by Editors

 A polite and civilized, but genuinely “at-odds” dialogue between two concerned “independents” on the question and handling of the Illegal Mexican Alien issue, which is rapidly becoming the most important political hard-ball in domestic play today. In this exchange, Professor Leonard Carrier* challenges our foreign policy Editor, Dusty Schoch to defend his position that illegal Mexican Aliens (all 11 million of them) should be treated as felons.

 

PART I – Len Opposes Legislation

(In a letter to U.S. Senators)…

 

Your message was sent to the following recipients:

Your U.S. Senators

 

 

I’m writing to urge you to oppose the immigrant punishment bill scheduled to come before you this week.

The bill, which focuses ONLY on harsh enforcement and heavier penalties, does nothing to address the root causes of our immigration problems. Making felons out of millions of undocumented workers is just not a workable solution. As I’m sure you’re aware, the House version of the bill also punishes humanitarian organizations that try to prevent migrants from dying of thirst in the desert, and conference negotiators could easily slip this provision back into the final bill at the last minute. Other provisions under discussion –- including requirements that churches verify the legal status of anyone to whom they provide assistance –- are equally troubling.

Please oppose the immigration punishment bill, and take the time to come up with a more workable and less punitive solution. I look forward to hearing from you with your views on this matter.

Part II

Dusty’s response

 

 

 

 

Leonard,

 

I haven’t studied this bill much, but the media-shown sight of thousands of illegal aliens assembling—en outlaw masse–to protest U.S. governmental enforcement of the laws they broke when they illegally entered the country and continue to violate as they waive sign and shout,  sort of made me say- Aren’t things a little topsy turvy in this picture?

 

The temerity of their massive assembly and protest to me smacked of crumbling civilization…. Too many criminals to enforce the law. Sure we were slow in coming out of the illegal-entry ether.  Once upon a time Mexico was a tolerable place to live and there weren’t so many MILLIONS of fiscal refugees.  We’re slow to catch up on most problems. That doesn’t make illegal entry either smart or tolerable or good.

 

Mexican aliens, because they’re illegal, stay huddled, separatist, ignorant, and mono-lingual in sub-cultural camps.  Their initial fraud of entry breeds a web of successor criminal frauds in forged SS#’s, ID’s and fake drivers licenses that enable them to drive and crash into you and me with uninsured , very old , very heavy automobiles.

 

 They’re afraid even to come to me at the legal aid clinic I conduct (free) in our homeless shelter.  They’re afraid to attend English class at the local (free) trade school for the same reason. The only place they feel safe in is their 1/8^thbedroom space in the suburban ghetto where 6 families park their uninsured trucks in the front yard of their 1500-square house, their Mexican “hole in the wall” point of pathetic refuge, where they dream of saving enough dollars to bring in the rest of their over-expanded families from M-City squalor. They don’t attempt birth control here either, and you and I are paying the birth bills, because our hospitals, like their employers, won’t/can’t say no to the opportunity for more low-cost labor and tax-supported charity healthcare.

 

 I’m for literally enforcing the naturalization laws that exist…on the books today. America is way over-populated, can’t feed its own native poor, and is below 30^th among civilized nations in health care.

 

The objection that it will “make felons” out of hundreds of thousands of “felons” is specious, it appears to me. Because we were lax in enforcement the past 10 years doesn’t make our present enforcement wrong. The law (new) of course can’t be enforced in every instance. We don’t have that many courts or immigration officers.  But even when your main femoral artery is torn on the battlefield, you do what you can to staunch the flow. You apply the tourniquet and do your best.  The law proscribes. It’s the tourniquet.  We may still lose the leg, but we may save the body in the process. And the other leg, in that altered process, might not itself suffer a lesion that exposes us to a compounded risk of bleeding to death.

 

A first (perhaps  preferred) line of remediation would be to punish, under existing laws, employers who hire illegal aliens, just for the bucks. They are guilty under the existing law. They are outlaws again shielded from prosecution by the “virtue” of their numbers.  

 

In my mind, there are two groups of modern day slaves that are bringing America to its indolent knees:  the slaves in China and India who’ll mostly die trying to emulate Western-level consumer madness, and the enslaved poor (trans ethnic, trans racial) in our country that see foot-soldiering in Iraq preferable to being homeless and jobless on the streets of our dying democracy, a democracy waning  from the greed of its moneyed/fascist/corporate/Republican, let’s-export-America-because-it’s-economically-expedient oligarchy. If we rid ourselves of our resident aliens, we’d be ending at least one form of slavery, and forcing their country’s of origin to take care of their own and their indigenous and perennial problem…over population.  In the same process, we’d accelerate the necessarily inevitable  process of industry and labor’s getting back together to find a way to staunch the flow of jobs and labor dollars to even poorer workers’ exploiters abroad.

 

What specifically don’t you like about the proposed bill?  I  think 700 miles of fence is hardly enough.  I think we should put our dollars in rounding up aliens’ employers and deporting them. This corporate exploitation of  aliens is melting our melting pot.

While we were becoming the hybrid mongrel of nations, strong of back and fang, we were still endowed with enough E Pluribus  collective wisdom to insist on a common native language.  Your last batch  of breakfast cereal likely came with bilingual bios of the Chiconic slugger who steroided himself onto history’s  pages and cereal’s box tops. The old rules are good rules: Before you naturalize, you speak and write the language.  The corporate mongrels would give up our language and our economic stability and our criminal control systems…for consistently easier bucks…until consistently easier bucks inflate our capitalistic American dream derrigible til it floats into the galactically  glutonnous ether. (Wrong word: ether connotes solvency.)

 

Educate me, professor.  

March 28, 06

 

PART III

LEN’S REJOINDER

 

 

 

Thanks for your thoughts, Dusty.  I’m against the immigration bill as written by the House mainly because it would make “illegals” guilty of a felony.  Under present immigration law, their undocumented entry into the US is a civil offense, not a criminal one.  Hence, if they’re found they can be deported without any sort of trial.  If we make them felons, then, in effect, our law officers would become agents of the Immigration Service, and our criminal courts will be flooded with cases. 

    Of course, I’m in favor of trying to enforce the laws we have on the books.  But those laws are not working–not to our favor, and not to the favor of the undocumented immigrants that arrive here.  Not to their favor because, as you say, they live among us in fear of deportation, many with no health insurance, drivers licenses, and without funds to get back to their own country.  And even if they were able to return, there is no work for them there, thanks to NAFTA, which has broken the Mexican farming industry.  Not to our favor, because without “illegals” working on our farms, our farmers would not be able to make a profit, because they can’t pass through upgraded costs to the consumer.  (If they could, then the food on our tables would rise considerably in price.)

    I almost hate to say this, but Bush’s idea of guest workers, a limited amnesty, and an easier path to citizenship is not a bad one.  Senators Kennedy and McCain have also worked out another plan that drops the felony component of the House’s bill.  But there are no easy solutions.  No matter how big you build that wall, desperate people are going to try to get a way to feed their families. Homeland Security would have the task of policing this wall, and we all know that they are not capable of securing their own offices. This is not the United States of fifty years ago, when immigration reform wasn’t needed.  Today it is needed, but the House’s simple “law and order” solution will, to my mind, only make things worse. What’s needed is a way to integrate these workers legally within our economic system–give them a chance to work and strive for the American dream, or at least to send back money to feed their families. 

    I usually don’t disagree with you on much, but I think we need to find a way to bring liberty and justice to all–including those who happen to be the undocumented aliens who live among us.

    All the best, Len

 

 

 

PART IV

 

Dusty’s response to Len

 

Dear Len,

 

Thanks for the thoughtful, provocative  and considered response. You gave me considerable pause, and much to consider. Here’s what I (still) say:

 

You say you are in favor of enforcement of the laws that exist, but you oppose subjecting aliens to criminal prosecution and deportation as “felons”.  I see no reason we can’t do both. Giving U.S. authorities the option of proceeding criminally and/or civilly to accomplish deportations of extant  and deterrence of future illegal aliens seems a capital proposition. When officers arrest the alien on felony charges, he’ll be subject to release if he goes peacefully back home. When he’s brought in the second time, there’s no trial. He’s violated probation (banishment) and goes to jail. The criminal “back up” consequence is for deterrence and is invoked/prosecuted only for the incorrigible. We need desperately to stanch the flow of alien entry and residency in our country and the old “civil” process alone is clearly not working.

 

Look to the East, my friend, at our former ally France. Letting their immigration gates swing open, they’re facing social mahem.  The newspapers called yesterday’s protests, riots and marches (March 28), involving over 3 million youths… “about labor law”.  That of course begged the issue. The fact is one out of five Frenchman is now Islamic, most immigrants of recent entry. The influx of people has resulted in unemployment across the board in excess of 20 percent. We’re next. Workers being imported; jobs being exported. Consider the math.

 

Two things have us hell-bent in America for replicating the French disaster, now moving toward anarchy with alarming momentum.  First, our neo-con corporate profiteers have exported a substantial segment of our blue-collar careers to China and other third-world slave labor camps. Second, replacements for the missing labor in the lower ranks of the service  industry (primarily insulation installation, agricultural harvesting and roofing) are  30-percent Mexican.  Greedy American businessmen  have self-servingly succeeded in resisting enforcement of immigration laws.

 

At present, one in 30 “Americans” is an ILLEGAL MEXICAN ALIEN. That is an abysmal number from the law-enforcement and social stability standpoints. That’s not counting their American-born (and under the law “citizen”-status Mexican/American children).  Over 14 percent of the entire population is Chicano; With a soon-to-be accretion of 6,  we’ll stand with the French, with every one in five of us having more ties with a culture and country… south of the border.

 

America, Len, is no longer “the land of opportunity”.  These swarms of immigrants bring to my mind that dark, god-awful scene in “Zorba the Greek” where the aging French “madam” is dying and the native old harpies who were her envious  less-affluent neighbors are teeming in and out of her boudoir carrying off her treasured trousseau and memorabilia while she lies agape, gasping  her final breaths and  grimacing at the canabalism of her invaders’ rites of passage and acquisitions by default.

 

We’re next. Here are some stats that should stun:  There are 12 million illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S.  today.  In California there were 1.4 million in 1990 and 2.5 today; in N.C. in the same period the number has jumped from 25,000 to  395,000, a 16-fold increase. In all, America has over 30 million foreign-born residents; that’s one in ten of us.

 

These people are not joining our culture. They are setting up their subcultures within us. Parasitic rather than symbiotic. Adversity as opposed to diversity. They won’t attend free language classes for fear of detection and deportation. They will not be amalgamated into so as to evolve with diversity the “American Dream”  because they enter under and remain in a marginalized “hole-in-the-wall” ghetto subculture. Because they are illegal aliens in our midst.

 

Ashville, N.C.,  is one of the  most beautiful cities in America’s mountains. It’s the place wealthy Floridians have their “summer homes”.  Len, as a resident of that beautiful city, can you tell me how many houses in your immediate neighborhood—say of the nice 2500-square foot variety—are presently housing 6 Mexican families? –That is about 20 to 30 people inside with 5 to 7 pickup trucks in the front yard because the 2-car garage is  too full of exterior  dining tables, deck chairs, smoking grills and ceramic cheminee’s  for warming the extended families outside during the perpetual family reunion?  In case you haven’t guess it, I just described the situation in my neighborhood, 5 yards ( and driveways)  from where I presently sit, and write.

 

The value of my 4500-square-foot ancestral home is presently, and ipso-facto, a joke.  And I do laugh a little at the poetic justice, consoling myself with the self-sanctioning symmetry of it by saying:  “It’s what you deserve for hanging on to that huge environmental Albatross  in the first place.”  But tell me the truth, Len: Would you want to live in Tiajauna?  O.K., then would you want Tiajuana transplanted and accreting  next door?  And in the bargain, neighbors who will never, ever , speak English?  The fact is “illegal aliens” inside America have little to lose. They can only be deported. So why not do illegal things until that push comes to shove?…things like driving without a license or insurance and saying to hell with single-family housing laws, I want to move in this great house and share expenses with my 26 cousins. We can afford it.

 

Len, somewhere between the insulation of your mountain retreat and the insult of my “Mexican Border standoff” in the urban foothills of N.C., there’s a place to reflect dispassionately and note that America as a whole is in trouble with its burgeoning Mexican subculture and population. We are as a nation already over-populated. That fact alone supplies us with all the reason we need to close our doors to immigration, legal and otherwise.  The melting pot has melted.

 

The affluent countries of the world are but “enablers” and accomplices to irresponsible over-populating nations and cultures when they let down their gates to   population over-flow. There was a time when emigration from overpopulated areas of the world, such as Asia, India and Mexico might have been symbiotic and efficacious for both countries, but it was never good policy from the global environmental standpoint.

 

When a population within a given territory expands beyond its resources and borders, the population should restrain itself. When overgrowth of  tissue in the human body occurs, threatening the life of the whole, we call it “cancer”. When it happens among the human elements of our living, unitary and finite  global ecosystem, we euphemize it “overpopulation”.  When a “cancer” migrates in microcosmic man, they term it “metastasis”;  When it happens in our global macrocosm, it’s “immigration”.

 

Where is the needed “sanction” for inhibiting overpopulation when one country can simply export its unemployed needy surplus population to another?  As earlier postulated, unfettered immigration amounts to “enabling” the globally-dysfunctional process and producers  of uninhibited population growth, and cultural irresponsibility in regard to birth control and conservation of finite resources. What these reproductively-irresponsible masses have done in their countries of origin they will continue to do in our country.  The statistics of the exponential expansion of Hispanic population in America confirm it.

 

As a depressing bottom line, what’s happening in France today as a result of the unimpeded influx of refugee immigration from the calamitous cauldron of the Middle East is destined to happen in America with Monetzuma’s retarded revenge. The 12 million illegal Mexican aliens are not assimilating in America; they are a growing, fuse-glowing time bomb in her bosom and loins and the process of their further invasion needs to be fixed.

 

The problem of the illegal Mexican alien is converted to conundrum by the bloc-voting political power of the legal Mexican immigrants. Both political parties want to avoid alienating the Hispanic voters, who are 100-percent polarized in favor of some form of amnesty, and any form of compromise that will keep their illegal family and friends from being deported. 

 

I say end the Mexican political standoff.   Fix the broken borders.  Mend the fences of the Rio Grande. Give a Marine escort to these southern encroachers back to the halls of Montezuma.  Guard the border lines with the soldiers presently engaged in losing the theocratic war now in Iraq.  Put a life-saving tourniquet on our country’s bleeding boundaries …or prepare to contend with the riots and cultural mahem presently threatening to crumble the foundations of the French Republic.

 

And let’s do it quickly. Before we complete our nightmarish rush to replicate the history of the Roman Empire.

 

Best as always my learned and considerate friend,

 

Dusty

 

To be continued ….

 

 

 

PART  V

 

 

PREVIEW OF  CONTENTIONS TO FOLLOW:

 

 

 

PREVIEW TO LEN’S SIDE…

 

One thing I do want to mention now, though, has to do with your concerns about our losing our national character by having more Latinos living here.  About ten years ago, I attended a guest lecture at the University of Miami given by a demographic expert.  He showed that we were definitely becoming more Latinized, and that soon there would be a majority of people living here with Hispanic backgrounds.  But the lecture had nothing to do with illegal aliens.  It was just based on demographics.  I don’t think that this is such a bad thing.  I lived in Miami during the great influx of Cubans into South Florida.  Mama and papa might not have learned English, but their kids did.  The Cuban influx helped turn Miami into the vibrant city we have today.  I also find it ironic that all you have to do if you’re a Cuban is to set foot on U.S. land and you get asylum; whereas Mexicans are to be hunted down, deemed felons, and turned back. That doesn’t strike me as being a fair and humane policy.  (MORE LATER)

 

PREVIEW TO DUSTY’S SIDE…

 

I’m not opposed to diversity.  I’m proud of my mongrel cultural heritage and DNA.  I detest the integration of bi-linguality  and bi-culturalism  in America. The separateness sucks. It’s not the melting pot that brewed the American spirit. It’s two separate pots on an archaic, increasingly- under-heated and under-tended, single-burner stove, each vying for space over the flame. A national, cultural hell’s kitchen.  Chinatowns are bad ideas…every time and every place. Festering places for fringe criminality and aberrant everything.

 

 We have too many people in the U.S. now, Len. We are overpopulated. Our overpopulation–with our habits of energy and other consumption–adds to the urgency of our closing our gates to barbarians aspiring to become worse…American-Class Consumers. Forget the legal vs illegal issue.  We need to close the gates to all but those who can help save us from us. German scientists who will help rehabilitate our GM-EXXON mentality with wind-powered energetics. As long as we “adopt” the bastard refugee children of over-populating nations, those nations will continue to over-populate, under-develop and under-conserve.  We’re a support system (enablers) for the addiction (unguarded sex) that’s killing the world. Unfettered human sperm is the doomsday WMD.  Plutonium can’t hold a candle.

 

There is no environmental problem that does not have as its essential primary cause, human overpopulation. Even nuclear arsenals and waste have at their roots men’s struggles over limited earthly territory and resources.   Australia …even China of all places are doing positive things about it. Immigration is an ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUE FIRST.

 

Please address this in your next response so I won’t be the lone ranger ranting on that most important aspect of the immigration problem. My basic tenet for preservation of life on earth is re-establish borders as a barrier to overpopulation. When a given territory starts losing human lives (thru starvation, disease contagion etc.) because humans have reproduced themselves to a point their space can’t sustain, that’s a problem that warrants quarantining as if it were  the most virulent  disease pandemic in earth’s history…because it is.

 

When a tsunami hits, send volunteers.  When a people begin to starve because there are too many of them eating from the same garden on the island, send them a life raft.  Drop the raft from a jet airplane at high altitude in a position to drift to the shore of the island. Fill the raft with a generation’s supply of contraceptives.

 

Despite what I seemed to imply above (re “hottest issue”), immigration and global warming are karmic (causal)  cousins. (MORE LATER)

 

*(Dr. Leonard Carrier received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Miami in ’56 and ’58, respectively, and his Ph.D from Stanford in 1967.  He taught at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and the University of South Florida (Tampa) before spending the rest of his teaching and research career (29 years until 2000) at the University of Miami. )

Robert R. (Dusty) Schoch is an attorney, inventor and writer (novels, essays, screenplays) living in High Point.  BA (English) degree, UNC Chapel Hill,  JD (law) U. of Ala., Tuscaloosa.  Dusty is founder and scribe of the B.E.A. (“Barristers et al”) a N.C.-based, politically-independent foreign policy think tank. He is also co-editor (foreign policy) of Democratswrite.com through the contact link of which readers are invited to correspond with him.

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