Jumping on immigration bandwagon ill advised

About the so-called immigration debate, I’m pretty sick of it – the presidential candidates trying to outdo one another by being tough on illegal immigrants. The problem is, every time one of them makes a fiery, impassioned promise to rid our nation of those illegal aliens, they get thunderous applause, which further fans the flames of demagoguery. And a candidate who refuses to engage in inflammatory language is reviled for it.

Furthermore, somehow I got on the e-mail-forwarding bandwagon of immigration bellyaching, which as far as I can tell is thinly disguised hatred of Mexicans. I am really disheartened by these e-mail campaigns and even more so by TV and radio hosts spewing such stuff: They are taking American jobs, they are ruining our economy, they refuse to speak English, they’re causing a crime wave – the accusations go on and on. Face it. The inflammatory language is aimed primarily at border-crossers along our southern edges, with little worry expressed about Mafia toughs or sex slaves smuggled in from Eastern Europe, or human cargo stuffed in shipping containers from Asia to be sold as slaves, or fanatics who come in from Saudi Arabia to preach death to America or organize radical student organizations on American campuses. The send-’em-back rhetoric is mostly aimed at Mexicans.

I want to preface the next few paragraphs with the statement – and please pay attention – that I have never heard even one illegal immigrant use the following as a justification for illegally crossing the border. I can only conclude that Mexicans don’t know history any better than we do. What is presently Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California was once Mexico. We took it away from them by force in something called the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which was settled by the coercive Treaty of Hidalgo ceding 55 percent of Mexico’s territory to the U.S. It started over Texas. American settlers who had moved into the territory revolted against Mexico in 1835, declaring themselves to be an independent state. (Remember the Alamo?) Later, when the independent state of Texas decided to join the United States, Mexico got peeved because it was distrustful of the expansionism of the U.S. It feared where it might lead, fears that turned out to be justified.

Border dispute skirmishes eventually led to outright border battles. U.S. armies marched south and west, capturing territory, then we sailed into the Gulf and our armies marched into Mexico City and laid siege on their capital. With Mexico’s military arm twisted behind their backs, we insisted on taking over half of their country. There were some war protesters at the time, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But our government and the majority of Americans fervently believed in manifest destiny, a doctrine that declared that God had deeded the whole of the continent to us, from sea to shining sea, and I guess the Rio Grande. And if we had to take it by force, well, so be it. God was on our side. We already had Texas, and now we took the area that would become New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. We must have felt guilty about it, because we later paid $15 million as compensation for the seized territory.

So, if you want to look at it that way, you could say that Mexicans are sneaking across a questionable border into territory that was once their country.

Of course, you can’t turn back time. Nations grab territory from other nations all the time. Generations pass, and people forget what the old maps looked like. By the way, somehow it’s OK for governments to do it. If individual citizens take things that don’t belong to them, they go to jail, or, in certain parts of the world, get their hands cut off. As a child I didn’t understand why it was morally acceptable for governments to steal when it wasn’t right for individuals to do so. I still don’t understand it.

By the way, when we took over Mexican territory, we forgot something. We failed to rename cities such as San Antonio, El Paso, Santa Fe, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to list a few. For all those who resent seeing Spanish signs in neighborhood butcher stores or hearing choice No. 2 in voice mail trees, I propose they start thinking of gringo names for the cities in our great American Southwest.

But it’s the scapegoating that should bother us the most. The minute you hear someone blame the border-crossers for our economic woes, let it be known it is not those illegal aliens who are causing the current recession – those workers who are picking our tomatoes and oranges, looking after our children, building our homes, mowing our lawns, or busing our favorite restaurant’s tables. It’s the greed of the subprime mortgage lenders who gutted our financial institutions, requiring bailouts from China and Arab oil states; it’s the credit card companies that push “easy” credit on our college-age children; the automakers who’ve dragged their feet in redesigning for the new age, thereby ceding the auto industry to other countries; it’s the American companies outsourcing jobs overseas or creating sham offshore “headquarters” to avoid paying taxes. Who are the real aliens to our American way of life?

That does not mean we shouldn’t find a way to regulate our borders or work to make the immigration process fair, economically responsible and workable. Our immigration policies are inexcusably bad, but scapegoating needs to stop.

When I hear it, I get this uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, a gnawing recognition that we’ve seen this before, this blaming economic woes on a group considered “foreign.” It happened not in my lifetime, but in the lifetime of my parents’ generation, a scapegoating frenzy gone so awry, so evil, that it took the courage and blood of America’s “Greatest Generation” invading Normandy to stop it. And whenever anyone, from ordinary Americans to cynical vote-seeking politicians, start blaming a whole class of people for the ills of our collective society, a bell should ring in our heads: Never again.