Molly Ivins: Immigration 101

Immigration 101 for beginners and non-Texans.

In 1983, I was a judge at the Terlingua Chili Cookoff, and my memory of the events may not be perfect -- for example, for years I've been claiming Jimmy Carter was president at the time, but that's the kind of detail one often loses track of in Terlingua.

Anyway, it was '83 or some year right around there when we held The Fence climbing contest. See, people talked about building The Fence back then, too. The Fence along the Mexican border. To keep Them out.

At the time, the proposal was quite specific -- a 17-foot cyclone fence with bob wire at the top. So a test fence was built at Terlingua, and the First-Ever Terlingua Memorial Over, Under or Through Mexican Fence Climbing Contest took place. Prize: a case of Lone Star beer. Winning time: 30 seconds.

I tell this story to make the one single point about the border and immigration we know to be true: The Fence will not work. No fence will work. The Great darn Wall of China will not work. Do not build a fence. It will not work. They will come anyway. Over, under or through.

more...

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=20578

If we would ENFORCE the laws on the books, those jobs would dry up. We apparently love cheap shit so much, however, and we bow down so low in reverence to corporations, that we're not interested in enforcing the laws, so, we get more and more and more illegals.

Perhaps some day in the far future when "globalization" has reached every country and wages have risen and stabilized around the world, workers will stop moving from country to country.

Not in my lifetime.

Immigration and globalization...

Read this publication and recoil in horror as I did.

www.iie.com/publications/chapters_preview/331/5iie3284....

The IIE board includes David Rockefeller, Harvard President Larry Summers and long-time Rockefeller agents Paul Volcker and Pete Peterson. These guys are globalists (New World Order types) in case you didn't know.

This file is copy protected so I cannot cut and paste. What they more or less propose is integrating the US, Canada and Mexico. I heard a report on CNN that said they hope to accomplish this by 2010. They said there would be new governing bodies. First is the North American Commision to be appointed by government, but independent of government (you know...no oversight and probably more or less secret...like CIFIUS). These guys are the planners.

Then they propose making a group called the North American Parliamentary Group (NAPG) which would be comprised of legislators from all three countries. That sounds icky to me.

They also suggest a new currency, the "Amero". You guys will see...the dollar will collapse like it did in the late '70s. Fuel, gold, silver and other commodities will go through the roof in the next year. I suspect this new currency will be introduced to 'save the day'. Never mind that fiat currency is a way to steal wealth from the people who don't understand the system of money, wealth and finance (as the Rockefellars do).

Globalization is the same as the New World Order. Slowly but surely, they don't want individual countries. Once there's a world government, with today's technology, they can impose a world tyranny that will be hard to beat. I believe that's their aim, but they have to break America down first. They need to keep making us more poor and less educated. They have to reduce wages. They need to encourage Mexican immigration. You see, US citizens don't want to merge with Mexico, so in order to merge us, they're encouraging Mexicans to relocate!! Vincente Fox is doing exactly that (with the back door blessings of our power elite).

So, this isn't just about cheap labor and corporations. Its way way more insidious. Its about the undoing of America and taking away our sovereign status as an independent country. Canada has similarly been sold out (and with a little googling, you'll see many are unhappy about it). Heck, Quebec doesn't even want to be part of Canada, how are they going to cope with being part of the US and Mexico too!!

The new world order is real. I'm just not convinced they're devil worshipers (which is what the conspiracy web pages alledge).

I started a thread earlier this week and have been keeping my eye on it ever since: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=2537656 Replies #12 and 16 in particular.

I couldn't get to the document you referenced - is there a title I can search by?

Edit for spelling and link

have you googled 'SPP' yet?

Edit to add: I've got to print this to read. Just think w is in Cancun right now with at least 15 CEOs and most people think it's about the border and immigration...

The IIE board includes David Rockefeller

but we do have Molly Irvin's.

She should be the next recipient of a DU Rose Attack.

I was very pleased to see that she and Tony Lewis (former NYTimes columnist) won lifetime achievement journalism awards from Hunter College.

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/news/newsreleases/2006/aronsonlifetime.shtml

...because even though some journalists include Fox's failures in the list of issues surrounding this, many don't.

"They will come anyway. Over, under or through..."

Yeah, well they wouldn't if they had something worth staying home for.

Great article as always.

More right wing twisted values. Since when did hate become a family value?

think "us" versus "them" and "they" soon become hated. Gotta protect "my" family from the indians, the commies, the illegals, the infected, the body-snatched...

if we really just said don't worry about it then we wouldn't bother with checking for drug traffickers, "real" terrorists (whatever those are), sought-after violent criminals (of both nationalities), and people who are moving bales of U.S. cash into Mexico for whatever reason.

If we're going to address border porosity then we do have to do it humanely, but we have to address it. Why is it we're okay with driving wages down here when the alternative would be to encourage driving wages up there?

Why aren't we doing that if we're so humanitarian? A border, even with a nominal fence and humane boundaries and standards, is not a barrier. It's an idea.

It's not about "us" and "them"; it's about the disparity between "ours" and "theirs" economic systems. The idea of opening the borders in Europe involved having a plan to normalize their economies and standardize their currencies so that while people from poorer countries would be uplifted, people from wealthier regions would not be impoverished and resentful and unproductive. It's still a rocky ride, but there are standards and they are actually working on it and fine tuning it in Europe.

We have no such plan here that does anything but benefit corporate interests and that leaves real people, both sides of the border and both legal, illegal, American and Mexican in a position of economic conflict.

and allows foreigners to own real estate and significant assets in Mexico without fear of re-patriation/nationalization of assets and if Mexico actually starts requiring and enforcing a fair minimum wage IN MEXICO, changes its manufacturing and labor standards and tries to raise its national standard of living, fewer people will be in such a rush to come here.

I know I'm being simplistic, but there are other factors than just the U.S. enforcing its own laws on illegal immigrants to put them back out after they've gotten in.

I don't agree with the fence thing - you have to have some demarcation even if it's nominal, and you have to patrol it. If those are our values then that's where we have to put our effort.

Leaving the bank vault open and waiting to arrest anyone who enters is not an option Molly, although I love ya dearly and agree with you on most everything else.

I'm not sure about this, but if US citizens were allowed to freely invest in Mexican real estate, I think it would be a really bad thing. Imagine the house flipping mania that would result. Absentee US landlords would expect the Policia to protect their investments and turn out delinquent renters. Housing prices and costs would be going up more than 100% a year as speculative bubble chaser real estate pros and novice investors from the US and Europe sold flip houses back and forth to each other. The only good I can think of is if they taxed the holy sh!t out of the landowners.

making it so bad for everyone surviving in USA that no one will want to come. As it is, too many in USA live worse than slaves because of the concerted efforts of the GOP.

Don't tear down the fence, tear down the system!


Bush Lied. People Died. Media Cheered.

It seem to me that the Cubans are welcomed with open arms and the Mexicans are told to go home,Could it be that the Cubans are more likely to vote republican and the Mexicans likely to vote democrat?.

Are you coming to the US for economic reasons or for political asylum? If its asylum, take one step forward. Economic, two steps back. And those of you fleeing a dictatorship: is it socialist or fascist? If its socialist, take two steps forward. Fascist, well, you get the idea. And if your reason for coming here is economic, are you a "skilled" or unskilled laborer? These are the considerations which make it easier for some groups to come to the US than others. And then there are quotas. From what I hear, the quotas on Mexican nationals were filled long time ago.

Illegal immigrants pose perhaps the most puzzling political questions today. What are we as a society supposed to do about these people who have entered America illegally? This question tears me up inside. Part of me thinks that they broke the law and should be deported immediately. Another part of me thinks that if I was a Mexican who couldn't afford to feed his family because the laisse-faire capitalism that exists there prevents the establishment of a middle class and because I have no prospects for employment and because there are very few social programs in Mexico to help the poor then I would make a run for the border just like the millions of others that have already done so. Loitering outside of a Home Depot in San Diego or El Paso looking for a days work beats the hell out of watching my kids pick through trash cans for food on the other side of the border.

I think the real crime taking place here isn't being perpetrated by these poor Mexicans who are swimming across the Rio Grande, or the Asians who are being shipped here in cargo containers. I think the real criminals are the Americans that hire these people and pay them next to nothing to do jobs that other Americans supposedly wouldn't do. Well other Americans wouldn't do these landscaping jobs, these cleaning service jobs, they wouldn't pick fruit and vegetables....it's true, they wouldn't, at least not for the $2-$3 an hour that the illegals are getting paid, they might for a few bucks more. What about the union construction worker who makes $15 an hour in Albuquerque? He's getting screwed because his scumbag boss is laying him off and hiring 3 illegal workers in his place. The illegal immigrants are getting screwed because they're being exploited by these greedy bastards. They have no benefits other than their low pay. Alas, I'm sure it's better being poor in Brownsville than it is in Tijuana.

President Bush wants to allow Mexicans to come here as "guest workers." These guest workers would have no path to permanent residency or citizenship, and their employers would not be obliged to pay them minimum wage. Ok, so the price of grapes and strawberries stay low if this program passes through Congress, but where does this guest worker program go next? Could it be possible that computer technicians will be imported from India to temporarily work for Microsoft in Seattle and be paid $8 an hour? Might there be temporary workers from Vietnam assembling Chevys in Michigan for $5.15 an hour. Multinational companies have the most to gain here; they'd import cheap labor, eliminate the cost of fringe benefits and lay Americans off. This would be free trade run amok. That's what I think this whole illegal immigrant debate is about. It's about lowering wages for American workers, it's about Bush and his cronies fulfilling their dream of eliminating the middle class.

We should do what we've been doing about illegal immigration up until this point, try half-heartedly to enforce the laws we already have. I beleive that any other solution will lead to the further decline and downfall of the American middle class. I don't want to lose my job to a guest worker, I don't want to pay double or triple for my wine and strawberries, and I definitely don't want to look a Mexican man, a fellow human being, and a fellow father in the eye and tell him that he has to go back to Mexico and send his kids back to the dumpsters to find food.

A very good post there! :toast: