Trey Smith
For those of you sitting at home getting yourselves all worked up with worry about our porous southern border, a recent article from Reuters should make you feel better.
U.S. authorities have upgraded six miles of border fencing in a remote Arizona ranching town with a taller barrier that will be tougher to breach, in the latest effort to tighten their grip on the isolated stretches of the Mexico border.Isn't it good that we're pouring so much money and resources into protecting ourselves from those scary illegal immigrants? These days they are flooding over our borders in droves, right? Um, no. Arrests of border jumpers haven't been this low since the days of Richard Nixon!
The fence seems to be doing the job as intended. But I have a better idea. Why not build a 20 foot high concrete barrier all along the Mexican border? Just in case a few hearty souls are able to get over, under or through it, let's patrol the area with drones that will fire missiles at anything that moves. Sure, we may have a bit of "collateral damage" in the form a few border agents or Arizonians getting vaporized by accident, but wouldn't that be worth the cost?
Once we construct this type of an almost impenetrable barrier, life will become so much better in these United States of America. It will be like heaven on earth, since we will know that our pure Yankee blood can no longer be defiled by those hideous creatures from "down south."
Yes, this is the general argument of narrow-minded bigots! It is painful to write and I hope, for most of you, it is painful to read. Still, this is basically what their argument boils down to.
Of course, if we adopted this inhumane strategy -- actually, we HAVE adopted a significant portion of it -- I'd like to be around when these smug ne'er-do-wells realize the damage it will cause to the overall American economy.
While the way we treat migrant farmworkers is deplorable, in it's own right, this institutionalized mistreatment fuels our agricultural economy. Remove the migrants from the mix -- that's what would happen with a giant wall and drones flying overhead -- and a good amount of American crops would go unpicked, rotting in the fields.
This would lead to vastly higher consumer prices in our stores and a staggering number of farm bankruptcies, including many corporate-owned farms.
Is that what these wisenheimers truly want? (Me thinks not.)
It's not so much jobs I worry about when it comes to illegal immigrants but racial tension. If a flood of Mexicans settle into a town for work, the rest of the population may feel like their being "invaded" (see Hazleton, PA) Immigration itself doesn't always cause social problems, it's lack of assimilation. If immigrants don't assimilate, they are viewed as foreigners to the rest of the population. When my family came to the US we tried our best to assimilate and we did quickly. However, for some reason, Hispanics aren't assimilating as easily, and their culture and language begin to "invade" or intrude on otherwise assimilated communities. The general culture of these communities then begin to feel threatened, so they call for tougher immigration laws. We must address assimilation, it is the key to solving the problem.
ReplyDeleteThe Amish have gone out of their way NOT to assimilate and yet few people feel threatened by them. Of course, the Amish are white and European.
ReplyDeleteLook at the indigenous people of this continent. Some Indian nations went out of their way to assimilate as fast as humanly possible, while others refused to assimilate at all costs. White people felt "threatened" by both groups.
From my point of view, the issue is more about racism than anything else.
Not sure what exactly you mean by "assimilation" --the whole melting pot idea? There has to be some balance so that immigrants can maintain their culture without domination by either the immigrant or the host culture. In Hawaii, this has been done delicately, probably because there is no clear majority. It is not a white man's world. But it doesn't belong to the Japanese, the Chinese, the Korean the Filipino or the Polynesian either. And if anyone suffered through "assimilation" it was the Native Hawaiian, who are only now beginning an pointed effort to reclaim their culture. Certainly the inability to "assimilate" or even cooperate has been a source of tremendous tension and violence in Islamic immigration in Europe.
ReplyDeleteWhat constituted "assimilation" for your family, KaiWen? What cultural values did you retain, what did you abandon? Where did you simply submit?
Also, it should be noted, the Amish are highly self-sufficient.
ReplyDelete