WE, the U.S. created our own immigration problems

Slinging a Smooth Stone

Copyrighted C.F. David

Even though I will always consider the Minutemen of the 21st Century to be racists. I of course can see we have an immigration problem. What I can’t see is an easy, solution. It is only a matter of time before they, (Minutemen), kill an illegal and are perhaps killed themselves. The Minutemen have started token watches on the Canadian border, but I can’t envision any success there. Unauthorized vigilantes aren’t the answer.

As I grew up and traveled with my parents to Colorado, New Mexico, even to Illinois and Missouri, I remember us coming upon rickety old trucks, filled with migrant workers, moving from job to job. They followed the seasons. Watermelon and cantaloupe, apples in Colorado and Michigan, broomcorn in Oklahoma, cotton in Texas, and the south, peppers and oranges in California, apples again in Washington.

Those hard working people were here at the behest of the American farmer, and the U.S. Government turned a blind eye, because stoop labor was hard work.

The U.S. economy changed, unions in the Midwest were broken; high-paying jobs that had gone to American citizens in the Midwest, (Iowa slaughter houses), were taken over by nationals from Vietnam, Laos, Mexico, and Central America.

In the Plains, like around Boise City, irrigation farmers hired on Mexican migrants who had pulled broomcorn here and wanted to put down roots. I remember several of those men who worked for wages, and acreages...a little plot of land, 40 or 80 acres from which they enjoyed the crop, and its profits.

But now we’ve come 360, and men, women and children who were once conveniently overlooked, and hired with a wink...those that followed them are no longer welcome.

A fence or wall on either border, (full length) is fiscally impossible to construct, maintain, let alone guard and be sure no one climbs over or digs under.

We don’t have enough troops to win a war against an unorganized, third rate enemy. We sure don’t have enough to maintain close border watches.

In any case both those scenarios give me the creeps, for when you have a wall built to keep someone out, it’s to easy for it to be utilized to keep people in, and as for armed troops facing the border of another nation, it’s to easy to tell them, “About face.” No I don’t think walls or troops are the answer.

We can’t imprison them all, because Texas has proven that you can build prisons faster than anyone, and still not have enough people to guard them.

It is of course, a matter of economy. As long as Mexico, nations of Africa and Central and South America have substandard economies and the U.S. has a culture that demands the drugs they can produce, illegal immigration will be a problem.

Throw into the mix, U.S. Legislators who are so corrupt that they vote to allow illegals to collect Social Security, and the problem is bewildering. Until corruption on either side of the border is eliminated, we’ll have this problem.

The word for the week is supine, courtesy of Dan Gilland.