blanket amnesty makes sense
by Andrew Bosworth
Published: January 1, 2008
It looks like 2008 will be open season on undocumented workers. Presidential contenders, especially on the Republican side, are talking tough on “illegal aliens” or “criminal aliens.” This is unfortunate, because upon closer examination, unconditional amnesty is the only valid course of action for three reasons.
First, the United States Congress bears much of the responsibility for destroying Mexican agriculture with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Ironically, under the guise of “free trade,” America’s socialized agricultural system dumped millions of tons of federally subsidized food on Mexico (even genetically modified food, which is illegal in Mexico). It is important to return to this little-known fact: If American farmers had to sell their products on the open market, they would be packing their wagons and abandoning their farms, as in The Grapes of Wrath. Massive subsidies by Big Guvment keep the combines running.
Make no mistake: The Mexican farmer was displaced by Washington’s Pork Barrel Congress and its Agri-Business masters. What happened next was predictable. A wave of Mexican farmers moved to large Mexican cities and then, when they could not find work there, to the United States. Washington opened the floodgates for capital and investment (with Wall Street applauding), but nobody did anything to regulate the inevitable flow of people.
Second, US immigration law has been drained of legitimacy by the federal government itself. For two decades, authorities have looked the other way, tacitly encouraging undocumented migration. Federal authorities routinely removed the Border Patrol from certain sectors during harvest time (so that the large farms had access to undocumented and cheap labor!). Also, the authorities did not enforce immigration laws once migrants were in the system. In other words, the federal government has encouraged “illegal immigration” for a long time; it has been complicit in all resulting “illegality.” US immigration law has thus become a kind of anti-law, or law of outlaws, without any ethical foundation.
Third, a crackdown on undocumented workers is an adrenaline shot for the emerging police state. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is raiding workplaces with Gestapo tactics. It is possible to see on Mexican television news (but not in the US), footage of what happens to the undocumented workers rounded up each month. They are shackled, put on buses, and dumped across the border.
Worse, the wives and children of the deported are processed through rent-a-prisons. It is highly illegal, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, to place children in prison, so the Department of Homeland Security, in typical Orwellian fashion, has renamed the prisons “Residential Centers,” as in Taylor, Texas. Unfortunately, if these stories were highlighted on NBC Nightly News, many Americans would not react they way they might have a decade ago; today, people are conditioned to accept torture and other violations of international law under the Bush-era doctrine of “American exceptionalism.”
No one likes to compare the United States to Germany in the late 1930s, so people apparently prefer to distract themselves with hot-button issues such as “English Only” laws. Another distraction is also whether or not the driver in the lane next to you, if undocumented, should remain unlicensed (that sounds safe!). The presidential candidates are sure to be asked their positions on English Only and drivers’ licenses for illegals. None will be asked if women and children should be detained in prisons.
Then, of course, there is issue of the border fence - or rather four of them, as the fence will not be continuous but rather broken into sections. This allows the political and economic elite to grandstand about the border while still reaping the benefits of migration. In any case, the fence as proposed is unconstitutional because it does not run along the border. In Brownsville, Texas, a portion of the university and several residential neighborhoods (low income neighborhoods, of course), will be left on the “Mexican side” of the wall, squeezed between the wall and the river. This sounds less like Berlin and more like the West Bank. In these cases, the wall denies some Americans equal access to their own country, infringing on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The former Governor of Minnesota (and former Big-Time wrestler), Jesse Ventura, is well known for having said: “Show me a 50-foot border fence, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.” On Jesse Ventura’s last tour here on the Texas-Mexico border, the locals who overheard him relay his other, unreported remark that when the wall goes up (and when the United States goes to hell in a handbasket), “How will we all leave?”
Indeed. The political bombast, willful ignorance and emerging police-state will be, understandably, too great for many Americans to bear.
Matamoros, Mexico: aaabos@gmail.com
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