The Illegals Right Under Your Nose
Thursday, March 31st, 2005
As tensions rise on both sides of the border before the monthlong project starts April 1, there is broad agreement that public frustration with the federal government’s failure to stem the flow of illegal immigration is stirring up a complex stew of activism that could boil over because of malice, mistake or miscalculation.
Since the mid-1970s, there has been a dramatic shift in who benefits from the American economy and bears the burden of taxes. CEOs, big investors and business owners can delay paying their taxes for years and sometimes escape them almost entirely, while wage earners have their taken from each paycheck. Discreet lobbying by the political donor class has made tax policies and enforcement a disaster. Because of obligations to these donors Washington has been unable, or unwilling, to fix these problems.
The biggest threat to the social fabric of the United States of America is not the porous border with Mexico and/or Latin America, through which dirt-poor men, women and children enter the U.S., looking for work and a chance to become Americans.
The biggest threat to the sovereignty and integrity of America are the super wealthy who, while gorging themselves on the table of America’s bounty, refuse to pay a single dime in taxes.
I’ve written about this before, the way in which poverty is treated as a crime while the wealthy are given carte blanche to do as they wish. But, today, I think it’s this missed connection, above others, which should be emphasized in the popular discussion of illegal immigration.
There is a black market for workers in America because there is a total lack of pragmatism in the management of migration. Immigration, and especially illegal immigration, is a welcome diversion from the far more vexing problem of labor, capital and power. A rational work visa program cannot be implemented, politically, because it would lead to a public reckoning about the rights of workers in America.
The populist demagogues on conservative talk radio, on Fox News, in xenophobic or, at least, “law and order” web sites, may occasionally invoke the rhetoric of class warfare to bemoan the fact that the Average Joe has been dealt a raw deal by wealthy tycoons.
But you won’t read about these same angry men, these men with an adolescent’s spurned love of America, taking up arms to patrol the hallways of Congress, to stand guard by K Street in Washington D.C., to shoot any trespassers who dare violate the laws of This Great Country on Wall Street.
Of course not. Like manchildren around the world who, upon coming home from a hard day at work, beat on their wives, girlfriends or children, these scoundrels, who find a legitimate expression for their irrational rage in the name of patriotism, will go out and find even more miserable wretches to abuse.
So it continues, as it has always been, the family on top pisses on the family below and the family below, fearing that the piss on their heads might mean they are “second class” find another family below them to piss on, just to clear up “who’s who” and “what’s what.”
The kings and queens of yesteryear had no moral right to demand taxes from the poor, to demand the lives of the poor in their wanton wars for personal gain. So these mere mortals justified their immoral power by convening upon themselves some veil of “divine ordination,” claiming that God was on their side, so righteous were their designs upon the spoils of war and the abuse of the poor.
In America today, the same sons of bitches who take and take and give naught, who derive pleasure from the power trip of sentencing tens of thousands to die in the name of the war on extremism, the war on AIDS, the war on drugs, the war on crime—they claim to do it because God told them to do it. Because God said they were the chosen ones.
Sure, there’s a great deal of lip service paid to the Free Market. But when it comes to drafting new legislation, when it comes to the enforcement of existing laws, the Free Market is just the sign they put atop their whorehouse. There’s no free market without a free society. And a free society is one where the wealthy man has no more rights and no more say than the poor man.
Today, the promise of the Free Market and the promise of a free society is known around the world. We live in a truly global society and work in a truly global marketplace.
The poor slobs, the veterans used up like disposable blades, who are taking up arms to “defend America” from slobs who are even more poor, are a woeful reminder that the gains made by the democratic forces in America after World War II—the G.I. Bill, for instance—can be easily lost.
The moral high ground of justice has been ceded to our new royalty, who bequeath their earthly power today just as easily as their craven predecessors did before the wars of Independence in the 18th century.
There’s your “death tax.” There’s your dying American Dream. The corpses of the young men and women walking through the desert to, literally, get a job. The rotting hearts of the manipulated, middle- and working-class Americans who see in their own shadows their biggest threat.
