No one in government pays the slightest attention to the root of the undocumented immigrants’ complaints and demands. None of the present reform efforts in Congress is relevant to or addresses the true cause of these immigrants’ claims for legal rights as other Americans.
Consider you were walking home at night. A pickpocket, suddenly, jumps on your front with a gun pointed at you and demands your valet. Unwillingly, you surrender your valet and he lets you go. The valet contained all the money you owned. You hide in a corner and follow him to his resident. You know you cannot face him openly to get your valet back. You try to find a way to get in the house attempting to retrieve your valet or take some of his belongings in return. He catches you and calls the police. Police arrests you for your illegal breaking and entering into his house. The pickpocket denies your claim about your valet and you are taken away for attempted burglary. Leaving the house, you whisper to him that you will be back to get your money. As a result of your threat, the owner places bars on the windows and fortifies the entrance to the house to prevent happening of such incidents without thinking that the man he robbed had a legal right to his money which is now in his possession.
This is what we have been doing in regard to undocumented immigrants. All immigrants coming to the United States from any developing country, where the American corporations have or have had established business, have certain claim on the American wealth which was accumulated as a result of subjugation of that county’s labor force where the workers received minimal survival wages, with no sick leaves, no meaningful retirement benefits or health care, and working long hours under excruciating work environment.
They are entitled to attain legal status,(1) social benefits such as health care and education for themselves and their children for which their present and previous generations of workers in their native country were entitled but were denied by their American employers.
The U.S. national and state governments are also responsible, financially and socially, to assist the undocumented immigrants in getting jobs, settling down, and receiving social benefits accorded to the U.S. citizens. This responsibility comes from the U.S. government’s bloody hands in establishing influence and dominance in their native country in order to sustain stability and security for the operation of the U.S. corporate entities who ravaged the nation’s resources and wealth, subjugated its working class and suppressed its people through a dictatorial government under American protection.
For example consider the power and influence of the American Fruit Company in Central and South America established and operated for decades at the cost of tens of thousands lives of innocent citizens whose only crime was to have control over their own land and national resources. The history is well illustrative of the American direct or indirect and often bloody suppression in countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq. In some of these countries the U.S. military operation had amounted to the level of genocide such as Vietnam where 2 to 4 million human lives were destroyed including total population of many villages; Indonesia, where by the help of the U.S. government the socialist government of Sukarno was overthrown and replaced by that of Suharto who slaughtered about 800,000 of his own people and an additional 250,000 in East Timor; Iraq where, according to a recent study, 625.000 lives have been banished so far, nearly 99 percent being innocent men, women and children.
It is interesting to notice that the American economic elite was much harsher on its own people before paying attention to the economic and human resources abroad. For over two centuries until the early twentieth century,this elite's sole objective was to sustain stability, often by force, and create means to maximize profits and accumulate wealth and power by enslaving the poor and working class with nearly total disregard to their welfare even essential needs. For example, "The economic crisis of 1857 brought the shoe busines to a halt and the workers of Lynn (Massachusetts) lost their jobs. ...Prices were up, wages were repeatedly cut, and by the fall of 1859 men were earning $3 a week and women were earning $1 a week, working sixteen hours a day."(2) That was 96 hours per week including Saturdays amounting to nearly 3 cents per hour for men and one cent per hour for wemen.
"A newspaper in North Carolina in August 1855 spoke of 'hudreds of thousands of working class families existing upon half-starvation from year to year'"(3) "in 1860s in New York City, girls sewed umbrellas from six in the morning to midnight, earning $3 a week from which employers deducted the cost of needles and thread. Girls who made cotton shirts received twenty-four cents for a twelve-hour day."(4) "The crisis was built into a system which was chaotic in its nature, in which only the very rich were secure. It was a system of periodic crisis -- 1837, 1857, 1873 (and later: 1893, 1907, 1919,1929) -- that wiped out small businesses and brought cold, hunger, and death to working people while the fortunes of the Asters, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, kept growing through war and peace, crisis and recovery."(5)
W. E. B. DuBois an Afro-American intellectual who came to teach at Atlanta University "saw the late nineteen century betrayal of the Negro as part of a larger happening in the United States, something happening not only to poor blacks, but to poor whites. In his book Black Reconstruction, written in 1935, he said:
'God wept, but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.'"(6) Regarding the expantion of the American elite's operation abroad DuBois wrote later: "Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labor in lesser lands..."(7)
More importantly, Americans who don't want Mexicans to immigrate, should remember or learn that Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase had doubled the territory of the United States, extending it to Rocky Mountains, bordering Mexico in the southwest, which had won its independence in a revolutionary war against Spain in l821. It was a large country which included Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, and part from Colorado. After agitation and aid from the United States, Texas broke off from Mexico in 1836 as the "Lone Star Republic" which was brought into the Union as a state by Congress in 1845. Then the United states decided to invade Mexico to occupy territories to the west of the Rocky Mountains, California in particular.(8)
Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcok, commander of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, wrote in his diary: "Fort Jesup, La., June 30, 1845. Orders came last evening by express from Washington City directing General Taylor ... immediately to proceed with his whole command to the extreme western border of Texas and take up a position on the banks of or near the Rio Grande, and he is to expel any arm force of Mexicans who may cross the river."(9) The traditional border between Texas and Mexico had been the Nueces River, about 150 miles to the north, and both Mexico and the United states had recognized that as the border.(10)
General Taylor's visit to the tent of his aide Hitchcock to discuss the move is described by the latter in his diary: "He seems to have lost all respect for Mexican rights and is willing to be an instrument of Mr. Polk for pushing our boundary as far west as popssible."(11) The army progressed and arrived, March 28, 1846, in cultivated fields and hatched-roof huts hurriedly abandoned by the Mexican occupants, who had fled across the river to the city of Matamoros.(12) All that was needed was a military incident to begin the war that President Polk wanted. It came in April, when General Taylor's quartermaster, Colonel Cross, while riding up the Rio Grande, disappeared. His body was found eleven days later. It was assumed he had been killed by Mexican guerrillas. The next day (April 25), a patrol of Taylor's solders was surrounded and attacked by Mexicans, and wiped out: sixteen dead, others wounded, the rest captured. The Mexicans had fired the first shot. They had done what the American government wanted. It did not matter that they were defending their country against foreign occupation.
Colonel Hitchcock had predicted: "I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. ... We have not one particle of right to be here. ... It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses, for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of a war between the United States and Mexico. ... My heart is not in this business ... but, as a military man, I am bound to execute orders."(13)
Accordingly, The Mexican people, have every right, historical, legal and natural, as part owners of the land taken away from them by brute force. They have right to come to the states which were part of the Mexican territory before the war. Those are their land and they have legal and natural right to be there. We are the aggressors, usurpers and occupiers. No country can take the territory from another by force and against the will of its people.
On August 2001 a study by North American Integration and Development (NAID) Center estimated that assumed 3 million undocumented immigrants from Mexico alone contributed $154 billion to the U.S. GDP in 2000 including $77 billion to the Gross State Product of California.(14) Using a higher estimate of 4.5 million, their contribution rose to 220 billion.(15)
Based on all these facts, Mexican people have every right to enter to parts from their motherland taken away from them by force and fraud and reside there as their own land. They may even try to take their land back not by force, which seems impossible, but by the weapon supplied to them by the U.S. Constitution, the ballot box. For this purpose they must be organized nationwide with a definit plan and coordination as how to take back their territory state by state. They would have important allies including Latino immigrants from other countries of South and Central America and a substantial number of those from the rest of the world. They would have also sympathizers from ordinary citizens which will vote for their candidate.
Based on the March 2002 Current Population Survey estimates, there are 34.5 million foreign-born population in the United states(16) of which 9.3 million are undocumented. Mexicans make up 57 percent of the total or about 5.3 million. 23 percent or 2,2 million are from other Latin American countries together constituting about 80 percent of all undocumented immigrants.(17)
Since World War II, forty-eight nations have been the subject of open U.S. military action or military assistance to a friendly dictatorial regimes and, at least, twenty two nations have been subject to covert operation, nearly all administered by the CIA, such as assassinations, military coups, bribery, all aimed to sustain dictators willing to protect American economic interests.
The presently claimed 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country are a very small part from the working people in developing countries subjugated, sppressed and exploited for decades by the American corporations resulting to accumulation of enormous wealth taken out of these countries amounting to trillions of dollars. In all fairness, American people owe them something substantial in return. They should be allowed to stay and be treated like citizens as a part payback from what we have taken from countries under our present or previous subjugation. The government’s reform policy should also allow two to four million immigrants to enter our country each year to benefit from our social and economic resources while contributing to our social and economic well being.
If Congress is truly interested in solving the problem, this is the only rational and humane way to go. Building a protective wall, the National Guard watch, or other protective measures will not stop immigration as long as people of countries we have benefited from their labor and resources are conscious of their well documented subjugation by the American economic entities. They think they have a valid claim on American wealth which allows them a right to share in its prosperity which they have contributed to be materialized.
Immigration from developing countries to America will not last for long since the U.S. economy has started its downfall as a result of globalization and free trade.(18) Increasingly, the U.S. production of goods and services will be outsourced to countries with low costs of production and marketing, causing substantial decrease in domestic production, increasing unemployment, decreasing wages and other benefits. As this inevitable downhill trend continues, Americans will have no choice but accept low wage jobs now taken by the immigrants. All these changes will cause a decrease in immigration and the start of migration of Americans to countries where the jobs will be.
Consequently, the immigration reform as proposed above would be a temporary policy. It is estimated that by 2030 unemployment rate in the United States will rise above 12 percent. People will be happy if they could earn enough for a modest living standards. Luxury living standards will be history except for a very few super rich. Immigration will cease to be a problem.
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References:
1. Matt C. Abbott. "Undocumented Immigrants Should Be Given Legal Status"
