In the 1970s, perhaps a few million illegals resided in the United States, and their unassimilated presence went largely unnoticed. Most Americans felt that the formidable powers of integration and popular culture would continue to incorporate any distinctive ethnic enclave, as they had so successfully done with the past generations that arrived en masse from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But when more than 10 million fled Mexico in little over a decade—the great majority poor, without English, job skills, a high school education, and legality—entire apartheid communities in the American Southwest began springing up.
During the heyday of multiculturalism and political correctness in the 1980s, the response of us, the hosts, to this novel challenge was not to insist upon the traditional assimilation of the newcomer but rather to accommodate the illegal alien with official Spanish-language documents, bilingual education, and ethnic boosterism in our media, politics, and education. These responses only encouraged more illegals to come, on the guarantee that their material life could be better and yet their culture unchanged in the United States. We now see the results. Los Angeles is today the second-largest Mexican city in the world; one out of every ten Mexican nationals resides in the United States, the vast majority illegally.
[…]
In my own experience, the slow progress made in rural California since the 1950s of my youth—in which the county inspected our farm’s rural dwellings, eliminated the once-ubiquitous rural outhouse, shut down substandard housing, and fined violators in hopes of providing a uniform humane standard of residence for all rural residents—has been abandoned in just a few years of laissez-faire policy toward illegal aliens. My own neighborhood is reverting to conditions common about 1950, but with the insult of far higher tax rates added to the injury of nonexistent enforcement of once-comprehensive statutes. The government’s attitude at all levels is to punish the dutiful citizen’s misdemeanors while ignoring the alien’s felony, on the logic that the former will at least comply while the latter either cannot or will not.
Fairness about who is allowed into the United States is another issue that reflects class divides—especially when almost 70 percent of all immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive from Mexico alone. Asians, for example, are puzzled as to why their relatives wait years for official approval to enter the United States, while Mexican nationals come across the border illegally, counting on serial amnesties to obtain citizenship.
These class divisions cut both ways, and they help explain the anomaly of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page mandarins echoing the arguments of the elite Chicano studies professors. Both tend to ridicule the far less affluent Minutemen and English-only activists, in part because they do not experience firsthand the problems associated with illegal immigration but instead find millions of aliens grist for their own contrasting agendas. Indeed, every time an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm or construction company alike most likely lose a constituent.
[…]
[T]his spring Americans witnessed millions of illegal aliens who not only were unapologetic about their illegal status but were demanding that their hosts accommodate their own political grievances, from providing driver’s licenses to full amnesty. The largest demonstrations—held on May Day, with thousands of protesters waving Mexican flags and bearing placards depicting the communist insurrectionist Che Guevara—only confirmed to most Americans that illegal immigration was out of control and beginning to become politicized along the lines of Latin American radicalism. I chronicled in Mexifornia the anomaly of angry protesters waving the flag of the country they vehemently did not wish to return to, but now the evening news beamed these images to millions. In short, the radical socialism of Latin America, seething in the angry millions who flocked to support Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Mexico’s Andrés López Obrador, had now seemingly been imported into our own largest cities.
Read the whole thing.
Previous: : A Global Village fortifies.
Multiculturalism and political correctness has and continues to take its toll on Canada with an ever increasing degradation of what were once but are no longer traditional Canadian culture and values. Similar to southern American cities, Canadian cities like Toronto have their own enclaves of refugees/immigrants (all soon to be citizens) where conditions similar as those currently found in California exist. Making mention of these facts is of course very un-Canadian and very politically incorrect. Therefore I want to appologize to everybody about everything as every good Canadian must do day in and day out to escape being labelled as a racist and bigot.
There are other perils inherent in illegal migrant invasion of the south west. To be sure ethnic ghettoization, racism, militacy and crime are one result….but we are seeing new resistant strains of old diseases that we once thought we had under control resufacing in the areas illegals populate….such as Tuberculosis, Hepatitis A-E and even leprosy.
It may seem cold but isolation areas like Ellis Island did serve a greater purpose…and to this day medial certification of fitness is still a part of US immigration policy ( and should be)…disease control is skirted by the criminal invasion of US borders by illegal migrants.
“every time an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm or construction company alike most likely lose a constituent.”
There’s the rub. Illegal immigration is encouraged by owners of sweat shop industries…Illegal workers breaking wage standards and working for much less than a local US citizen goes right to bottom line profitability…these sweat shop industrialists are most likely all GOP members and patrons.
Therefore it is no surprise to me that the Bush GOPs dropped their pants and issued Illegal immigration amnesties ( Guest worker) programs rather than doing what the law and constitution dictate in protecting national border sovereignty.
As mentioned in the article, if the government will arbitrarily give a pass to criminal entry and residence in the US…what does that make a legal US citizenship worth? It devalues citizenship and constitutionally compromises the government doing it.
With the amount of civil strife and public expense being caused by America’s estimated 27 million illegals, round up and deportation would have been the cheaper route…that’s if the GOP feds were at all fiscally and constitutionally responsible.
The only people with deep satidfied grins in this whole sorry mess are the American sweat shop owners and the corrupt Mexical oligarchy who are dumping their problems into America.
the Cons better start building the 49th parallel fence, else we too will be swamped by …..
Multiculturalism or assimilation? That’s an easy one, I’m afraid, political correctness be damned. A large mass of un-assimilated immigrants is bad for economic and social reasons, and the ghettos that usually result are breeding grounds for all sorts of sectarian bull—-. Our ancestors knew better, but of course they did not have the benefit of a modern progressive education. We are not creating charming little outposts of the global village in our midst, full of smiling happy people who hold hands singing “We Are the World,” but a lot of nasty little ghettos full of people who don’t know how to talk to anyone except themselves, or how to move out into the broader society where they could better themselves, and us.
California is a case in point. Of course the Mexicans come here because they want work. Of course they’re used as a cheap source of labor by businesses. What’s revolting about this is the way the whole subject’s been politically conceptualized by the left: undocumented workers, my arse, to say nothing of the cravenness of the political and chattering classes who beak off about tolerance and propose mass amnesties, as if either of those would address the basic question of how to control the borders.
Much of America’s success is owing to its history of assimilating immigrants and creating a sense of collective identity around the idea of personal liberty and the rule of law. Abandoning that now would be folly.
AJ said: “the Cons better start building the 49th parallel fence, else we too will be swamped by ….”
Go to Google
Google “nafta superhighway”
go to the Jerome Corsi article
click on the map to enlarge
Take note of the starting point and termination point and direction flow of this planned super corridor which is designed to take large volumes goods and “workers” from one destination to another within North America.
Now, calculate a domestic union wage for any given trade…go to the Mexican trades commission and look up the wage structure for the same trade in Mexico…calculate the difference…now consider that difference to be what labor intensive industry hopes to pocket with “labor migration” in the North American Union (which is a policy agenda that is sheculed to follow the completion of the NAFTA super highway trade corridor and the finalization of the SPP government departmental integration.
Better yet visit the SW US and talk to some trades people and ask where the wage structure for labor and task-oriented jobs has gone in the last 10 years of illegal Mexican labor invasion…then ask if taxes and living costs have gone down proportionately.
I think Alberta roughnecks may get a pass from the cheap Mex labor invasion….seems Eddie and the boys can’t get it up here fast enough so are inclined to importing Red Chinese labor to fill the roster on the sands projects.
Hasta la vista Canadian labor standards here comes La Raza!
Two points:
1. “United we stand divided we fall” has served us well, but that is gone now. Multiculturalism has destroyed it so it now safe to say. “Our diversity is our weakness”.
2. The upside is that the Mexicans rushing the souther border of the US do not possess the liberal education diploma … they are all old fashioned Christians. They will not be the saps we have become and MAY NOT BE WILLING TO TOLERATE THE MUSLIM ELEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA!
One can only hope.
Consider also Mexico’s role in this illegal immigration. It does not have to provide jobs, housing, city infrastructures etc for millions of Mexicans. However, it benefits enormously from their illegal work in the US, because they send billions of dollars back into Mexico.
In fact, it has become very easy to send those wages – untaxed wages – back to Mexico, as the Mexican banks set up easy wire transfers etc.
These Mexican illegals, working in the US, paying no taxes, sending billions back to Mexico – are of enormous financial benefit to Mexico – which doesn’t have to provide jobs or infrastructures of housing, schools, hospitals for them. All of that is provided for them in the US.
AND, Mexico doesn’t have to provide jobs for their dependents in Mexico – because the Mexican dependents are kept by the illegals in the US. So, these people spend that money in Mexico. Money that comes from untaxed wages in the US. And Mexico, again, doesn’t have to provide jobs for either the dependents or the workers. And, it doesn’t have to provide schools, hospitals etc, for the illegals.
No,wlmr, I don’t believe that all the employers are ‘friends of Bush’ or Republicans. That’s irrelevant.
What is important is the financial drain on the US taxpayer who has to provide the infrastructure of these illegals, the abuse of the US by the Mexican gov’t, and the absolute unfairness to valid immigrants and the US taxpayer.
Mexico’s main source of hard currency and jobs, crude oil, is now in full decline, so you can expect this problem to only get worse in the next few years.
Unless the US gov’t makes serious efforts to seal the border (complete the wall and enforce it with round-the-clock guards) you can expect the minutemen to ‘take care of business’. It could get ugly.
Mexico is Afghanistan of America.
If the drug cartels were not given free reign to run half the Mexican economy, then industry would locate there in droves, providing jobs and incentives for Mexicans to work at home.
The Mexican government and police corruption is a disgrace. Conditions could be worlds better in Mexico if things were run decently. It is a holiday paradise, after all.
WE, the USA and Canada are making illegal immigration worse with the corn biofuel stupidity.
Corn derived biofuels are vastly more expensive than we may realize.
How practical is a fuel source that creates dietary and financial hardship for millions of Mexicans and South Americans who rely on the corn tortilla staple food?
What is the true price of corn based fuel when it pushes up the price of beef and hogs?
If ya can*t buy cheap tortillas in Mexico, where ya gonna go?
Fools rush in.. eh? = TG
…the only thing keeping Canada/Alberta from being flooded by illegal’s or immigrants is our weather.
One of my neighbours work up at Ft.Mac as an electrician and how Suncor was bringing in labourers from Malaysia and places like that by the planeload.
He was talking to some of the bus drivers who pick them up at Edmonton Int’ and say about literally half will turn around and get back on the plane for home when they feel the first blast of cold air in January.
ET saidL “No,wlmr, I don’t believe that all the employers are ‘friends of Bush’ or Republicans. That’s irrelevant.”
It is relevant…it means there is a bipartisan agenda to allow this crap to continue….and Bus betrayed conservatives/republicans and constitutionalists by dropping his pants on the illegal migrant problem…ferkissake he’s from Texas and knows damn well what the social risks are and the taxpayer burden is from illegal migrants….but in the politically connected elite circles of Texas gentry ( both Dem and Republican) who have vast corporate farms and cash cropping interests it’s nice to have cheap Mex (wetback) labor come harvest…so we know exactly where Bush’s loyalties lay on the issue ir sure isn’t with the burdened tax payer who is subsidizing the cheap labor on corporate farms…..directily in line with the Dems.
I might have read somewhere that remittances from Mexican illegals working in the U.S. is Mexicos’ third-largest source of revenue, maybe it was the second, after oil.
Also reminds me of a company I worked for that tried a Mexican branch operation years back. It failed, and I was told one of the small cultural signs of the inevitable failure was that the company could not keep stocks of cutlery in the company cafeteria. The workers just kept stealing it all, who knows for home use, friends, relatives or maybe to sell as scrap metal. They had to switch to plastic disposables.
WL Mackenzie Redux is right: the buck stops with the government and the employers of illegal immigrants. Quite simply, this pool of labour is utilized to keep wages down. Moreover, working people,ie. the taxpayers, are subsidizing the social costs related to illegal immigrants while many businesses profit from using these very same illegal workers.
lberia says: “WL Mackenzie Redux is right: the buck stops with the government and the employers of illegal immigrants. Quite simply, this pool of labour is utilized to keep wages down. Moreover, working people,ie. the taxpayers, are subsidizing the social costs related to illegal immigrants while many businesses profit from using these very same ilegal workers.”
Take a bow, lberia, this is likely to be the most sensible thing you will ever post on the net. Well stated.
Wrong, Bob. The “buck” stops with the people who allow their government to get away with it. Last time I checked, the US was a democracy. It’s government for the people, BY the people.
Re: Los Angeles is today the second-largest Mexican city in the world. Seems unlikely. The populartion of LA is 3.8 million, of which 1.8 million are of”Hispanic or Latin” dscent. Guadalajara’s population is 1.6 million. Are we to believe that only 10% Hispanics in LA are Americans? I don’t…
Re: “untaxed wages.” The Social Security system is solvent in large part because illegals pay this tax, and can never receive benefits. Illegals are almost always in a tax bracket in which they would pay no income tax in any case, but they often pay FICA.
Neither of these facts, of course, means that the US immigration system is not seriously broken. It is nearly impossible for a Polish family to visit Disney World on vacation, very difficult for a high-tech company to hire a qualified foreigner, and there is no mechanism to fill menial jobs. Whenever a bureaucracy stands athwart economic reality, it must be brutal to succeed.
WLM Reducks
******Better yet visit the SW US and talk to some trades people *******
if someone can find such a animal let me know, as I would like to meet them, as their “trades people” down there always reminded me of unskilled, uneducated illegals
As a matter of fact, there is powerful resistance to our present immigration fiasco. One presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo, Republican Congressman from Colorado, is runnng entirely and specifically on the immigration issue.
In addition to the Minutemen, there are a number of lobbying organizations, like FAIR, and others who daily resist this imposed illegality on the American people.
In states and in cities, there are activities that attempt to block illegals from renting and working in certain communities. Right next to me in Farmers Branch, a suburb of Dallas, people are presently trying to do just that.
The resistance to illegal aliens coming across our southern border and creating problems for us is strong and robust.
And that is why this whole thing is a little crazy.
Something like 85% of the American people want the illegal situation to be taken care of. And yet in the face of this our politicians continue to posture and resist the will of the American people. Why?
All of the congressmen and senators have powerful corporate citizens in their states and districts who want cheap, illegal labor. These corporate entities create a lot of economic activity in these states and districts.
Conservatives have been so busy in the post-Reagan era promoting capitalism that we actually got faked into believing that American corprations’ aims and our aims were the same.
However, defining America as simply the place that is benign to shareholder value is to define America too narrowly.
We have a lot of goals and ideas that have to be understood and expressed above and beyond making money.
Additionally there is another cynical and chilling ploy going on among our political class.
President Bush wants to nationalize 12 to 20 million illegal aliens in the United States. This would solved the problem technically, because the illegals would become legal.
Leaving aside cultural and criminal matters for the moment, politicians have invented government programs they wish to fund. In order to do this they need taxpayers.
So government sees making illegals into citizens as a cynical way to create millions of new taxpayers who have obligations to fund the political programs that politician have invented.
We have entered a realm in which human beings are simply seen as fodder to keep politicians from having to change programs, because those programs now have protection from political constituencies.
This is harmful in so many ways, I cannot begin to address it. Programs should be ended and reformed inevitably as their usefulness changes. Human resources are at bottom human beings who deserve to be seen as something more than cogs in the socio-economic machinery.
Last Wed/Thurs apparently Stelmach et al were meeting with the Feds and reps. of both U.S./Mexico (or perhaps only the Feds – we don’t really know yet) about the supplying of bulk water. Nothing seems to be coming out yet, not even speculating on where this might be going.
Apparently we have already given away the farm to the South as regards bottled water via NAFTA (or whatever) and now it seems time to wholesale bulk water – water which we ourselves are starting to see dwindling in supply.
The patch is doing for AB exactly what the Wal Marts of the south have/are doing for illegal immigration in US/Mex. It all starts with the best of intentions but ends up with the Big Business generally winning – with enough savings going to the public at large to keep them from protesting to loud.
The wake up call comes when the cultural fabric has gone to hell, the schools are full of ESL students that take up disproportionate funding, the country is full of illegals who either remain/have children born here to back door citizenship, etc., etc. with far to many likely to end up on pogey.
Big Business/The Patch will become the major lobby groups for “no such thing as an illegal” and on it goes. They will have taken their profit, the landscape will look like a war zone, ground water supply will probably contaminated with who knows what – and the Oil execs/equipment will be off to Sask to do the very same thing.
Of course we need development but I hope Sask is a little more savvy about how they go about “giving away” their share of oil/gas – and they have a lot of it. In far to many ways, the Klein “progressive” conservatives have squandered billions by allowing bargain basement prices to oil companies while at the same time allowing our infra-structure to deteriorate to the point where we a likely going right back into debt in a big way.
It astounds me where the younger Boomers are these days who are standing by quietly and apparently unconcerned about where life is heading for their own children/grandchildren. Then again, they represent the “me” generation who want it all now and are happy to partake of low consumer prices based on illegals/offshore workers while basically allowing our culture to wither without thinking about the why of it.
Retaining the cultural fabric costs hard cash (not product made by cheap homeland labor) and intestinal fortitude to make it work. Generally the Boomers are a product of “the group is all”. They lack the will/the guts to act alone – even if they believe it is the right thing to do. They are now in the power positions, trained in universities where it was all about your “mark will be a group mark” and individualism is not easily tolerated, extreme political correctness is a given, and doing the necessary “networking” to ensure the grades to get into Grad Studies is the norm.
How do we change things. Get the Alberta Party up and running for the election next year and replace the remaining “progressive” (read red tory) elements that are still in power politically. Many of them were sidelined during the leadership race but its time to make a wholesale change. The caretaker group doesn’t have the jam to fight for AB against the Feds and Stelmach has said as much publicly.
After his $450 a plate dinner for 1750 faithful, one has to wonder if much of anything is really going to change.
To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact — on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration. By making it possible for American farmers to sell their crops abroad for considerably less than it costs to grow them, the farm bill helps determine the price of corn in Mexico and the price of cotton in Nigeria and therefore whether farmers in those places will survive or be forced off the land, to migrate to the cities — or to the United States. The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since Nafta is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico’s eaters as well as its farmers.) You can’t fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico.
That’s what I do. I causes so many problems in so many parts of the world, hardly anyone understands any more what my effects are. Even for people who say they hate me, the trouble that I cause will get them howling for me to grow, grow, grow and for every violation of people’s rights spawn a dozen new violations. There’s nothing wrong with farmers selling out and moving to cities, but of course I’m there already, just waiting to make trouble for them.
I cause trouble in Mexico, Mexicans cause trouble for America, America causes more trouble for Mexicans, more trouble for Americans … as long as they keep demanding that I “do something”, everybody (who gets a paycheque from me) wins.
MULTICULERRALISM,POLITCAL CORRCTNESS a new form of evil in america this can be summoned in one word SOCALISM thats what these evil PC Multiculterarlists want STAMP OUT MULTICULTERALISM,STAMP OUT PC STAMP OUT ILLEGAL IMAGRATION STAMP OUT THE UN STAMP OUT THE CFR
wlmc what an asshat. i suppose there are no rich democrats running businesses in the us. where do you think all the rich libs live? california must have a few of them. man you are something else, i am not sure what just yet.
wlmc what an asshat. i suppose there are no rich democrats running businesses in the us. where do you think all the rich libs live? california must have a few of them. man you are something else, i am not sure what just yet. paul, every dollar generated by an illegal costs tha us 28 dollars.
I live in Arizona — more accurately classified as Far East LA. For me, the matter of illegal immigrants, or the more PC “undocumented aliens”, is not just an angry article in your local newspaper. It is my life. I seethe anger every day at the predicament my government has put me and my family in.
Every document from voting ballot to grocery ad is subtitled in Spanish. I can no longer understand the spoken word when I visit my corner store or fast food restaurant. My tax dollars send the offspring of these illegal aliens to school while I also pay to send MY child to a private school where he can actually LEARN something — the curriculum at the local public school has been so dumbed down to accommodate the ESLs that the white kid, who is now in the stark minority, can barely pass the required proficiency exams (which have also been dumbed down so the illegals can pass those and graduate…).
The United States is a nation of immigrants — my ancestors came here in the late 1800’s from Germany; my husband’s family in the early 1900’s from Sicily. They did so with the proper documentation and went through the process of becoming a US citizen. Legally. And with pride. Pride that encouraged them to learn English, to pay their taxes and to reap the benefits of same (well, that may go a bit far but I’m trying to make a point here…). My point is, if you want to better your life and the lives of your children, the doors are open. But that means that you want to become an American — with all the benefits and responsibilities that that status entails. Don’t come here and bleed my country dry and bog down the education systems I spend my hard-earned money funding.
What I find extremely troubling is that these illegals can afford to drive nicer cars, live in bigger houses and spend more time with their families than I can. Then, the gang-banging little heathens paint their graffiti all over the fences and walls of those beautiful neighborhoods, drive down property values until all the decent people move out and more derelicts move in. Ghettos are springing up in neighborhoods of 3,000+ square foot homes!!
I’ve had it!! I’m going to pack up my family, tie a taco to the antenna of my truck and drive north. The first place we get to where someone points to my antenna and says “What’s that?”, that’s where we’ll live.