Immigration: Getting the Attention It Deserves?

Given the U.S. media’s attention to the continuing flood of illegal immigrants that cross the Mexican border into the United States, culminating in President Bush’s Monday speech on the topic (wherein he announced the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops to help secure the border), one cannot help but think that this issue is getting more than enough attention. Indeed, by a vote of 83-16, the Senate approved legislation yesterday to add fencing and 500 miles of vehicle barriers along the border. But when such inroads are not only so hard-won, but also still challenged, as they were yesterday by television personality Alan Colmes, I grow concerned that people don’t fully understand what’s at stake by leaving the border porous—or even semi-so.

One of the most immediate, but surprisingly seldom-mentioned, threats of an open border between the United States and Mexico is infiltration into the former by terrorists and others who are openly hostile to it. In a post-9/11 world, one cannot help but marvel at the irony of a country that, in the name of national security, employs in its airports customs officers and other law enforcement and security personnel whose zealousness is often so off-putting as to alienate not only business people and travelers from other countries, but also more than a few U.S. citizens while doing precious little to prevent all manner of persons from strolling over from Mexico.

At least a couple of additional threats that an open border poses might be expressed in terms of costs—quantifiable and otherwise. According to several sources, the taxes that immigrants contribute do not cover the costs of their schooling, health care, welfare, social security, and burden on the prison system that total at least $100 billion—an amount that does not take into account the costs associated with the immigrant-imposed burden on land, water, and fossil fuels (oil, coal, and gas).

But these costs, while significant, arguably pale in comparison to more-difficult-to-quantify human costs—and while these might include the lives ruined by drugs trafficked into the U.S. or the loss of satisfaction and self-esteem that come from losing to immigrants the jobs that many ignorantly say U.S. citizens wouldn’t take, I’m talking about something far more sinister: I’m not talking about a quantifiable cost that affects our pocketbooks now, but the long-term effects on our very being, our very existence as we know it, of an open border policy.

Lest you think such statements smack of melodrama, consider the accompanying map, where one sees that the Latino population of 4 states (CA, AZ, NM, and TX) already stands at greater than 25%, with at least 2 additional states (NV and CO) rapidly approaching that figure. In and of itself, these statistics are shocking, but what makes them even more so is the fact that the U.S. is going the way of Europe in the sense that, immigrants subtracted from the equation, its population is crashing—so much so that Euro-Americans will be a minority to whom terms will be dictated by the likes of José Angel Gutierrez, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, who, presumably representing the anti-American sentiment of many Latino immigrants, has been quoted as saying, “We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. The explosion is in our population. They are [or should be] shitting their pants in fear! I love it.” And just so there’s no confusion about whether or not these terms would stop short of La Reconquista, one need only recall images from the May Day parades and rants from people like Ricky Sierra of the Chicano National Guard who has been quoted as saying, “We’re recolonizing America. . . . It’s time to take back what is ours.”

So, has the immigration issue been getting the attention it deserves? Hardly. Despite not insignificant media coverage, as well as the President’s attention, more needs to be done—but fast. Specifically, the border needs to be secured—and not just with a few thousand more troops and/or a few hundred miles of fence. To finance the endeavor, the U.S. would perhaps be wise to divert at least some of its funds, in the form of troops, from Iraq, a country in whose affairs our only justifiable excuse for meddling could be its threat to our security or sovereignty—which is surely no greater than that posed by an open border with Mexico. A collateral benefit of this course of action would be to placate more than a few members of the world community who mistakenly see the U.S. as a police state (it’s how we treat our visitors, folks) engaged in the business of empire building.

In addition to stopping the infiltration dead in its tracks, the U.S. needs to do something about the 20 million or more illegal immigrants who are already within its borders. Although these people should in principle be deported, such a solution fails to take into account not only the logistical issues it represents, but also a human dimension that can hardly be ignored. (How does the U.S. handle, for example, the case of illegal immigrants whose children have ius soli, or “right of the soil,” by virtue of having been born in the U.S. and who know only English? Can it in good conscience visit upon them the punishment that belongs to their parents?) Instead, at least some of the illegals should be provided a path to naturalization—a solution with which I’m unhappy less because it gives the impression of condoning illegal behavior than because, by having let something analogous to a statute of limitations expire, we have forever compromised the culture and political landscape of the United States and must now live with the consequences of the moral paralysis that got in the way of enforcement at a time when it was unquestionably a viable option. Perhaps this time we’ll come closer to doing not only what we can, but also what we should.

Nuestro Himno: Solidarity or Disunity?

Intended to promote unity and solidarity, Nuestro Himno is the newly released Spanish version of The Star-Spangled Banner, the national anthem of the United States. Since its release, President Bush has said, “I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English,” thus triggering a reaction from large segments of the media, most indicating, some but implicitly, that this position is inherently intolerant. But with a President whose approval/popularity rating stands at just a little over 30%, I think this particular reactionary onslaught is a much better example of the media’s attempt at something like a coup de grace than it is of sound analysis involving abstractions like tolerance about which they say much, but know little.

According to Tolerance.org, a Web project of the Southern Poverty Law Center that bases its definition of tolerance on UNESCO’s Declaration on the Principles of Tolerance, tolerance is “a way of thinking and feeling—but most importantly, of acting—that gives us peace in our individuality, respect for those unlike us, the wisdom to discern humane values and the courage to act upon them.” As such, tolerance is a two-way street where people on both sides of the road assume some responsibilities in exchange for the rights they either enjoy or anticipate enjoying. What’s more, tolerance is not without its limits, including the actions of others that promote chaos or otherwise undermine one’s being.

So, had the media assessed the proposal to sing a Spanish version of The Star-Spangled Banner against this or some similar standard of tolerance, I am at a loss not only for how they could’ve concluded that Bush’s position is intolerant, but also for how they interpret the position of the proponents of Nuestro Himno to be anything but that. How else is one to interpret a translation that is not faithful to the original?

The translation’s faithfulness to the original aside, the “official” language of the United States is English. If the United States wants to legitimize a Spanish version of the national anthem for anything but pedagogical purposes (so that its legal immigrants can learn the English version), then it should be prepared to abandon altogether the charade of being uniquely different from its neighbor to the north, where annually enormous sums of money go into supporting an officially bilingual society, many of whose Francophones represent a constant threat to the integrity and strength of that society with the persistence of their secessionist tendencies.

Just because the United States ought to avoid slippery slopes like the one that plays into the hands of proponents of La Reconquista and a subset of immigrants who justify their illegal status on the basis that they are living on land that they say belongs to Mexico, does not imply that it’s intolerant. Rather, it’s resistant to groups that would push the limits of tolerance, with what amounts to threats of conquest, or that would try to enjoy certain rights to which they are not yet entitled rather than foregoing a mentality of entitlement and engaging in the hard work of assimilation—assimilation into a society that has a history of respecting heritages that are foreign to itself.

Is there room for improvement? Probably, and for ideas one might look to countries like present-day Germany—where a large immigrant population doesn’t expect Germans to sing Turkish or Russian, for example, but instead takes advantage of plentiful and affordable institutions to acquire another language and to get instruction about German culture. Surely the development of a network of similar institutions would be a far better investment than throwing money at a group of people that isn’t particularly interested in traditions other than its own and whose claim to land that doesn’t belong to it is hardly an effective strategy for unifying people.

Cartoons an Excuse for Illegal Expressions of an Ideology?

Every life is precious—which is why, to the exclusion of the more than a million people who go missing each year in the United States, I’m not going to supplement with my analysis the already-considerable resources that have been brought to bear on the tragic disappearance of Natalee Holloway, the 18-year-old girl from Alabama who vanished nearly a year ago from the island of Aruba. Leaving this single case in the hands of Greta Van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera, and others who have become its experts, I’d like to take this opportunity to explore an ideology that, by posing a threat to every U.S. citizen’s unalienable right to liberty in the form of freedom of expression, is arguably more treacherous than the widely assumed denial of one U.S. citizen’s unalienable right to life.

The ideology to which I refer is that which galvanizes radical Muslims, inciting riots, let alone other forms of unacceptable behavior, in response to things like cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, 12 of which were published last September by Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. Because the Islamic faith explicitly prohibits depictions of Muhammad, one can imagine that a person of this faith might be offended by such images. Even so, any such person ought to take into account the context within which the offense occurred—in this case, not the Muslim world, but the West, where, because of the separation of church and state, doing cartoons about religion is “fair game,” particularly for non-Muslim cartoonists who aren’t bound by the religion’s prohibition from depicting Muhammad. Context-specific or not, I don’t know that being offended warrants the destruction of property and/or other illegal activities. Perhaps this was the realization to which the Danish imams and their radical Muslim organizations came earlier this year when, according to The Brussels Journal, they proposed to end the cartoon dispute on two conditions, the first of which is presumed to have already existed and the second of which was met shortly after it was proposed: (1) a guarantee from the Danish authorities that Muslims can freely practice their religion without being “provoked and discriminated” and (2) a declaration from Jyllands-Posten that it had not published the cartoons with the intention of mocking the Islamic faith.

Notwithstanding this early-year effort of the Danes to appease its radical Muslims, the situation generally appears to have gone from bad to worse; in addition to a mob’s destruction by fire of the building that housed the Danish embassy in Damascus, Denmark’s radical Muslims have fueled the controversy by distributing three additional, arguably much more offensive, images that it has misleadingly attributed to Jyllands-Posten. Is it any wonder that Western sources that had published the cartoons from Jyllands-Posten to express their solidarity with the Danish paper are now being applauded by other Western sources on the ground that, had they not done so, far fewer people would realize that the more offensive images were not, in fact, among the 12 that Jyllands-Posten had published?

Indeed, I am myself tempted for this reason, let alone others, to post the images. For the time being, however, I’m inclined to exercise the restraint of which radical Muslims seem to be incapable—not because I’m a person who’s persuaded by unacceptable behavior or the “fear and trembling” that it tries unsuccessfully to impress, but only because I choose to do so out of consideration for their more moderate brethren who’d probably think me to be nothing worse than slightly insensitive if I were to exercise my option to do the opposite. In the meantime, I may take to drinking Carlsberg beer and doing anything else I can to support a country that, like my own and despite at times considerable pressure to do the contrary, refuses to be intimidated by impulsive radicals who would deprive them of liberty.