Catch 22
Representing the 12 million illegal immigrants who have established residence in the United States, millions of Latinos and their supporters have engaged in a number of protests around the United States over the past week. Their moral outrage is justified in the face of the entrenched power structure's bid to criminalize millions of hard-working human beings and to punish compassionate people who help them.
Meanwhile, corporate champions (like George Bush), whose greed over-rides their racist, xenophobic tendencies, want to find a way to keep illegal immigrants in the United States as "temporary guest workers" since they are a source of cheap, submissive labor. With the Thirteenth Amendment impeding them, the leaders America's corporatocracy are not about to let these indentured servants slip away from them.
Self-inflicted wound
Living in denial, the American Empire is blinded to its culpability in creating the immigration problem. By enabling US corporations to build manufacturing facilities in Mexico starting in the early 1970's, the United States set itself up for a mass exodus across its border and, at the same time, betrayed its own working class. While the US businesses maintained miserable working conditions and paid a small fraction of what they were paying American workers, the poor in Mexico flocked to the jobs they offered. Unfortunately for them, many American businesses closed up shop and moved on to other countries once they found cheaper labor pools. Many of those factories were close to the US border, leaving large numbers of unemployed Mexicans living near states like Texas and Arizona. Who can blame them for risking illegal immigration to escape their miserable situations?
Furthering its illegal immigration woes and deepening the plight of the American working class, the United States accelerated the movement of US corporations onto foreign soil by passing laws such as NAFTA. Utilizing neocolonial and imperial tools like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the CIA support of dictators friendly to US corporate interests, and even invasion, the Empire has bled the people and resources of developing nations like a vampire with an insatiable bloodlust. Besides subjecting the citizens of other nations to abject poverty, the Empire has slaughtered millions of innocent civilians with its behemoth military machine, and is continuing this pattern in Iraq. Employing the lessons of its early history, the United States enthusiastically enables Israel in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Stop the killing and share the wealth
Why wouldn't people flock to the security and prosperity of the Empire? After all, the rest of the world is a dangerous place considering that the imperialist United States has run its "collateral damage" count into the multi-millions despite its relatively brief existence, has declared that it is above international and humanitarian law, and invades nations "pre-emptively". Since 25% of the world's resources flow into a nation of only 300 million, some of the other 6.2 billion human beings are bound to show up on the Empire's doorstep begging for food.
American Capitalism and the American Empire are blights on humanity, particularly outside of the United States. They render far more damage to the rest of the world than to the United States, which explains why a small number of Americans expatriate while millions of immigrants flock to this nation.
Congress will pass a law which will put a bandage on the immigration problem, but the wound will not heal. One piece of legislation will not come close to addressing the myriad underlying causes. Ultimately, the United States' increasing trajectory toward a more brutal form of Capitalism with fewer restrictions on corporations (and hence less protection for workers and consumers) coupled with a rapid acceleration of the American Empire's quest for global hegemony will spark an influx of illegal immigrants. Until the White American Plutocracy and their brainwashed adherents end their tenacious and destructive efforts to ensure the perpetuation of a "White man's world", they will continue to be plagued by an onslaught of "little Brown people" who speak a language that is "downright un-American".
Suggested Reading:
Life After Capitalism - And Now Too
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?itemid=6842
Minutemen Objective is Shameful
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002883309_danny23.html
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