A 50 year plan: Border security and immigration

This post should be right up Crabbin‘s alley. For those of you not familiar with the Eastern Shore blogging scene (and those who are but don’t know his blog), D.D. Crabb (pen name of the writer) spends quite a bit of his time looking at the issue of illegal immigration. This chapter of my 50 year plan is going to deal with his pet issue.

Some have estimated that there are 20 million illegal immigrants in America. Most are from Mexico and Central America, but a few come from other places around the globe, including countries that are on America’s terrorist watch list. The impact is obvious – just look at the bilingual store signage that many national merchants now feature. Even in our position over 1,000 miles from the Mexican border we have Spanish-language radio stations in our area. All of this was unheard of in most parts of America even 10 years ago. But this immigration spigot along our southern border had been dripping for most of the last fifty years. It’s become a rushing torrent in the last decade though as Mexican and Central American economies stagnated while America’s abundant thirst for cheap labor combined with easy access to free health care and the chance for children of these undocumented workers to become American citizens by virtue solely of being born within our borders enabled this problem to become a hot-button issue. It’s so hot that a heretofore obscure Congressman from Colorado, Tom Tancredo, made a name for himself as a border hawk and is now one of the second-tier GOP candidates for President in 2008.

For most of the late 19th and early 20th century, America was the land of opportunity for immigrants of all stripes. Wave after wave of Germans, Poles, Irishmen, Italians, Greeks, Asians, and others from all points of the globe converged on America and filled up this land from sea to shining sea. My ancestors, mostly from Germany but a few Poles mixed in, were in that group. All of them had to deal with the language barrier and some amount of discrimination (as in the mid-19th century “No Irish Need Apply” signs) but if they didn’t adapt, their children surely did because they wanted to become Americans. Most cities of the era had enclaves where these immigrants eventually settled to be with those they shared language and culture with. But even moreso than the fun poked at rural Americans today, people from the “old country” were looked down upon by the next generation and those children who were born or raised in America grew somewhat ashamed of their cultural roots, leaving these old-world enclaves to live out their American dreams.

Eventually the pendulum started swinging the other way and in the last half-century or so many Americans have reembraced their ancestry through vacations to the homeland, ethnic festivals, and the like. In my old hometown of Toledo summers were punctuated by weekend gatherings celebrating Irish, Polish, German, Hungarian, and Greek food, dance, and culture. (And those were some good eating, let me tell you – particularly the Polish Festival. Now there’s where you can get REAL kielbasa.)

But the large majority of immigrants in the modern era have played the role in reverse, wishing America to adopt their culture and language instead of having the desire to become Americans like immigrants of yore. With the foreigners’ economic impact and the desire of major corporations to be politically correct (lest they offend some legal organization someplace enough to incite a lawsuit) they’re bending over backwards in an effort to appease the undocumented folks streaming in across our southern border. Bank of America recently made headlines by adopting a pilot program in California that eliminated the requirement of a Social Security number for applicants to receive a credit card. And right now a big fight amongst the Republicans pits the Chamber of Commerce types who like the idea of a cheap labor pool against the border and security hawks who see danger in the flood of humans crossing the border knowing that there are some among them who wish our nation ill.

In choosing sides, I stand with the border and security hawks. But the solutions of putting up a stronger security fence and enabling our Border Patrol to become a quasi-military outfit in order to fight against the heavily armed drug and human smugglers who operate along what’s best described as a lawless Mexican border is just a small bite out of the whole enchilada.

We also need to crack down on the employers. Obviously this is going to piss off the Chamber of Commerce types but there’s millions of people out there who knowingly or unknowingly have had their Social Security numbers hijacked by someone who’s using it to work here illegally. It’s unfortunate that the Mexican economy has put itself in such a bad state that emigration by a large chunk of their young male population is necessary, but with all of the oil they sell to us one has to wonder how they cannot support their own people with decent jobs. This phenomenon isn’t lost on the new Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who’s even questioned whether his relatives are working in the United States legally. Speaking to the immigration issue from Mexico’s perspective, he’s quoted in the Washington Times today, “We want (those who emigrated to the U.S.) to come back; we want them to find jobs here in Mexico.” Continued President Calderon, “We miss them. These are our best people. These are bold people, they’re young, they’re strong, they’re talented.”

So these are three legs of the stool: tighter physical security at the border, a stronger show of force against drug and human trafficking, and a crackdown on employers who don’t show due diligence in checking whether a worker has the proper status to be in the country.

But there are other needs which have to be addressed. Another simple one is to make English our official language of government. Additionally, it’s my belief that bilingual education needs to be scrapped. Just like the immigrants in the days of old, the adults may feel more comfortable to converse in their native tongue, but in order for children to advance in our society they need to learn English as their first language. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being bilingual but in America the vast majority of people speak English as their first and only language. If one were to move to Japan it would be expected that this individual learn enough of the language to get by and if they were to have children those children would be taught Japanese as their first language. So it is with America.

If America is to survive and have a chance to enact the entirety of my 50 year plan, among other things it has to disdain this slide into multiculturalism. Abraham Lincoln noted (paraphrasing Sam Houston) that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” By Balkanizing our culture in the way we have over the last quarter-century, we’re isolating pockets in our country that do not speak the language and have no desire to become Americans with the exception of the dollars we place in their pockets. We’ve turned the heat off from under our melting pot and the results are far from the ideals we once shared in common.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer. View all posts by Michael