An Opening Salvo in an Inevitably Interminable Argument
LET’S ABOLISH IMMIGRATION LAWS
An Initial Salvo in an Interminable Argument
This is my position, and I’m sticking to it until someone can present good reasons for thinking otherwise, as opposed to using bigotry and bad science to support continuation of vicious, universally harmful, and ultimately unenforceable laws. The following tale, basically a modestly expanded anecdote, came to me one evening a year ago, as a neighbor accosted me about helping him with his English. Bottle of Tequila in hand, he pondered the potential for trading something he had, other than money, for English lessons. We never came to terms on this sort of relationship, but I listened to the narrative I elicited with my questions for several hours and offer it to readers as a slice of life, a dose of reality, that to me is powerful documentary evidence of the case I make, folllowing this anecdotal interlude, for open borders.
Jose’s mother left him with a great-aunt in order to follow her husband to Los Angeles. She was hungry and without much satisfaction outside Mexico City, and rumors flew that her man was not only paying attention to other women, an eventuality that Latin culture certainly accepts, but also considering another marriage, which, culture be damned, she intended to disallow one way or another by her arrival on the scene.
Inevitably, little Jose, despite his prodigal power as a young boy, felt at least an emotional hunger and lack of satisfaction equal to his mother’s. He had a will that matched hers as well, so that at age seven he slipped away from his auntie, having managed to accumulate the cash and the connections to make a dash for California. He celebrated his eighth birthday in transit.
Unfortunately, he failed to find his father, and his mother had died the year prior from a combination of heartbreak and hard-living. He had no money, none of the family network with which he had managed exceedingly well in Mexico, considering his circumstances, and he knew that as an “illegal alien”, he faced immediate detention and expulsion from the land he now claimed---as the repository of his mother’s bones---as his own. He set about finding and joining with people who could help him.
Also unfortunately, but predictably given the intersecting insanities of several policies that destroy our lives in spite of our leaders offering them to us as if these methods were essential to survival---I mention drugs and education, as just two examples, in addition to immigration---the companeros with whom Jose affiliated lived lives of bandits and battlers, as a result of the same exigencies that drove Jose into their arms. He immediately became an expert thief and distributor of all sorts of contraband. He committed his fifth contract killing on his thirteenth birthday, with the unpleasant accompaniment of taking five 9mm slugs in his shoulder, chest, and neck.
Jose is not a large man, and he was even smaller at age thirteen. The will to live of this mensch is almost beyond imagining. The State of California certainly didn’t want him wandering the streets after he recovered---they convicted him of one count of second degree and one count of first degree homicide, so Jose found finally a stable home---a ‘left coast’ Youth Detention Center full of drugs and violence and insanity, but nonetheless significantly more conducive to learning and survival than had been the habitat of the streets of West L.A.
By the time his eighteenth birthday drew nigh, he had a GED and a couple of college course credits, and he was a productive, inventive, and---given all the factors---quite congenial hauler on life’s rope. Institutionalization was going to be difficult to permit, given the lucky liberallity of California juvenile law. On the other hand, West Los Angeles had kept in touch, and a ‘boss’s’ position---with a hero’s welcome---awaited his impending exit.
A clever social worker found another aunt, mom’s sister this time and a wonderful woman of warmth and devotion to bettering the lives of those she loved. She lived in Georgia, and a judge in Orange County agreed to a ‘Consent Decree’ that was in essence a contractual banishment(deportation will follow any entry into California without State permission). Three days prior to turning 18, he boarded a bus for Atlanta, coming to the age of voting and adult responsibility the morning of the Greyhound’s arrival, across from the Fulton County Jail.
He has had some marvelous adventures in Atlanta, certainly for the most part legal---he is an excellent businessman and knows plumbing, carpentry, and a smattering of other construction craft---and he now has two children and a desire to make something more of himself than just a wage slave. “I think God’s got a purpose for me,” he says, before holding my gaze to inquire, “Understand?” Whether I am fully conscious of this man’s pain or passion, I know that he brought his mother’s remains to Georgia as his twenty-first birthday present to himself.
He is a man whom I support as an ally. God knows, in the chaos and craziness predominant now, essential as never before to wealthy warlords’ capacity to maintain their own, social, predominance, he could run amok or go astray again easily. But his great heart, his powerful will to improve himself, the sum of his ability and discipline and unexpected calm recommend him to me. I would rather him as my neighbor than any number of Republicans who have better haircuts, an appreciation for Scotch instead of tequila, and hearts and morals as dark as the void. Any law that inhibits the legitimacy of Jose’s fellows elsewhere increases the likelihood of the social devolution that his life as a gangster describes. Any law that eases his and his hermanos’ journeys will in turn help me and my children.
The Dalai Lama once remarked about human arms, that they lack the requisite components of a truly martial species. “These arms are made for hugging, not fighting.” He saw the embrace as definitive of humanity. Only a Hobbesian curmudgeon, or some functional equivalent, could argue with at least the aesthetic attraction of the renowned Tibetan’s assessment. I would like to add a couple of similar anatomically logical observations to his list. The first is that homo sapiens lips and tongue and teeth are much more appropriate for erotic congress than for any form of fighting, which certainly is not the case in innumerable species better outfitted than we are for battle. The second, which relates to the topic of this BLOG, is that our legs are ideal for walking and of much less utillity for speed or powerful mayhem. A propensity for perambulation, which is the basis of the human capacity for migration, and hence for what we now call immigration, might lead to the view that any attempt to inhibit this wanderlust is at best a childish fantasy about keeping strangers at bay, where blaming them for our problems seems easier and more defensible than if they are our political and spiritual equals.
Attempting to prove this proposition is thankfully impossible, but this essay does advance a few reasons(more will follow in later, related passages)to support this idea. As well, the above capsulization of the life of Jose, an account of one of the many compadres and other outlanders with whom I have had the chance to converse about life and the human prospect, makes a strong case for doing away with artificial borders. In order to make the creation of any sort of HUMAN condition possible, we must see and embrace both each other and our common humanity.
The first reason for widely expanding immigration(and I would argue, at this juncture, doing away with inhibitions on travel for any reason other than public health quarantine)is that folks will move when they need to, whatever laws we legislate. Hunger, war, oppression, have always goaded immigrants to move toward inequitably distributed opportunities for power and happiness. Thus, if we prefer folks to stay put(who, like us, tend to love their homelands and mother tongues---I make this assertion on the basis of the honor of having worked with thousands of immigrants over the wild years of my incredible life), we have only to support socio-economic policies that make humanity easier to sustain than murder and brutality. Unfortunately, the policies of those who decry immigration tend uniformly also to promote exactly what makes immigration inevitable and unstoppable.
The second reason for wanting open borders is that the six and a half billion cousins who all live here as neighbors need to recognize that we have some serious problems that we can only solve by recognizing our common fates, which recognition in turn is only possible if we eliminate the foolish, unequal, and unworkable construction of walls, erection of stalls, and all such techniques for keeping ‘undesireables’ where they belong. If people can flee cretins and murderers and theves, to go as they please toward a happier prospect, it seems logical to anticipate that political support for the said cretins and murderers and thieves(the list is pretty endless of the ‘creatures’ of United States policy, Frankensteins all, the only amazing thing that not one of them has yet succeeded in slaying its master---stay tuned, of course, as the present moment unfolds in that regard)would become harder and harder to sustain. If folks everywhere could have left terror behind, that American policies had promulgated---in instances such as Somoza’s Nicaragua, Mobuto’s Zaire, Allende’s Chile, Reza-Pahlevi’s Iran, and on and on and on and on---the hypothesis is intuitively attractive that the fleeing masses of people would have drastically foreshortened the careers of multiple madmen embraced by Presidents and cabinets and friends since at least the Monroe Doctrine. The initiation of such a policy of openness now would allow, or perhaps force, us to consider our relationships with each other, with the earth, and with our institutions, the premise of this consideration being the notion that we can live powerfully and happily as partners and stewards instead of victimizing and seeking revenge on each other, as if one set of cousins were spawn of Satan, or any similar nonsense about ‘ubermenschen’, aryan superiority, etc.
The final rationale in today’s installment is a mere trifle about equity. Right now, money flows around the planet much faster than natural substances, such as water and carbon, and much faster than the commodities which money enables. Why should money, which after all is only the embodiment of the labors of the ancestors of all of humanity’s cousins, flow freely, while those who own the money constrain the movements of the people whose work is primary in the loot’s creation? As the above arguments indicate, several ideas support just the opposite conclusion. One might even paraphrase Moses: “Let the people go!” The basis for this thinking is hardheaded and practical. So long as the rich control the borders, the chances are excellent that instead of helping each other, we will continue to slaughter each other. Inevitably, that which contributes to such conflagrations as today gird the earth has to hurt my children. On the other hand, when I use my arms as God and nature arguably intended, to embrace every cousin Jack and Jill alive, the chances have to improve that we will find a way to cooperate for the mutual benefit of the next generation of cousins among us.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.