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.

[This article concludes the discussion. Parts I through IV may be found and reviewed in the title index to “articles”.]

PART  V

CONCLUDING BORDER FIRE

LEN CARRIER’S LAST WORDS

            When two rational people who share the same values disagree about something, their disagreement turns on what the facts are.  I think that this is the case between Dusty and me.  I know that there are lots of people with a xenophobic,“Archie Bunker” mentality who find it convenient to blame illegal residents for everything they find missing in their own lives.  These are the same sort of people who in earlier years derided the “micks,” the “wops,” the “polacks,” and the “niggers” for taking away their jobs.  Deport them back to their own country, they said, just as they are now saying we must root out all the “wetbacks,” make them criminals, and send them back to Mexico where they belong.  I think that this nativist thinking lies behind much of the debate on immigration today, but it is not what divides Dusty and me.  Neither of us is xenophobic, and neither of us is guilty of nativistic thinking.  Judging from our past correspondence, I feel confident, as well, in saying that we share the same basic values.  Consequently, we must disagree about the facts of the matter.  Here’s what I think some of those factual disagreements are.

            First, Dusty thinks that if we build a high enough wall, they will not come.  I think this is mistaken.  In Texas they have been talking about building such a wall, on and off, for many years.  It’s never happened.  What if we police this wall with our National Guard?  Well, aside from the fact that most of our National Guard forces are in Iraq, making such a barrier invulnerable on our entire border with Mexico would require a military draft in addition to National Guard forces.  Even with that, we have only to remember the Maginot Line and the Vietnamese boat people to see how determined or desperate people can get around obstacles.  Building a wall and policing it is a game not worth the candle, especially since it would better serve us to use our law enforcement agencies to keep out enemies like al-Qaeda, not poor Mexican workers.

Second, Dusty thinks that allowing illegal residents to stay and work would put us in the same position as France, a country whose immigration policies have not worked.  But we are not France.  In France, the immigrants are mostly Muslims who have not integrated into French society.  They live in enclaves surrounding the large cities, and there are no jobs for them.  Mexicans easily assimilate into our society, as the millions of legal Mexican immigrants in our country have demonstrated.  Remember, Texas and California used to belong to Mexico.  And unlike the situation in France, there is ready employment for Mexicans who arrive here.  After all, this is why they come.

            Third, Dusty thinks that the United States is overpopulated and cannot assimilate illegal Mexicans.  I would deny that this is the case. There is plenty of open land in the United States, and our low unemployment figures show that there are plenty of jobs, even with as many as twelve million illegal residents already living and working here.  Demographics show that as an industrial nation’s work force matures, the birth rate drops.  This is already the case in Europe, where the population is declining.  Our birth rates are also dropping, which is why we need immigrants to keep our economy vital.

            Fourth, Dusty thinks that if one favors trying to enforce a law already on the books, as I have done, then one should favor increasing penalties under that law if it’s not working. We agree that the present immigration laws are not working. But it’s not inconsistent to favor trying to enforce existing laws until they can be changed for the better.  Dusty thinks that making illegal aliens criminals will make the law better.  I think it will make matters worse by stigmatizing people whose only offense is trying to make a living; and, as I said before, it will overstrain our law enforcement agencies and courts, in much the same manner as the prohibition against alcohol did in the 1920s.  Only the repeal of prohibition stopped bootleggers from plying their trade.  I predict that the criminalizing illegal immigrants will produce similar consequences.  I say that if you’re in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

            Fifth, Dusty thinks that there is presently an immigration crisis.  I don’t.  I think that the so-called crisis was the consequence of political double-think.  Here’s how it went.  The present Bush administration, in declaring its war on terror, has frightened many Americans into thinking that terrorists want to continue attacking the United States. But what better way for them to attack than to have them seep through our porous borders?  But Mexicans slip through our borders every day, so we’ve got to close those borders and not let any more in. Many who are already here are here illegally, so we might well already have terrorists in our country.  But this line of reasoning assumes that illegal Mexicans are akin to terrorists, whereas they are not.  They’re the people who cut your grass, repair your roof, mind your children, and pick vegetables and fruit for your dinner table.  They share our borders and our culture.  Once they are assimilated into our society they will do what other immigrants have done:  work hard, pay taxes, and invigorate our economy.

            Sixth, Dusty thinks that illegal residents take jobs away from those who are here legally.  If this were the case, then you would think that those who emigrated here legally would be opposed to making our immigration laws more lenient.  But they’re not.  Studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of legal immigrants support the case of the illegals.  After all, most of the people crowding the streets in protest of the draconian law proposed by our House of Representatives, waving Mexican flags, were legal immigrants who want to see other Hispanics get a fair shake. Do illegals perform work that legal residents will not do?  Perhaps, but we won’t know until we document the illegals who are here.

            Finally, statistics show that some two million workers now earn less than the minimum wage, and millions more work without occupational safeguards, workers’  compensation, overtime pay, and other protections offered by legal status.  The only way to right these wrongs is to bring that black market labor force out into the open and change the laws to make their status a legal one.  As Jose Millan, former labor commissioner for California has said, the legalization of undocumented workers would make us all better off.  He also said, “I am in favor of anything that brings these workers out of the shadows and into the sunlight; it’s very easy to exploit a population when they’re afraid.”  I would second what Millan has said, and I would add that we should ourselves be unafraid to acknowledge the fact that there are at least ten million undocumented workers in our midst, and to take steps to see that the necessary documentation is legally provided for them.

All the best,

Len

DUSTY’S  LAST WORDS

I’ll mention a few of Len’s arguments first to dispel some of his misperceptions of mine and thereafter concede most of what he continues to contend. Finally, I’ll do what  lawyers often do in a lawsuit:  issue a demurrer.  The “demurrer”  is essentially contending to the judge, “I agree with what my opponent says, but his own argument shows he has no case”.

Now, I know Len doesn’t think I’m the “Archie Bunker” type, but I have to confess I’m a “nativist” to the extent that my loyalty is to my American tribe…that is, those who belong here because they’re citizens by either birth, or lawful naturalization. Forget the 6 decades I’ve worked, paid taxes and contributed to the perennial building and maintenance of the Country. As long as there are national boundaries, they should be used for the welfare of all. Defusing the global population bomb is the priority most integral to life on earth. I also believe that without both having laws and enforcing them, we have no social order, but rather anarchy and chaos. So (1) preservation of life and (2) rule of law are foremost in my mind when I advocate tightening the legal strictures on Mexican and all U.S. immigration.

I’m not opposed to diversity.  I’m proud of my mongrel cultural heritage and DNA.  I do detest the integration of bi-linguality  and bi-culturalism  in America. The separateness sickens society. Exit Unum’s Pluribus.   Illegal Mexican  immigration in America is 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.

Illegal aliens have broken the law upon entry and they are breaking the law in remaining here as illegal aliens.  If there were only a few of them, like Billy the Kid and his gang of cowboy vigilantes were, amnesty might be a feasible option. We are talking here about between 11 and 12 million criminals.  Some say Billy the Kid had good reason, as did Jesse James to do commit some of the criminal acts of which they were charged.  I’m virtually certain every illegal Mexican alien in the U.S. has a litany of good reasons he chose to  slip in past our border guards, but the fact remains, he chose to sneak by instead of enter legally. He chose to violate the law.  Unless we visit him with consequences, others will take our acquiescence as license. As precedent.

Bill Tildon (great American tennis champion) said the first rule of tennis and life is the same:  When you’re playing a losing game, change. If we grant amnesty to the 11 Million aliens we have, what will keep the next 11 million from coming in the same door?  Amnesty is precedent. It’s time to change our clearly losing tactics in the immigration game.

The logical answer is to require the ones who came in the back door, to confess, comply with the law, leave and come back this time through the front. Let the “amnesty” be merely a stay of execution on their arrest and deportation. If they have a job skill and a job prospect in the U.S., apply for a work visa, and ultimately citizenship. Will it be easy, or will it be cheap?  No and no.  Like most of the mistakes America is making now, exporting jobs to China and waging ruinous theocratic wars, the solutions are going to cost us dearly.

What other “immigrants” should we be concerned with?  How about all the Islamic youth of France who are unemployed and rioting over there?  Would we like to have more Islamics illegally enter our borders at the present time to join the 3 million we already have? How about Islamics who, as many Mexican aliens, don’t know the first word of English and get all their truth through Al Jazeera TV?  For that matter, have you noticed lately the number of Spanish-only stations on your cable or dish?  You’re paying for them just as you’re paying for the increased price of dual-language packaging and instructions on every item sold in America. What’s the last thing you learned or enjoyed on those Spanish-speaking channels?

Right now Colorado’s Dish Network supplies Al Jazzera TV to up to 150,000 resident Islamic households for $23/mth, solely in Arabic as  cable networks sell several Spanish-only stations to millions of Mexican Immigrants. The same corporations making money out of shipping jobs to China are making money shipping foreign culture into our Islamic and Mexican immigrant subcultures, keeping both  subcultural, ignorant and separate. Alien.  But Mexicans are no longer rioting in the streets (as the L.A. 13 did in March 1968 ) to be granted equal privileges to study English and other college-prep courses.   They are rioting in the streets with indignation at being asked to obey American Immigration Law most of them can’t read—immigration law which is every nation’s bulwark of stability and security.

Professor Carrier argues that it’s futile to think we can build a wall high enough to keep aliens out; that it’s a proposal impossible to police.  If he’s right, we’re doomed, and it’s just a matter of time before Al Qaeda operatives, already planning to enter and by various means destroy us, consummate their dreams and America is no more.  I say, Australia–more completely surrounded by water than us–has little or no immigration problems because they have prudently and consistently enforced their immigration laws and never fallen asleep on their bastions as we have.

Len says the Muslim problem in France is not like the problem with Mexican aliens in the U.S.  I agree.  Most Mexicans over here are gainfully employed and are not scary religious fundamentalists whose lunatic fringe wants to kill everyone who doesn’t pray to their god 6 times a day.

But while I agree, I again demurrer: Len completely misses the point of my contentions concerning population control.  First he is wrong, egregiously wrong when he says America is not overpopulated. “Overpopulation” is a relative term.  If the U.S. were a third-world country, 300 million would be relatively…innocuous  from the environmental standpoint. But Americans, both from the individual residential and corporate industrial standpoints are the number-one consumer culture in the world, and each person in the U.S. consumes and pollutes, respectively,  40 times the resources and wastes (including global-warming Co2) that undeveloped nations do per capita. This means America has a globally-warming and polluting population of 40 times 300 or closer to 12 billion people in terms of exerting toxic effects on our unitary global society.  Contrarily,  the corresponding millions on the continents of Africa and South America are much less environmentally greedy and toxic to the earth’s finite and integral ecosystem, and their millions in that milieu translate to  thousands on the American scales of consumption and environmental attrition.

And Mexicans don’t steal their ways past our border guards to become third-world natives. They come to emulated, replicate and wallow with us ugly Americans in our internationally-infamous game of greed, consumption and waste, a game led now by the prince of ecological darkness who has unilaterally thumbed his oily nose at Kyoto, and told International Law and the Hague to take a hike.

America owes it to the rest of the world to limit its numbers. With only 300 million of us on our share of the continent, we’ve managed to kill every viable river with industrial and agricultural runoff.   To be safe, we must all now drink water from a bottle. One of four of our children has asthma now because our air, from auto and industrial exhaust is unsafe to breathe. We are the greatest per-capita contributors to global warming on the globe.  Mexicans remaining in primarily agrarian Mexico are environmentally, third-world innocuous.

 We have too many people in the U.S. now, Dr. Carrier. We are clearly and certainly 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 Consumer barbarians.  Forget the legal vs illegal issue. I demurrer.  We need to close the gates to all but those who can help save us from us…German scientists perhaps who might help rehabilitate our GM-EXXON mentality with wind-powered energetics or again challenge us to Manhattan Project ourselves again to world peace…this time with a formula for creating hydrogen as our primary energy supply.

 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.

When it’s suggested, as Len did, that we need Mexican immigrants to give us the population growth necessary to “keep our economy vital”,  I can only cite the misguided polemic to the fallacy in the rule to which that assertion is an infected corollary :  The prime fallacy in all capitalism is that “economies are capable of infinite expansion”.Economies become more “vital” when we enhance the quality and quantum of our GNP and foreign trade balances.  If we  adopt  population expansion as the engine for GNP expansion, we’ll convert our Mexican standoff to an ecological OK Corral, and we’ll be the McLaury’s.

In winding down, I can agree with a lot of what Len says and with the  compassion he obviously feels for the Mexicans we have permitted, so far, to violate our immigration laws. I can concede for the sake of argument that their ancestors had adobe digs in California and Texas before Daniel Boone, and they are all well-intending, hard-working, Cheech-charming  and beautiful people. I am not singling them out. They simply, on a 100-to-one count, comprise most all our illegal aliens.

My basic tenet for preservation of life on earth is that we re-establish borders not simply as a barrier  for Mexicans, but rather to overpopulation. When a given territory starts losing human lives (thru starvation, disease contagion and emigration) because humans have reproduced themselves to a point their space can’t sustain them, that’s a problem that warrants quarantining as if it were  the most virulent  disease contagion/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 an F-16 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.

And when the beautiful native girls run out onto the beach, wearing grass skirts and no tops beckoning you to land…hit the afterburner…and fly for (our) life. When you get home, run out to and enjoy your own sandy beach.  Bathe in the sun, swim in the water.  And guard the shore.

Enjoyed our dialogue, Len, even as it occasionally drifted toward debate.

Hope you learned as much as I did.

Dusty

4/5/06

*(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.