Americans Love Mexicans

Vicente Fox has been telling the story of his great-grandfather, who rode his horse from Cincinnati to Mexico City in 1895, bought a ranch, and raised a family that spawned the best president of Mexico so far (though Calderon is promising). His grandfather, Fox says, was a migrant worker just like the illegal Mexican immigrants who are streaming across the US border.

However wobbly his simile, I come not to tip it over. For Americans don't want to fight with Mexicans. Americans love Mexicans.

American employers love to hire Mexican workers, and not just because they will work for less than Americans (though that is a plus). Mexican illegal immigrants are hard workers. That's why there are so many factories full of illegal workers.

American contractors and homeowners love to hire Mexicans for construction jobs, especially in disaster areas that were affected by storms like Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. The Mexicans have moved into the American building trades in a big way. They are moving up from their old stereotyped positions in lawn care, picking oranges, and gardening. They aren't just working on roofs. Now they are carpenters, electricians, and sheetrock installers, carpet layers, bricklayers, plumbers, and welders.

Americans love Mexican food and culture. In most Southern states Mexican restaurants are as easy to find as hamburger joints. Maybe easier. Carlos Mencia and George Lopez are arguably the two funniest comedians on television. Cinco de Mayo is growing more popular every year. American "Anglo" Kids are entertained and taught Spanish by Mexican main characters in Dora the Explorer, Dragon Tales, and Sesame Street. Mexican slang and curse words are common on the American street and the Spanish language is becoming ever more common.

I have gone through all this to underline a fact: Americans welcome Mexicans to the USA. Mexicans who have the "get up and go" attitude necessary to propel them from poverty-stricken backwaters in the old country to an unknown future, in a strange nation obsessed with trivia and celebrity, are exactly the kind of entrepreneurial spirits who could be America's hope for the future.

Though Americans love and welcome Mexicans, Americans hate and reject illegal immigration.

The first and most central objection to illegal immigration, which is actually a people smuggling operation across the border, is that it turns migrants into criminals. Because it does this, it puts them on the wrong side of the law. Technically, it makes them outlaws who are not able to depend on the nation's rule of law, because by their being in the USA illegally they are subject to punishment and deportation.

Smuggling in a large population of outlaws damages the USA in several ways.

It weakens the reach and universality of the law. Because outlaw immigrants do not call the police when they need help the law cannot help them. This produces areas of the country where the law does not extend. This is a problem, because it is discriminatory. The discrimination is by the outlaw immigrants, who reject the laws of the country they chose to migrate into.

It provides a population that predators can prey upon with impunity. MS-13 is a notorious violent gang that is at epidemic levels in outlaw immigrant communities and many Central and South American countries. The Crips and Bloods are pervasive in immigrant communities.

It encourages employers to wink at the false papers and corruptly hire immigrant outlaws. Employers use their political influence, if they have any, corruptly in order to prevent their illegal workers from being arrested and deported. The end result of this is political corruption. Money gets spent greasing the political wheels to stop the law from working the way it's supposed to. This corrupting process undermines the law, results in selective prosecution, and engenders a disgust at the law in law-abiding citizens. Bad laws, selectively enforced laws, and corruption drive people to become scofflaws.

Smuggling operations that are used to smuggle migrants of good character across the border are also used for other purposes. Legal products are smuggled across to avoid taxes. Legal citizens, and legal immigrants, pay taxes and excise fees. Outlaws and smugglers do not. Drugs, violent criminals, and sex slaves are also smuggled across the border, all producing their own problems. Enemy soldiers of the Global Jihad, and other terrorists, are smuggled across the border. For example, the Fort Dix terror plotters were smuggled over the US-Mexico border and lived as outlaws in the US for 23 years before plotting to attack Fort Dix.

The large number of outlaw migrants produces political divisions that are exploited by the most toxic actors in the American polity. Anti-illegal sentiment will be used to divide and demonize Republicans in the 2008 elections. Racist organizations like La Raza (The Race) and MECHA, and communist-front organizations like ANSWER and Code Pink, have been and will continue to paint the Minutemen, who simply protest corrupt border control processes, as a new Ku Klux Klan. They treat border control agents the same way, even when the border control agents are Hispanic.

Outlaw migrants are not subject to the same health inspections that legal migrants must pass. Drug-resistant tuberculosis, drug-resistant staph and strep infections, intestinal parasites, even horrors like the black plague have been brought across borders illegally. Outlaw migrants spread virulent, dangerous diseases. When they go to the hospital, they can't pay. They don't have insurance. Yet they use up resources that legal immigrants and citizens pay for with their taxes and insurance.
The massive smuggling of people across the border must stop. The border must be sealed. In the 1950s, Eisenhower was faced with an illegal immigration problem and he solved it with comprehensive enforcement, rounding up outlaw migrants and sending them back deep into Mexico. General Swing, who headed this operation, had a two pronged plan to enforce the borders. First, he transferred entrenched immigration officials from border areas to other states where their political ties to open borders advocates like Lyndon Baines Johnson didn't lead to actively corrupt behavior. Second, he sent 750 agents on a sweep of agricultural areas. Their goal was to find and apprehend 1,000 illegal immigrants per day. In two months over 50,000 were captured and almost 500,000 had fled back to Mexico before they could be caught.

Some agents who worked on this successful border enforcement operation in the 50's are still around. They say that before the US builds a fence it should make other changes.

• End the "catch and release" program for "other than Mexican" illegal aliens. Most "other than Mexican" illegal aliens laugh at their court dates and never show up. "Other than Mexican" illegal aliens who come into the US over the Mexican border should be protected for their own good, until they can be sent back to wherever they came from or at least deep into Mexico.
• When sending outlaw migrant Mexicans back to Mexico, send them deep inside Mexico, at least 500 miles from the US border.
• Crack down had on employers who hire illegals. If they don't hire illegals, then illegals won't cross the border to get jobs from them.

But this is enforcement only, and it ignores one thing: Americans love Mexicans. The US would have 40 million more citizens than it has, most of them African-American, if the children aborted since Roe vs. Wade had instead been born. Not only would these children have been loved, they were necessary to work and contribute in the expanding economy of the US. Since they were killed before they could grow up and contribute economically, replacement people are needed. That's where Mexicans come in. Americans love to hire Mexicans, so Mexicans need to be given a fair shake at getting into the US. Currently it takes at least 10 years for a Mexican who applies for a work visa to the US to be granted one. It could take another 10 years for the legal wheels to turn and his wife and minor children to be allowed to visit, or to join him. The quotas and legal immigration system are broken. America wants more hard-working Mexican immigrants of good character. The quotas must be adjusted to allow many more Mexicans to immigrate legally with a much shorter wait of one or two years at most.

And there are other groups who should be allowed to immigrate on a faster track than they can presently. Filipinos, Koreans, and other hard-working entrepreneurial groups, especially those like Mexicans who are Christian or of a Christian culture, should be given favorable immigration status.

Additionally, the US is facing a Tech Labor Brain Drain because Immigration Law is so bad. In the next ten to fifteen years the Baby Boomers will retire. There are not enough American college graduates with technical majors graduating every year to replace technically employed Baby Boomers at the same rate that they retire. This will prove to be a windfall for American tech workers over age 40, who are currently discriminated against in the workplace. At the same time, foreign college graduates with technical degrees from American colleges who want to contribute to the American economy are being made to wait so long to get green cards that they give up and move back to their home countries. Good news for their home countries. Bad news for the US.

It's not complicated.

Immigrants good. Illegals bad.
Entrepreneurialism good. Smuggling bad.

Enforce the good laws and fix the broken immigration law. We need Mexicans. We just don't need the aura of illegality that infests the current immigration mess.



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