What Should We Think Of Immigrants?
It seems we need start here by admitting immigrants differ from one another just as much as native born Americans differ from each other. Next, it seems reasonable that every country can control it’s own borders. Now it begins to get complicated. We never really have seriously attempted to control our own borders. We never have seriously attempted to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants. Why? The answer has always been economic in nature. We enjoy having illegal immigrants do the difficult and heavy labor that these immigrants do for sub minimum wages. It’s the American form of slave labor which keeps prices down. And no citizenry likes a bargain better than Americans. Thus we need rid ourselves of this notion that we have done what we can to keep them out. We never have.
The vast majority of people in any country do not flee their country for a better life. This is true even in the poorest of countries. We don’t hesitate to accept the cream of the crop from other countries, including doctors, scientists, wealthy business men, sport stars, and so on. So the problem boils down to what kind of immigrants are we willing to accept? And at what cost are we willing to eliminate most illegal immigrants? Are we willing to accept that our own benefit from slave labor is part of the problem or do we put all the punishment on the victims of our own greed for bargains?
Most illegal immigrants I have met and known much about at all are few. I don’t have household help or have any substantial conversation with those doing the kind of work immigrants tend to do. If they are part of a crew doing work around my place or at work, they were simply present, but not in any meaningful way. I tend to be against letting the poorest of immigrants into this country because their circumstance is painful for me; they are trying to meaningfully exist with no skills in a different culture with a different language. They can spend their entire life as some sort of outcast living in the cracks of our society. Not good for them. Plus I am against letting any workers in our country be paid less than minimum wage. As T.O. would say, fair is fair. We know that, but like already mentioned, we love bargains. In my mind, bargains obtained on the backs of the poorest amongst us, is simply unethical. I agree with Lincoln—labor comes first and is superior to capital. It is the obligation of every government to protect labor and not let capitalism allow wealth to accumulate for them at the expense of decent wages for workers. When anyone says they are against the minimum wage rising with the cost of living they are anti-labor and are essentially ensuring that the poorest amongst us will get even poorer.
The point here so far is that we are just as responsible for the large number of existing illegal immigrants in this country as are the brave immigrants who risked everything to try to get a better life. For the vast majority of illegal immigrants already here that better life does not include living any kind of affluent life which many Americans live. There are exceptions. But overall the whole general picture is one of quiet frustration and poverty. Not good.
The rapid and ever increasing acts of terrorism across the globe has generated a lot of fear of letting any enemies gain entrance to our country. And we have a lot of enemies. No country can invade 60 other countries, in one form or another, over the last 60 years, be the chief buyer of goods made by slave labor abroad, and not have a lot of angry enemies abroad. We have never been an innocent non involved country in all these nations where terrorist groups have sprung up—certainly not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Middle East, Libya, Egypt, etc. It really is a long list. I can only think of one country in which we have invaded directly, or through military support of ‘rebels’, which benefitted after our involvement there was over—and that is Vietnam, a war which we lost and should have lost. It was David vs Goliath and David won.
With all this as background, we can now look at where we are, and what we should do or not do. Trump is claiming he has banned refugees from 7 countries in order to protect the American people from terroristic attacks on our homeland. While Trump has made clear enough that anything he thinks is a fact—is indeed a fact, even if it is an ‘alternate fact’ (lie). Of course reasonable people will continue to exist that facts are only those things which have sufficient data to justify them as facts.
Obviously, if we want real facts we must look elsewhere then to our current President. La La land is never a good source for facts. “In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants. But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center. The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly savage case. (NY Times)
In the last decade 280,024 Americans have been killed by guns. On average there are nearly 12,000 gun homicides a year in the U.S. Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of firearm deaths in the U.S. are suicides. America’s gun homicide rate is more than 25 times the average of other high-income countries. Black men are 14 times more likely than non-hispanic white men to be shot and killed with guns.
There are 75 million homeless refugees living in tents (if lucky) with no possessions but what they wear on their back. We are not innocent bystanders in the politics of their countries which resulted in civil wars and forced them to flee. 75 million is more than twice the population of the U.S. back in Lincoln’s day. Trump, as is his forte, says that safe zones should be established in their own country. Huh? I thought they fled these countries because they weren’t safe? And I thought we invaded these countries, in part to make the citizens in these countries have a free and safe country? He then suggests we invade again to create these safe zones? Now once we have established a military presence to create safe zones, and built houses for them to live in, and created good jobs for these refugees so they can afford to maintain these homes and have a decent income, I suppose we can then leave. So, by any kind of sane logic, this plan is irrational nonsense.
I cannot think of any sane country who really wants these refugees. It reminds me of the days when air heads thought busing ghetto kids to good schools would be a solution. Instead, it simply brought the quality of the good schools, by any measures, down. But before I wander too far here, let’s bring in a important fact: zero fatal attacks were carried out by immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries targeted by the ban. Trump’s ban did not include any of the Muslim-majority countries where the Trump Organization — which is now being run by his sons — holds business interests. Those countries reportedly include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, the U.A.E. and Azerbaijan. Trump has a long history of never sacrificing his own self interests to in any way to improve the welfare of the least fortunate.
Personally, I am against the slaughter of 280,024 Americans killed in the United States since 9/11.
And I am totally for every diligence to capture and persecute those directly responsible for the increasingly common terrorist attacks on Americans within this country. But the reality is, and the fact is, that these attacks are being carried out almost entirely by our own citizens raised in our own country. No immigrants, of any nationality, admitted as an act of mercy from the 75 million refugees living in refugee camps, have committed any terrorist attacks against our country. Haven’t these people suffered enough without the richest country in the world accusing them as the source of terrorist attacks within our country?
In an age of human overpopulation, rare is the country who needs additional people within their own borders. We don’t need these people, they will not easily fit into our culture and language. They will have difficulty getting decent jobs, decent education, decent housing, decent opportunities of any sort. There is no real effort anywhere in the world to enforce responsible human reproduction. We are unable to attack this basic global problem, not even discuss the problem. The Chinese did, but while elevating the economic situation substantially, it is too little, too late even for them.
Behind all this global terrorism of varied sorts is the dual core problem of human overpopulation and lack of any global minimum wages. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to reduce terrorism in the absence of solving these two basic problems. No, Hitler didn’t make Germany great again, nor will Trump make America great again by exterminating, in one way or another, certain segments of the population. We have our own refugee camps, called urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes. They don’t live in tents, and they are better fed than in the foreign refugee camps, but after that the similarities are strikingly similar. Both populations suffer from chronic stress with the associated high levels of stress hormones. Especially for those in their formative years, this often means they become medically stunted during their formative years. Every system of the body is affected by high levels of stress hormones, and not in a good way, especially the nervous system. Some affects are, to varying degrees, irreversible.
With this background we are able to better address what we should think about immigrants, especially those from the refugee camps. Personally, I’d rather not think about them at all.
Nor do I wish to think that much about the huge population who live in our own urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes. It frightens me to suspect that, in the near future, we may face roving riots, coordinated via all the gadgets most everyone has at their possession. That is, a riot starts at point x, then when the police or army arrive at point x, a different riot occurs at point y, and when the police or army arrives at point y, a different riot breaks out at point A——and so it continues. Clearly the police and army can’t be everywhere so no one ends up too safe. This is essentially how all these modern day wars are being carried out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, many South American Countries, many African countries, etc. Of course it can’t happen here in the United States, but then of course there is little reason to think it can’t.
It is intellectually hard to keep talking about solutions to today’s problems when we cannot establish world-wide responsible reproduction and create global reasonable minimum wages in what is a well established global economy. No form of government, no economic class, no religious sect, no ethnic group, no geographical group, can sustain any peace and prosperity much longer without responsible global reproduction and global minimum wages. No one seems to argue otherwise, but practically everyone dismisses this ‘fact’ by saying “Well, these two changes will never happen”. This is just another way of assuring what all agree could happen, will happen.
In the end, we are ethically bound to do what we can do, under the circumstances. And that is, take our fair share of these 75 million refugees. They are not a terrorist threat to us at all from current data, but are a financial burden and a personal tragedy for those who will end up, through no fault of their own, in a strange land with minimal chance for personal advancement in our modern day society.
If their country of origin ever regains some economic and peaceful status, then I would halt any foreign aid to them unless they find housing and a job for their refugees living in our country. If some want to stay then they will have to apply through normal channels after they are reabsorbed back into their country of origin. My understanding is that most refugees would jump at the chance to go back ‘home’ if home had an economic and peaceful status.
There are so many global problems coming down upon this earth that we are simply overwhelmed and underprepared. We no longer know where to begin to start. We furtively grasp at ‘family values’, circle the wagons, and foolishly delude ourselves into thinking this is some kind of solution. 75 million global refugees! Living as I do, in an ample affluent manner, there is a simmering sadness that, in raw numbers, there are more homeless, helpless, jobless innocent human beings living on this earth than ever before. For the most part we no longer lynch, quarter, burn at the stake, or torture with slow painful death—but then again, how can we use words to describe the misery and hopelessness of these 75 million refugees, or even the 43 million Americans who don’t make enough money to qualify to pay federal income tax, or the odds of a child born in our urban, suburban, or rural ghettoes from suffering chronic stress throughout their formative years? The consequent hormones present through the formative years, for most victims, spells medical stunting of most body systems, especially the nervous system. We respond almost absurdly—wage emotional battles over abortion and pitifully little emotional battles over what happens to these children after birth. If there is any ethics in this madness, it is hard to detect.
This is the kind of musing that has a dark and depressing end. So I guess it just stands unresolved. It offers little encouragement for the future. We are, and have been for some time, like lemmings rushing to the edge of the cliff with all the insaneness of real lemmings. God’s evolutionary process has always survived and progressed, with sometimes long thousands or millions of years setbacks, but there is zero reason to conclude evolution is about to end. Time stays, we go.
