A Crisis Of Humanity At The Border
– By Ed Kociela –
I remember when you could pretty much move easily across the North American borders without visas or passports or any other encumbrances.
As a sports reporter covering the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, I regularly breezed in and out of Canada with no problem. Before that, I remember going in and out of Mexico without having to produce any documents whatsoever.
Things change; I’ve got that. Circumstances – political and otherwise – come to bear in crushing waves of change that aren’t always good, reasonable, or humane.
We look differently at each other these days. The color of our skin, the accent of our words, the belief system we adhere to indelibly marks us and separates humanity into an “us or them” clique often stained by fear and suspicion.
That’s why our people of power are making it such a point to visit our borders, particularly the one separating the United States and Mexico, and insisting on building walls.
Here in the promised land, Lady Liberty stands tall in the harbor, beckoning.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” she tells the world.
My European ancestors heeded those words because they believed them and wanted only a fair shot of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And, at great personal sacrifice, they got it. No riches, no free pass, no special favors, just planting roots in a land they believed was filled with opportunity. The Great American Dream, you might say.
Now, we have families torn apart, living in tents and makeshift villages in a cold and unfriendly land, so cold and unfriendly that I wonder why they dare to come here in the first place.
And, instead of recognizing their needs as being just as important to them as ours are to us, we place barriers in front of their wishes to find a better life. By all I believe in, I cannot, for the life of me, figure why they do it, why they risk imprisonment, why they risk death, to come to the United States anymore. It is just too hostile, lonely, and threatening in so many ways.
But they do, and that’s where the perceived problem lies. So much so, in some eyes, as to warrant visits from presidents, vice presidents, members of Congress, and others to stand at the border and deliver self-serving speeches about security and fidelity; when they all damn sure realize that without those hardy people willing to come across and toil laboriously in our fields and factories for little compensation, we would fold up.
The talk, since quarantine, has been centered on the economy and how important it is to sustain it. Well, guess what? Without workers migrating north to pick the fruits and vegetables from our fields, build our houses, or carry on at the most challenging levels of labor, our economy would be so severely out of whack that your strawberries and lettuce and other veggies would cost ten times what they do now.
Our night’s stay at the local inn would be a minimum of double the prices now charged without those workers. Without those workers, your night out would probably cost at least three times more.
Yes, we have immigrants engaged in the white-collar professions, but they are the lucky ones, the financially blessed, for the most part, who were able to find a reasonable path to citizenship. For most, however, it is a lengthy, complicated, and expensive journey that may or may not, depending on luck, ever be completed.
No person should give up their identity, their culture, their being, but no person should be excluded because of it.
There should have been no other reason for Vice President Kamala Harris to visit the border near El Paso last week other than to pick up a nice pair of Tony Lama’s from the factory, then hop across the border for some Chile Colorado or Pozole.
Instead, she was assigned to the cleanup detail of cleaning up from the last administration and its disastrous impact on the border, which still has left many children torn from their families with little hope of reconciliation.
This whole border thing is beyond redemption.
Walls do not keep people in or prevent them from entering. They are simply a hurdle that many have found ways to surmount. Of course, the anger and suspicion generated by these idiotic walls remain unchecked.
Immigration reform?
Dog whistle stuff bleated to heighten hate and prejudice. You want to shake somebody down just because of the color of their skin? You, my friend, are a racist. You object to undocumented immigrants because of the money they supposedly suck from the system? You, my friend, are uninformed. While they may be treated in a hospital’s emergency room, they are not eligible for Social Security, food stamps, or cash assistance even though more than half of the undocumented immigrants work using fake Social Security numbers. That means they are paying money into a system they can never access. That puts at least $12 billion annually into the fund. They are taxed in other ways as well through sales taxes and funding property taxes through rental payments.
And again, consider what kind of price we would pay if they were removed from our agricultural and service industries.
More importantly, we separate ourselves by choice.
We, of course, have our ethnic roots, but beyond that, we are residents of a certain city in a certain county in a certain state in a certain nation. We have seen for some time how that goes just in the city-to-city comparisons. We tend to be very territorial, very parochial, very singular in that regard. In fact, we were all but removed from the global community, at our own choosing, by the previous administration and its separatist nationalistic elitism.
Me?
I prefer to think of us all as children of the universe.
Isn’t it time to build more bridges and fewer walls?
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