times are insurmountable.
[The idea that the Federal Government is sitting on its ass in regards to immigration is a canard. In fact that are quite hard-assed. In this immigration lawyer's opinion, to a grievous fault.)
This President is too smart to not know that by breaking his promise to address immigration reform in his first 100 days in office he killed it. He is too smart not to know that CIR is a Candidate killer.
Obama knows it, which is why he has employed the do nothing and blame the GoP strategy on immigration reform the moment he got elected.
Pelosi knows it, which is why she has passed the buck to the Senate.
Reid knows it, which is why he flip-flops on immigration reform depending on his audience and put the breaks on Schumer last year when he promised CIR by the end of August 2009.
Yup... a complete failure.
May your first term be your last Mr. President.
This Congressman has it exactly right.
But to make one last point: I think there are too many people in the world. Overpopulation is a huge problem and the earth is running out of resources. There are a lots of approaches to the problem, one of them is the reduction of poverty, when leads to smaller families. (All fodder for a different post.)
Equating my suggestion that we understand the motivations of undocumented workers with the idea that somehow I believe we should stock the United States with hundred of millions of new people is idiotic.
As I point out: the "cure" for undocumented workers is simple: pay Americans decently for all work illegals are currently doing and Americans will do those jobs. As a society, that entails a willingness to shift compensation from the bloated super-wealthy to the American worker. The "paper-pleasers" are focusing on the symptom--illegal immigrants--and not the problem--the twisted misdistribution of wealth in this country that makes cheap labor an economic necessity.
fail.
you lost your audirnce with that "liberal lies" drivel again.
Thank you for your lecture on logic.
The same voices scream at any perceived infringment of the second amendment, resulting in the ridiculous state of affairs where someone on the no-fly list can still buy a gun.
And now a third generation Arizonan of Mexican descent has to make sure he carries papers around proving he's legal, while his blond Swedish neighbor gets a friendly wave. It may be the law, but it doesn't make it right. (By your reasoning, it's the freedom riders who were to be condemned, not the system of perfectly legal segregation that they were protesting.)
When you start screaming your head off about tax evaders, pot-smokers, and good-ole boys who leave the bar drunk on a Saturday night you might have a shred of credibility that it;s the law-breaking part that so offends you.
The empathy I express embodies the assumption that human beings react similarly to similar circumstances. I'm not myopic or ethnocentrically arrogant enough to think that if I was a poor Mexican, I wouldn't make the same choices. I'm a human being before I'm an American, evidently a minor position in this country.
I am even more disturbed by his LACK of empathy for Americans who bear the biggest burden of the illegal flood. Those are our poorest, blacks, browns, and poorly educated whites who have to compete against the illegals.
I am a long time union member and supporter. I also read the stats on immigration, LEGAL immigration, on the unions. When immigration went up, unions went down. FDR BANNED ALL immigration during the Depression by the way. WE need to do the same to make it possible for the unions to stop their decline. If you support unions, then we have to stop the illegals and enforce our immigration laws.
And if the business thought that was too expensive then they need to look at buying machines or robots to do it. Now building robots would create great high tech jobs. And that would raise wages and make America stronger.
But we will never get to either of the above if we keep taking the easy way, the slave labor way out. Illegals are just a modern form a slavery that hurts every worker.
If you want to help Mexicans STOP your pity party and END NAFTA.
Right now, if all the illegal workers returned home, the economy would ground to a halt. There'd be no one working in the slaughterhouses or the nursing homes, cleaning factories, hotels and restaurants--not at $7/hour. Arizona didn't seem to have care much about the paperwork of Latin migrants when they needed them to overbuild retirement communities in the 100 degree sun back in the 90s. Now it's "oops!" Don't need you anymore! Go home! And stop speaking that nasty Spanish-- we're afraid you're talking about us!
With 10 Illegals waiting in line for every low end job employers don't have to pay much to fill a job AND our young people have a huge amount of competition for entry level jobs.
Now, since those Illegals don't make enough to pay significant taxes they ARE NOT paying enough to pay for their Health-care. - One child of an Illegal costs just the school system $16,000 a year. That doesn't include other services they draw on and there is NO WAY they pay $16,000 in taxes. - That makes them welfare cases.
The difference between an Illegal down at the low pay scales is they are there for as much as 40-50 years where-as a legal young person generally moves up during their lifetime, pays more and more in taxes, and leaves a spot open for the next young kid.
.
well said.
Faulting Homeland Security because they can't seal the border is like calling our soldiers in Afghanistan lazy bums because they can't pacify that country. Its lazy, convenient scapegoating that ignores the reality of immigration detention centers filled to bursting and thousands are deported daily.
I'm not blind to the problems caused by unchecked immigration. There's are some pretty good solutions laid out in the Democratic reform bill. But I find it ironic that the same denouncers of illegal immigration are usually the same ones voting for the yahoos who will block that very legislation. McCain used to be a co-sponsor, now he's pandering for his life. Typical rightwing hypocrisy.
I once started a post saying "Imagine if we lived in a country where people were welcomed from all nations to contribute to our society, and where basic human rights and dignities were the keystone of the system of government", but partway through I realized something: that I was essentially describing the principals that America was built around. It was incredibly depressing. Our founders gave us the tools to live in a utopia of respect, kindness, and enlightened self-interest, but we don't, because so many Americans as individuals have forgotten the rules of human decency and kindness we learned as children.
A few landed rich guys with royal connections (like William Berkeley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Berkeley ) didn't know the first thing about farming. None of the early settlers knew anything about farming. So they had to either exploit the Indians, get slaves, or bring over people from Europe. They started by bringing over peasants from England. Then they graduated to slavery. That lasted for 400 years.
Now they want to start again with NAFTA and open borders. That is the real history of America. Its a history of rich people importing labor for exploitation.
Well said, Beth!
"The inadmissible truth is that we would do exactly the same thing if we were them. " -- project much? Which part do you find most appealing: becoming a criminal, entering into slavery or having your family held hostage by human traffickers?
As for being "criminal," that word was also used for escaped slaves, and Jews who wouldn't wear their yellow star. I find its use to demonize people who are looking for a better life obscene, although I'll grant you, legally accurate.
Quite