Sunday, November 9, 2008

Don't Fence Me In

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Gosh, that sounds pretty open-ended to me. But, then again, real first Americans didn’t erect it. Immigrants did.

And, now, we, a nation of immigrants, are building a fence between the United States and Mexico. A long fence, 2,000 miles. A big one. An expensive one. [And, just think: It can be electrified for as little as $362.0 million!]

Instead of debating and agreeing upon an immigration policy and setting realistic immigration limits, we want a fence to keep outsiders where they are, out. Fiscal conservatives, who are most often social conservatives, support the thing. No matter what the cost.

You hear the damnest things on the street.

Those who don’t like to spend tax dollars also don’t want no foreigners comin’ into our country unless they’re white Europeans. You know, the ones who look like us. And, now don’t you be going too far into Eastern Europe, because that’s where a lot of, well, you know, Muslims live. But, boy, them Croats and Serbs can sure play ball.

Oh, where have we recently invaded a country, those fleeing the melee we have unleashed must be bad. Don’t let ‘em. Yah never know.

OK immigrants


1. Anyone who looks to be of white Anglo-Saxon stock, although in times past we have taken a dim of Catholics, Irish and Germans. Right now, they’re OK.

2. Those wanting to come to the US from the Asian Subcontinent and the Pacific Rim are usually OK. Evidently their religions, Hindus, Buddhists and Shinto, is of no concern - - - they’re just smarter than the dickens. Computer geeks and forensic pathologists. [Oh, yeah. There was that Pearl Harbor thing and our internment camps . . .]

3. Chinese, although we’re getting’ nervous. We have a big debt. These folks could become the heavies when Beijing calls in the loans.

Not OK immigrants

1. Everyone else.

After all, the 19 hijackers of Middle Eastern descent who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon entered country legally and look at what happened.

Anyone from the western hemisphere who resides south of El Paso, Brownsville, San Diego.

They’re coming in hoards to take our jobs.



All of these folks are human beings. You think we are suffering because of the current recession and ailing financial markets? Walk a mile in these human beings shoes if you dare.

They are desparate.

The majority are unskilled and the ones, who are skilled, should be screened sufficiently in the hiring process to detect them. But, no. Businesses prey on these workers, in far too many cases, knowing employing them at a fraction of what they would pay a gringo, if a gringo would be interested in the job. And, costly benefits? Schmenifits.

Any idea as to how much $4.00 (US) a day means in Honduras? Guatemala?

They clean swimming pools and tend to the yards for bloated executives bailing out of Lehman Brothers. They make up beds. They work in the sweltering heat picking our food and cleaning up after us. And, then they disappear, for the night, fearful their dream will snatched away.

And, here all along, I thought we didn’t like fences and walls. After all, the “communies” built the Berlin Wall and fenced off eastern Europe ostensibly to keep western Europe from invading. Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the wall and the eastern Europeans (white in color, of course) did just that.

In a effort to save money on labor, we’ve given the world of the “good life” through free trade agreements. Until we send them more, they’re just aren’t enough to go around. And, so they come.

American workers, mostly white-collar, are seemingly caught in the midst of paradoxical thinking of the American business community. It argues that guest worker programs will keep jobs here and save jobs from being offshored. In reality, those programs are used to transfer knowledge and jobs overseas. The business community suggests, on the one hand, that outsourcing is good, and, then, on the other, uses the threat of outsourcing to effect immigration policy.

Seems like the faster we legally let them in, the faster we lose jobs to other countries.

What really is a tragedy is that we did not erect “fences” around ill-conceived free trade policies and treaties that resulted in the outsourcing and offshoring of hundreds of thousands of jobs that American workers actually wanted.

2 comments:

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Anonymous said...

I am not sure what the previous comment has to do with this writing, but I guess that home based jobs are more difficult to ship overseas. If the NAFTA agreements were more popular, maybe the fences would not have to be built because maybe more people could work in their own country. We are so angry with the jobs that go overseas, maybe we should do something about getting better educated so we do a better job of competing to keep the jobs here in the US - cheapest isn't always best. SG