by Randy
Schuyler
Greetings,
I am a white, middle-aged, college-educated male. On the other
hand, I’m fluent in French and Spanish, speak a fair
measure of Italian, some German and a little bit of Arabic.
I’m more xenophile than xenophobe. I live in Marina,
a little north of Monterey.
I fall into the silent majority: too busy doing my job, running
my business and managing my affairs to take to the streets
or even write many letters to lawmakers.
But as legions of illegal immigrants have taken to the streets,
it’s time a citizen got a word in, as well. Part of the
reason for this is because I’m really getting tired of
seeing Mexican flags, foreigners demanding their rights in
my country and signs that say “Si, se puede.” All
this says to me that these are not people who think of themselves
as Americans, but as Mexicans in America. “No. No se
puede aqui.”
That said, the whole thing is a mess, but one that demands a
solution. Since plenty of newspapers and lawmakers have opinions,
I thought I’d add mine.
Most of them are nice, hard-working people who are here just
because there is nothing for them in Mexico. And for that matter,
why does Vicente Fox keep getting a free pass from everybody?
His country is such a corrupt mess that nobody wants to live
there, yet he calls our policies a disgrace and scandal.
We need their labor, especially in farming, roofing, fast-food.
We can’t catch 11 million people, much less criminalize
them. We don’t have that many prisons.
Norteños, Surteños and the Mexican Mafia. Much
of the gang violence is Latino.
They overload hospitals and welfare systems.
They overload schools and drag down test results. How can it
be otherwise when children either have to be taught in Spanish
or have to be taught English before they can be taught anything
else?
Their need for housing puts huge price pressure on the housing
market. Older Americans like me make a killing, but younger
Americans are priced out of the market.
Having large enclaves of people who have more ethnic or religious
pride than they do national pride is a recipe for civil unrest
or civil war and you can see it all around the world.
How many people do we want in this country? How much water, how
much energy, how much of everything is there to go around?
How many cars on the roads? How much pollution? How much can
we afford? Ask India and China if more is better.
And for anybody who says these people will be funding the baby
boomers’ retirement, I suggest that when they reach critical
voting mass, they’ll change the laws to drastically reduce
retirement benefits. Why would poor young brown people want
to subsidize rich old white people?
The whole thing is a mess, but…...
Amnesty for 2.6 million in the mid-80s has left us with 11 million
in 2006. It encouraged people to come here and showed them
we didn’t really mean it about controlling our border.
I’m not sure we have any credibility left, but amnesty
for 11 million now is going to result in another huge surge.
I still like the border wall. I don’t believe the people
who say it won’t work. They don’t believe it themselves.
On the one hand, they say it doesn’t work. On the other
hand, they say it pushes border-crossers into the desert. It’s
true that hundreds of people in Africa are even hurling themselves
onto barbed-wire fences to get into a Spanish enclave and passage
to Europe, but that just means it’s holding back hundreds
of thousands.
Just today, on a radio show, I heard a proposal to tax remittances
wired south of the border to help offset our education and
health care costs. Another good idea.
If we just hand citizenship on a platter to a bunch of people
who came in the back door, that pretty well junks the system
for those coming in the front door.
So on the one hand, there should be a path to citizenship for
those who have lived here a long time and a crackdown on those
who haven’t. But that path shouldn’t be too easy.
I’ve heard talk of fines. That’s a possibility.
At minimum, they should have to be fluent in English. If they’ve
been here 20 years and still only speak Spanish, they should
still be sent home. Being American must not be important to
them. They should have to meet some of the requirements the
front-door people face, too.
Oh, and by the way, the law allowing babies born on American
soil to foreign parents to become American citizens should
be junked. What on earth was ever the rationale for that one,
anyway?
Then there’s the guest workers. How do you keep them from
melting into the countryside and becoming the next 11 million?
Maybe withhold their pay until they go home. Maybe tell them
that if they vanish, their families will be blacklisted from
ever entering the U.S. for any reason.
But there has to be a guest program. Much of the farming in this
country would vanish without foreign labor. Not wheat or corn,
but vegetables and fruits. We can’t afford that, either.
Food is as potent a weapon as any ICBM in the arsenal. A nation
that can’t produce its own food is at the mercy of one
that can.
There is not a country in the world that doesn’t enforce
its borders, including Mexico. It’s time we started enforcing
ours.
~Randy Schuyler
