••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Thursday, May 04, 2006

new know-nothings

anti-immigrant fervor has roots at least as far back as 1856, when ex-president millard fillmore ran and lost on the ticket of the american ("know-nothing") party, which promoted phobia of foreigners to divert the country from the growing slavery crisis.

fillmore had been one of the 4 whigs who served only 8 years in the white house between them, since the elected war heroes harrison and taylor died in office, and their successors—tyler and fillmore—didn't get reelected. tyler, a southerner, later supported the confederacy, while fillmore, a northerner, opposed lincoln during the war.

similar short sight shows in today's draconian effort to criminalize immigration infractions. it would likely force local government to arrest folk with expired visas, take up police officers' valuable time, fill already crowded jails to overflowing, and make states pay to enforce federal law.

it's really a question of motivation: folk enter illegally because it's so hard to get in legally; those who come here lawfully but overstay their visas do so because it's too hard to renew visas or to come back once they go home. we've been motivating them to break our immigration laws.

in the not too distant future we'll need more immigrants: as boomers retire at a rising pace, they won't stop consuming, and productivity won't grow fast enough to replace them. who's going to do the work they've been doing? who's going to care for them when they get old and sick? immigrants on payrolls will also pay into the social security and medicare trust funds.

what we need to do is find a nonpunitive, nonthreatening way to discourage folk from crossing borders illegally or letting visas expire. if we turn them into criminals, where will they be when we need them? but if healthy, honest working people could come here lawfully and without unreasonable delays, why would they circumvent the law?

that leaves the problem of aliens taking jobs from citizens: sweat shops and other off-the-books jobs have to be stamped out; minimum wage must be raised and enforced. that should help americans compete and stop thinking of immigrants as foreign invaders.

then we've got to organize, because union members—whether citizens or not—are the only workers who can defend themselves against abusive employers to get good pay and working conditions.

1 comment:

  1. d Nova,
    I'm going to post this post, as a supplement to my earlier comments on this issue - even though you posted your response to my post a year before I wrote it... The Internets are funny things, no? thanks,
    dK.

    ReplyDelete