Legal or illegal, capital or labor

American-psycho-patrick-bateman

“You’ll get beautiful coverage, believe me, and the Mexicans will pay for it.” – Jeet Heer

This tweet is comedy because “and the Mexicans will pay for it” is referring to the wall that the Mexicans will never pay for and will not be built. (Though some connected families are going to make a killing billing 10x market for more drones, etc.)

This tweet is tragedy because when the ACA is taken away and the wall isn’t built and prices at Walmart are going up because of a trade war and/or instability around a resource threatened by a sudden and unexpected disruption in peace agreements, the Mexicans in the U.S. will be made to pay for it by being constantly harassed and shamed.

And by “the Mexicans” it could be an amalgam of Mexicans, Muslims and anyone else who can take the heat away from the failing kleptocracy.

But first, they’ll be called illegals.

Today, the incoming President referred to Syrian refugees in Germany as “illegals.” He used the same vague category that angry people use to refer to people they want to treat like criminals.

What’s remarkable about this language is that it mostly describes people in the U.S. whose crime is having committed fraud within the context of a business transaction: the sale of their labor.

In America, we usually call this kind of fraud white collar crime. White collar criminals commit some big stakes fraud with falsified documents submitted to the SEC or the IRS or the FDA or the FTC. These white collar criminals typically pay fines and keep on keeping on.

To recap: people who commit fraud while selling contracts or withholding earnings usually get to pay a fine and keep their dignity. People who submit false papers to sell their own labor… they can fuck the fuck off.

Do some people commit fraud to receive government benefits? Absolutely. Some military contractors do it. Some charter school companies do it. Some people without residency papers do it. We treat them all as people unless we think some of them are less than our standard for a person. To those people we refer as illegals.

Image – American Psycho