Planet
of the Mexicans
 Well,
the Mexicans of LA are angry
again, and for the usual reason:
Immigration. Last week half a
million people marched through
downtown Los Angeles to protest
the suggestion that maybe there
are enough uneducated busboys,
dishwashers, domestic
housekeepers and fender and body
men to last for a while. Earlier
this week there was rioting on
school campuses over the same
issue. I respect protest, civil
and otherwise (I did my share of
both during the Vietnam War), but
I do have a couple of questions
for my fellow Angelenos of Latin
persuasion.
One
is why don't you organize 500,000
people to protest the War in
Iraq? Why does the Latino agenda
necessarily entail only parochial
Latino concerns? A successful
resolution of the immigration
question benefits only immigrants
and still leaves us with
overcrowded public schools and a
broken healthcare system. So how
is that good for all Angelenos?
But
the war in Iraq is of concern to
everyone, so why no angst over
that? Your son is not going to
die if his uncle cannot emigrate
from Mexico, but he may if he's
in the Marines right now.
Mainstreaming into a culture
means softening narrow interests
so as to benefit the whole of
society. This is not being done
by Los Mexicanos, and for some
reason it is insisted that it
needn't be done.
But
the destruction visited upon us
by George Bush's War is a far
more significant issue to the
country than immigration. So why
not march against the war? If one
is going to be in the boat, then
why don't we all row in the same
direction? Why the silence over
issues that affect not just
Latinos, but all Americans? Half
a million people in the streets
protesting would send a powerful
message. I know, because it
worked 35 years ago.
Another
question has to do with the
Mexican mantra that "white
people can't work". It used
to be that we couldn't jump. Now
we can't even survive. Our
children would go uncared for,
our homes would be filthy and all
of us would starve if not for
Third World intervention. As
such, how did our society ever
make it these last two centuries
without the Mexicans? I ask
you...
The
fact of the matter is, if we can
land men on the moon, then we can
mow our own lawns. We don't need
anyone to do anything for us. No
one helped us defeat the
prevailing world power to win
independence in the 18th Century;
no one helped us resolve the
tragedy of the Civil War in the
19th Century; nor the Great
Depression and the two World Wars
of the 20th Century. This may
come as a shock, but we
accomplished these feats without
Mexicans, as politically
incorrect a statement as that may
be. We Euro-Americans can also
work hard and be resourceful,
believe it or not
And
insisting that there are jobs
that would go unfulfilled is
insulting rubbish. We would do
them, and to suggest otherwise is
an exercise in a fallacious
premise. You want to help out?
Fine. But don't tell me we're
helpless without you. Our great
history disproves that. The only
thing we Americans need to
surmount any obstacle is each
other.
And,
pray tell, just what is the
advantage to a society to be
inundated with tens-of-millions
of unskilled and uneducated
people? The United States is of
the First World precisely because
we are not of the Third World. So
how does changing that benefit
us? The Statue of Liberty may
exhort us to accept "your
tired huddled masses", but
that's just poetic license, and
in any event, it surly has its
limits. After all, a third of the
worlds' population lives in
abject poverty. That's almost two
billion people! Should we
encourage the migration of those
huddled masses to our shores as
well?
I
don't think so, because it's
beginning to resemble a zero sum
game. Those who win displace
those who don't, and such
shouldn’t determine ones
destiny. It's dehumanizing, as
well as destructive to a vibrant
sophisticated culture. Working is
not the only human endeavor, and
really not even the most
important, and maintaining that
it is only justifies a very
narrow perspective (unlimited
immigration for employment
purposes) that is neither
rational nor constructive. (See
my article "Work" in
the April '05 issue of The
Noyse).
The
politically correct would label
me a racist, xenophobic,
intolerant, nativist bigot, which
is what the PC do when one
disagrees with them, this despite
the fact that not only am I a
life-long voting Democrat, but am
married to a Latina! So how
intolerant could I be?
But
those same name callers more than
likely send their children to
private schools and maintain
private health care. In
otherwords, they're unaffected by
the consequences of their efforts
to rescue the world’s
huddled masses who arrive en
masse. With children in LA public
schools, I am affected.
My
final question is, did we really
need this? Did we need to upset
the balance of the work place
with cheap exploited labor so as
to satisfy the bloated maw of the
beast of business? Capitalist
concerns should not be the
determining factor in our sense
of who we are. Those are false
values. And damaging a society in
pursuit of false values is a
death knell.
Crushing Third World
immigration contributes to this.
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