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La Guerra Contra El Terrorismo

American for Immigration Reform

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by Jason Roth

There's a difference between dishwashing and detonating dirty bombs, but for some reason, Republicans are finding it hard to tell the difference. Here's a hint: one involves Mexican kitchen staff hosing off scraps of food you couldn't scarf down between glasses of wine and bromides about "the rule of law". The other involves scraps of your glowing skull getting hosed off of building walls. There's a subtle difference, and it's one that you might miss while you have the American flag tied over your eyes.

The anti-immigration crowd is made up of a hodgepodge mix of racists, xenophobes, isolationists, duty-bound rule-followers, and the only group that matters: confused but honest individuals legitimately scared shitless about getting blown to smithereens by terrorists. So, let's start from the premise that all nineteen September 11 hijackers were legal visitors to the United States and move on from there. This wasn't an invasion of illegal aliens. Let's accept another premise. The current state of American politics makes it impossible to resolve the current immigration problem. If you don't accept this, we'll get back to it.

Here are the best reasons given in defense of the position that Mexican dishwashers should be deported post haste for the good of the American people:

• National security interests

• Preservation of the rule of law

• Protection of American jobs

• Unfair welfare support of immigrants

Let's take them one at a time...

National security interests

National security: who can argue about this? Well, most of those disheveled assholes you see on TV screaming and waving picket signs between college credits or minivan trips to their kids' soccer practices, for example. Notwithstanding the spewage from these mouths that bite the hands that protect them, there really aren't national security interests at stake here. Not if we're talking about Mexican laborers and not terrorists.

Should we have standards for who can be allowed into the country and who should not? Of course we should. For the same reason we need better standards for which Islamofascist motherfuckers we allow in on student visas, we also need standards for which undocumented, beige-skinned individuals we allow in from south of the border.

Unless we end all traffic into and out of the United States (something not everyone may be opposed to), we'll always need standards for who constitutes a threat and who does not. Having a sufficient number of copies of form 9637.512B stamped by the right bureaucrat at the right time is not a mark of inherent safety. Most American citizens I know don't possess any paperwork proving they don't pose a threat to my safety. I trust them for two basic reasons: 1. they haven't done anything that gives me reason to mistrust them, and 2. they are citizens of a country that doesn't want to murder me. (Not in the short run, anyway.)

Since most people desiring entry into the United States pass test number one, the next question to ask is: how do they do on number two? I suggest we might want to start by asking them what continent they were born on. If mommy and daddy gave them a little pair of maracas instead of an Explodes Herself Hamideh doll, we might want to lower the minimum grade requirements on their non-terrorist asshole certification exam.

It's within the realm of possibility that anyone might become a murderer. That goes for both American citizens and non-citizens. But in the context of national security, we're not concerned with mind reading or proving the unprovable. We're concerned about the identification of potential threats and preventing them from entering the country. (Or in some cases, imprisoning or killing them.) The way to identify potential terrorist threats is to identify connections with existing terrorist networks, and to do that from an immigration perspective, we need to identify connections with known state sponsors of terrorism.

If you're concerned that identifying an individual's connection to a state sponsor of terrorism is difficult, I don't disagree. Hence, I go back to my original premise: the current state of American politics makes it impossible to resolve the current immigration problem. As long as state sponsors of terrorism are allowed to exist, as long as their death threats are perpetually ignored and rationalized, and as long as they continue unabated to expand their military capabilities to destroy us, the risk of misidentifying some miscellaneous connection between an individual and those states will persist. More state sponsors of terrorism means more state-sponsored terrorists. Before immigration, or any entry of foreign visitors, can be deemed reasonably safe, the sources of terrorism need to be removed or otherwise stifled.

The mindless prevention of any random idiot from entering the United States in the name of "national security" does nothing to end the cause and source of terrorism. It is a symptom of a mindset that fails to recognize the real enemy: Islamic fundamentalism. It's typical ballsless behavior by Republicans: picking on unarmed Mexicans in the name of national security and calling it a war on terrorism.

Preservation of the rule of law

When all else fails, the next excuse I hear from the conservative types is that anyone who's shown enough guts and perseverance to get into this country is a criminal, end of story. We must fight to preserve "the rule of law", and extricate these wildmen from our borders before they start using our heads as piñatas and everybody's kids start crying for their bottles in Spanish. If there's one thing that differentiates a Republican from an Objectivist, it's the Republican's dogmatic defense of law with blatant disregard for context. I.e., are we talking about a good law or a bad law? More fundamentally, why do we have the law in the first place? Is it only there for us to obey it?

A rational approach is not to accept some dictator's commands (say, ten of them), obey without understanding their purpose, and declare any act of transgression a step toward anarchy. Sitting on a bus when you're not allowed to is not necessarily a step toward anarchy, nor is giving the finger to bureaucratic assholes who make it impossible for you to escape from your life of poverty and misery, simply because your birthplace was latitudinally-challenged and your parents picked peyote instead of Pabst Blue Ribbon as their aphrodisiac of choice. When the law infringes upon, rather than protects, individual rights, the law is immoral and ought to be broken (in the short term) and then changed (as fast as goddamn possible). Rights apply to individual human beings, not to those born of a certain status or geography.

Hence, the justification for the rights of the original Americans, even before they were Americans:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."

It just so happens that one of the things the Founding Fathers were so pissed off about was King George III's actions towards potential immigrants:

"He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."

If contemporary Americans, the descendents of immigrants or immigrants themselves, really held respect for American law, they would respect it for its power to protect individuals, not its power to rule over them. They would choose to differentiate between those who are threats and those who are innocent.

Many of us have seen the practical consequences of "the rule of law". The "rule of law" everyone's so proudly anal about is the law that hinders honest, hardworking people from getting into this country. I've seen multiple examples of this firsthand, from Jamaicans to Germans. We're not talking about a few annoying hours at the DMV. We're talking about death and disease, and a government that rams its proverbial burrito (and/or jerk pork) up your loco ass 24 hours a day. When someone gets in the back of a truck with two-dozen other sweaty assholes with dreams of being unloaded into the promised land of a filthy kitchen in the back of some redneck barbecue joint, you know she's taking her pregnancy seriously. Give her a break. She's not al Qaeda.

Protection of American jobs

This is the second easiest excuse to refute, and the most glaringly obvious example of xenophobia, plus what I like to term "chickenshitophobia". Technically, you might say chickenshitophobia is the fear of chicken shit. I prefer to think of it as a palilogical term.

Chickenshitophobes suffer from the lack of mental testicles. These are ballsless individuals who need to re-reread the Declaration of Independence. It's not the "pursuit" of life. It's not the "pursuit" of liberty. It is the "pursuit" of happiness. Neither reality, nor government, can guarantee your happiness. In a million other instances, Republicans would agree with this. Take affirmative action. For the same reason that affirmative action is a bullshit way of keeping qualified white people from getting jobs, the sending of hardworking Mexicans back into a third-world prison is a bullshit way of giving underqualified white people overpaid jobs they don't deserve.

You don't have a right to a job, you have a right to the government not preventing you from getting one. If your job requires that the government prevent others from working for less money, than you're one overpaid motherfucker. It's the rights of those in your company who would rather pay somebody else less money which are being violated, not yours.

For an open immigration policy to work, we would first need to eliminate the minimum wage laws. The reason a lot of these illegal aliens have jobs in the first place is that their employers are paying exactly what they can afford, no more, no less. The productive value of these jobs are worth what their employers are paying, they're not worth as much as the minimum wage. Force all these "illegal" jobs to pay minimum wage, and say goodbye to a lot of diligent bastards who help keep your prices down.

Unfair welfare support of immigrants

Now, here's the easiest argument to demolish. Those who wield this particular shovel of shit flaunt their inability to abstract with glee. The argument is this: "I don't want to support these people with my tax dollars." Ok, asshole, but how do you get from there to "shoot the motherfucker as he crosses the border"?

I agree with the sentiment. I don't want to support them with my tax dollars, either. And if we didn't have a monster of a welfare system, we wouldn't have to worry about people who are entering the country purely for the handouts. Which is why we need to eliminate all welfare and social security payments to immigrants. (And to everybody else, for that matter, but one thing at a time.)

If you're against the giving of tax dollars to immigrants, then be against the giving of tax dollars to immigrants. This is the perfect example of why this country is going down the toilet. People are bred to accept "the system" as it is and can't even comprehend a government that doesn't play Robin Hood. It's just taken as a law of nature. Well, I'll take gravity, but I'm not taking your goddamn laws. If something doesn't work, try to change it.

Which brings me back, yet again, to the problem that underlies the whole "immigration debate": The current state of American politics makes it impossible to resolve the current immigration problem.

People are looking for a "compromise". News alert: they're not going to find one. Not until they find a solution to every one of the above issues. And the solutions aren't easy. But they are clear:

1. Eliminate state sponsors of terrorism.

2. Apply objective standards for identifying potentially dangerous immigrants.

3. Eliminate the minimum wage.

4. Eliminate welfare benefits for immigrants.

If there's some common ground to be found here, maybe it's in the universal hatred, by everyone but bureaucrats, of bureaucracy. If that's the case, then let's take some steps to eliminate it. Red tape couldn't keep out the September 11 hijackers. It sure as fuck shouldn't keep out the good guys.

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