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TABLOID HART: WALKOUT - THOMAS HART believes this week's walkout by Latino high school students is a case life imitating art and talks about his view of the firestorm over the immigration reform bills before the United States Congress.
Austin, Republic of Tejas - I never understood borders. I'm a Libertarian, as y'all know, and to my way of thinking, borders just don't make a lot of sense. To my way of thinking, people should be able to travel anywhere they danged well please with no restrictions, no "May I see your papers, please," et cetera. Now I know this goes against the grain for a lot of folks, mostly them folks who believe in putting fences up around "their" so-called land, building walls and having gated communities where only the rich and tony and get in. Screw that!
Do you see lines separating anything on this planet Earth? I don't. If the Good Lord had wanted folks to have borders, to my way of thinking, he would have put them there at the time of Creation. But he didn't, and there's a reason for that: US LOWLY MORTALS ARE PART OF ONE DANGED FAMILY. Families live together; they don't look for ways to separate themselves.
To my Tabloid way of looking at the world, we are experiencing, here Amurrica right now, an amusing case of Life Imitating Art. Am I the only one that noticed that just about the time the television channel HBO started broadcasting the great Edward James Olmos film "Walkout!" the immigration reform bill came up before the nation and then - Lo and Behold! - all week we've have t housands of Latino students walking out in protest of the bill all over the country just like in the danged movie! Students in La-laLand, uh, I mean Los Angeles, are even walking out every day despite the fact that they is supposed to be on lock down. Down here in Tejas, just the other night, about twenty or thirty kids was arrested in Houston for taking part in the protests. Viva la Raza!!
Now I know that CNN's Lou Dobbs and a lot of folks over the way in Arizona and New Mexico got this notion that they don't want no more Meskins movin' up here to El Norte and frankly, I don't get it. Why are people so uptight about us having a few more guys to hang drywall, masons, gardeners and fruit-pickers? I mean, come on! somebody in America has to do an honest day's work and your slacker kids, mall rats and yo' boys sure as heck ain't gonnah do it. Hell, without Meskins this country might not have any real working people left!
And yeah, I heard Lou Dobbs intone ominously on his program about how "this is just another sign of the devastation of the American middle class." And you know what, I almost yelled back at my danged Idiot Box, "WHAT middle class, Lou? There ain't one and ain't been one since your Republicrat cronies sold this danged country to Big Business. Now there is just, as YOUR President said with his chimp-like smirk, 'The Haves and the Have Mores. In other words, my base.' And the rest of us poor suckers without real health insurance or any way to get ahead! Who you think you're foolin', Lou Dobbs?"
But I didn't. I bit my tongue real hard so my ole lady wouldn't think I'd completely gone off my nut and I popped open another brewski from the cooler I always keep strategically placed near my lazy boy recliner, while watching anything on national television, to keep me from exhibiting outbursts like that one.
What would the neighbors in the double wides on either side of ours 'un think, after all?
In fact, I'm getting so riled up just thinking about this that I'm gonnah have another brewski right now. You should, too.
I read what Joe O'Neill had to say in these pages about Irish immigrant support for the McCain/Kennedy immigration bill in the Anniversary Issue of this rag and I had to wonder to myself, "Why don't Lou Dobbs ever talk about the undocumented Irish in this country - or Swedes or Brits? Hmmnn. Kindah makes ya wonder, don't it?"
Okay, let's look at the argument from the other side. The high ground from those who want much stricter immigration laws for this country, including making all illegal immigration a felony, is that it is a homeland security issue. They say these tougher, enforcement focused laws are mandatory if we are to say that we want our country more secure. Nobody can argue against security, they say, to do otherwise they argue, is to play into the hands of terrorists. In other words, their best argument is to play the fear card and call it reasonable to be scared all the time.
I don't buy it, y'all, and I'll tell you why. As General Patton famously said decades ago, there is no such thing as an impregnable fortress. Fortifying, in that legendary general's point of view, was a near-meaningless exercise; he felt that remaining on the offensive was the only smart way to conduct a campaign. I would extrapolate on that there perspective by saying that just as there is no such thing as job security, there is no such thing as homeland security; it's a completely unachievable goal and just another canard for people who want to line their pockets by playing on the fears of others.
You ever seen a caper movie where the smart criminals, like Danny Ocean, have ever been that bothered by a security system? Me, neither.
The second problem I have with this tougher enforcement way of looking at immigration in general and how to deal with the millions of undocumented workers in America in particular is that it flagrantly does not take into account that we are talking about breaking up families with this kind of approach to the situation. We all know, once we go beyond that shallow image of Meskin and other Latin American men standing around waiting for Joe Bob's truck to pull up and him to call some fellows over, that behind these men there are wives and children, living in cramped conditions that most Americans would never accept. Many of these kids, a lot some analysts would argue, were born in this country and are American citizens. Do we send Mom and Dad back to Guatemala and keep their kids here as wards of the state? Then what would we do, punish the children along with the parents? I'd like to hear the strict enforcement side's answer to that question.
Now, I'll admit that I've fallen into the trap of framing this view of the immigration reform bills and the walkouts and marches and other demonstrations they've started completely around Latino immigrants, though there are plenty of non-Latinos in this country without paperwork, either. Hell, you probably know a few of them yourself if you live in any decent sized city. They are here from countries as disparate as Ireland, Switzerland and India. They just sort of dropped below the INS radar and got jobs off the books as house painters, bartenders, etc. We don't talk much about them when we think of immigration, though. We should.
Now what gets me about the outcome of even the best of these bills, the "compromise" bill coming out of the Senate side of the U.S. Congress, is that its outcome would be to naturalize (offer citizenship) to about 40,000 of these people a year. When you consider we're talking about a pool of 11 - 12 million folks, if they're adults, and we know most of 'em are, they could be waiting in line the rest of they danged lives before they moved even close to the head of that line.
What I'm saying is, even if, say, as high 20% of these folks would be disqualified from applying for citizenship, that still leaves millions of honest, hardworking folks waiting hopelessly for their chance to become "legal." To my mind, that's neither rational nor compassionate. We're leaving all those folks as hopeless as they were from the get-go, cowering in fear and prey to the intimidation of unscrupulous employers.
Well, that there is my critique, so you're probably now wondering what I think would work to deal with our immigration situation?
As I said at the start of this article, I'm not a big believer in borders. But I'm smart enough to know that most folks ain't as far on the Libertarian side of most political questions as I might be, so I ain't gonnah even suggest that wholesale amnesty is a viable answer. Nonetheless, I do think that we have to admit that H1B visas, a ploy built for corporations who wanted skilled workers from other countries to do stuff like programming so that they don't have pay Americans honest wages for the same work, aren't the only way to provide an ad hoc solution to our situation.
A "guest worker" program like the Shrub is suggesting only puts us in the same boats as the Germans vis-?-vis the Turks a few decades and the French vis-?-vis so many, mainly North African, immigrants during the same period. We see on the streets of Europe how that worked out: it led to discriminatory housing, taking the work of this cheap labor pool without allowing the benefits of the society they lived in and the alienation that has produced riots in the streets. So a "guest worker" program, to my thinking, is just a formula for future social unrest on our own streets. Naw, that ain't the right answer, either.
What I do think is the right answer is two-fold:
- If we were more committed to the goals - set out by the United Nations - of rationalizing the money supplies of the rich countries and those of the "poor" countries through a series of economic policies that aren't that danged hard to understand, let alone justify, the incentive for people to vote with their feet would certainly be lessened.
No sane man is going to stay in a country where he can't support his family if he can move to one where he probably can.
As long as we insist on using up the resources of the world, from oil to food to copper, we must face that the people from whose countries those resources have come - at a loss of GDP for them and a fat profit for some corporate fat cat - are gonnah follow those resources. They ain't got access to them at home.
- Even if, the rich countries decided that profits aren't the end-all and be-all of human life on Earth and decided that some sort of social conscious was a rational route to world stability and more prosperity for everybody, it would take years for the affects of that policy change to happen.
So in the meantime, we need immigration guidelines and laws that are both rational and compassionate. In other words, sorry Lou Dobbs, we have to accept that more people from other countries are going to become part of the polity of the United States.
A hundred and fifty years ago, predictions that the Irish immigration wave would take this country to Hell in a handbasket proved entirely untrue. When, a little less than a hundred years ago, the Poles, the Italians, etc. rushed in, America was able to absorb them, despite the xenophobic nay-sayers' dire warnings of the time. To my thinking, the same is true of America today.
Let's face it, y'all, the world, not just America, is becoming a very crowded place. The success of the human species in spreading and propagating has been phenomenal, even scary. But the alternative is even scarier. That tipping point concept about various resources, from oil to potable water, is certainly a genuine concern for all of us. The answer, though, is not to be ruled by fear but by a recognition of our shared and common interests in seeing more people be provided for and protected. The answer is to give everybody a seat at the table. Like I said, we is all family.
And remember: It will take more than a few tornadoes to blow away all the trailer trash.
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