The immigration thing

I don’t talk enough about current events. It’s evidence, really, of how messed up I’ve been by the past four years, because talking about current events was one thing I wanted to do here and I certainly offer opinions about same on my own social media, but every time it’s occurred to me to offer something here I kind of mull it over and then go, “…Nah.” Can’t get up the juice to even start. Which would surprise some people who’ve known me for years. Yes! I do have self-restraint! Fuckers.

And I’m still dragging myself kicking and screaming just to write this because I’m sure it’s going to annoy someone, and I’m really tired of feeling like I have to put out fires every time someone gets annoyed with me. But it’s gotten to the point that either I can say something or I can be a Good German. I don’t want to be a Good German. That’s, like, the worst thing I could be right now. I also am not going to merely repeat what everyone else has said, though. I want to add signal, not noise because I’m tired of people just shouting the same old bullshit at one another and getting caught in these outrage loops. You need to settle the fuck down and start THINKING, because this is hurting real people in real time.

Okay. We know immigration is a hot issue right now. And what seems to be driving a lot of that “being a hot issue” is that far too many Americans are convinced we’re being invaded by raving hordes of brown and black people, some with weird cloth things on their heads, who come here to rape and pillage and murder and steal our welfare funds. And we think that nothing sort of massive military action is going to put a stop to it. It’s gotten absolutely crazy. I look at the people screaming things like this and I think, “Are we even on the same planet, here?” I’m not seeing what it is they’re seeing. They’re not even seeing it. They’re hearing it on the news or on social media and they’re believing the gossip, basically. It’d be almost funny if it weren’t literally ruining other people’s lives. Or killing them. That’s happened too.

“Wait, Dana,” you’re saying. “What do you mean ‘brown and black people’? This isn’t about race. It’s about obeying the law.”

Cool, cool. So you’re telling me race isn’t informing your opinions on this issue at all? That’s very interesting. So how come every time I hear about illegal immigration, it’s someone screaming about Latinos or Muslims? (Okay, Islam isn’t a race, but you did know there are white Muslims, right? How come when I see people shitting themselves about Muslims, it’s always the brown and black ones? Don’t smart off to me, just stop and mull that over. Might be the first time you’ve given anything a serious think in your entire life.) Some years ago, I looked up information on how many illegal Canadians we’ve got here. The article I found estimated that in any given year we’ve probably got a hundred thousand of them here. Now, there are brown and black Canadians, but be honest: when someone says “Canadian,” what race do you usually think of? And this is in spite of how easy it is to come here legally from Canada, but I’ll get to that later. Or how about after the September 11 attacks when we cracked down on “illegals” and we kept seeing news stories about British people caught being here illegally, same story? We think of them as white people even though some aren’t, and it is really, really easy for them to be legal here, and yet. They were breaking the law. How come people who scream about “illegals” (ugh) never scream about them? It’s about obeying the law, right? They didn’t. Scream about them too. We know you won’t.

“Well… but there are so many MORE Latinos here than Canadians!”

I hear you, but I’ll say it again: if this is about obeying the law, why are you singling out one group? I would think you’d be ANGRIER about people who have it easier under the law but break that law anyway. Such a low bar and they failed to hit it. That should make you MORE angry, not less. People coming from Latin America have more hoops to jump than someone coming here from London does. (United Kingdom OR Canada… there’s a London there too.) I would think you would be MORE understanding about someone breaking a complicated law than about someone breaking a simple one. Under ANY OTHER circumstance — in other words, a circumstance affecting white people, or a circumstance affecting someone you know personally — you would be more understanding. Hell, I hear social conservatives bitching about government bureaucracy all. the. fucking. time. And that complexity, thus the difficulty in obeying those complex laws, is exactly what you’re bitching about. So it’s okay if YOU can’t follow the law and YOU deserve pity and sympathy, but people literally trying to save their own lives or make them better don’t deserve anything but deportation. I see.

Because did you really think that everyone who comes here from another country is subject to the same rules, regulations, and laws? Because they’re not, you know. A person coming here from Mexico has to follow more rules and requires more paperwork and a different permission process than someone coming here from Canada or the UK does. People coming from Mexico need more documentation and permission; people from Canada or the UK just need a six-month visa waiver, easily obtained and renewable indefinitely. And that shit you need to come here from Mexico all costs money. Sometimes lots of it. You did notice that a lot of Mexicans are dirt fucking poor, right? THAT’S WHY THEY COME HERE.

And it’s fascinating to me how the number of steps and obstacles an immigrant must overcome are GREATER when they come from a country with a higher melanin count than when they’re coming here from a country with a lot more pale people. I saw this in action in the nineties when Cuban and Haitian boat people were constantly in the news. Now, there are black people in Cuba, but it wasn’t the black people who were coming here from Cuba. Haiti, meanwhile, is almost nothing BUT black people. So guess who got let in, and guess who got turned back. And anyone who knows anything about Haiti knows that it’s the far more dangerous country for its own people. But they’re not white or even white-adjacent, so our policy has generally been to send them back and let them die. As we’ve seen in the recent Trump administration policy change on whether anyone can even fly here from Port-au-Prince. A plane flight. Just that. Even if all the passengers are “legal.” Banned now.

Hell, the phenomenon we’ve all noticed about Asian immigrants going to college in the United States at much higher rates than other immigrants or even natural-born Americans? That’s because we have a longstanding policy of mostly letting in college grads from those countries. Everybody knows a college family is more likely to produce college graduates. It’s practically cosmic law. It’s not because they’re racially superior, it’s because we’re rigging the game.

I have been hearing for years that the United States has deliberately engineered its immigration policies in order to control the racial makeup of this country and tip it in favor of white people. I have seen nothing in my fifty-one years of life to disprove that notion. You see it in public policy, you see it in how the media (especially, but not only, the conservative media) discuss immigration, and you see it in how Americans on the street discuss immigration. Not even just white Americans. You get a lot of “I got mine, fuck you” attitude from people of other racial groups too. Some of the loudest screamers about Latino “illegals” are established, legal Latino residents or American citizens. They don’t want the competition, apparently.

It’s especially irritating to me because it is currently a fad for social conservatives to scream and cry about DEI (I have issues with DEI too, but not along the racial axis — but that’s off-topic here) because “we’re supposed to be color-blind,” and they will claim to be color-blind and Not Racist til they’re blue in the face but if you were to suggest to them that we establish a UNIFORM standard for legal residency and legal immigration in the United States, one NOT based on the predominant racial group of the country of origin, they would absolutely shit themselves.

As to the argument that this is about “reducing crime,” until Trump came along no one was seriously suggesting that we deport violent criminals who are natural-born or naturalized citizens. I don’t think even now we’re arguing for deporting the natural-borns, but we’re definitely talking up revoking naturalized citizenships. But the crime rate among natural-borns and naturalized citizens is much higher than it is for the people here illegally. If you know you could be deported for acting up, you’re going to behave a lot better, nine times out of ten. Most of those people are here to make a decent living, and they don’t want to fuck that up. People who think they get to be here forever are going to take it more for granted. So no, you’re not going to reduce violent crime by deporting janitors and dishwashers, and you’re not even going to undo the crime those janitors and dishwashers committed by coming here illegally. It happened. Deportation in fact is the punishment for that happening. It’s not going to stop them, either. It’s just going to make them more determined to game the system, in the same way that spanking children just makes them better liars.

(Didn’t know that, huh? Yeah… I got bad news for you. Sit down. Not sure how you’ll take this.)

And the thing about unauthorized immigration being a crime is that you determine that presence in the United States is legal, or not, by looking at a person’s legal documentation. So all you have to do to break the law is not have the right documentation. You don’t have to be smuggled in by truckload, you don’t have to hop the Rio Grande, you don’t have to sail across the Gulf of MEXICO. You just have to be here and not have a piece of paper. Ooh. Scary.

My paternal half-brother is dealing with this shit right now. Our father was career Navy and neither of us was born on American soil. We are, however, natural-born citizens according to United States Code (federal law). When you are born overseas like this, you have to have a piece of paper that says you’re a natural-born citizen to go along with your birth certificate in order to be legally documented. When we were born in the seventies, that document was called the Certificate of Birth Abroad. For some reason, because his mother was always more conscientious about this stuff than mine was, I have my CBA but he does not have his. He has been trying to sort this out for YEARS, but his parents have refused to work with him on the matter, even though it’s their fault he doesn’t have it. I’m about to step in and help him obtain their birth documentation, because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t actually need their permission to obtain copies of those records. But he’s going to have to white-knuckle it until we can figure all that out. Trump being on a tear about “illegals” may ruin his life. What’s he supposed to do if he’s deported to the Philippines? He knows no one there and doesn’t speak a word of Tagalog. He was three when we moved back to the States. Fucking hell.

If you want my opinion, and you probably don’t, I think the whole immigration thing is bullshit anyway. I’ve long thought so. We spent most of our nation’s history not regulating who could come here. It didn’t turn out so great for the Native Americans, but face it: none of you care. In fact, you use the eNfOrCiNg ThE LaW excuse to persecute them ‘cause they’ve got brown skin and look like Mexicans to you. That ship has sailed, anyway. This is what we’ve got. It makes no sense to micromanage who crosses that border. We already have laws about how people are allowed to behave once here, and it doesn’t make a rape or murder any worse if it’s committed by someone without citizenship. It really doesn’t. Promise.

I am completely okay with not letting someone vote who doesn’t have citizenship, and I agree we do need a path to citizenship for people who are not from here. But it’s long past time we had a national conversation on why some of us want to turn the United States into an open-air prison. We don’t need more walls and travel restrictions. We need to stop dehumanizing people who don’t look and sound like us. The collateral damage alone, such as the kind my brother’s facing, should have clued us in on how pointless this all is. Shipping his ass to Olongapo is going to do fuck-all about Mexican drug gangs. Even the laws we have that let immigrants work here legally are horrible. So you can only be here legally if your employer likes you? But your employer will only like you if you do everything they tell you to do. If your employer decides not to like you, it’s their word against yours and the government will side with them. How is this not paid slavery? It’s fucking paid slavery. They weren’t even committed of a crime — if they had been, we’d deport them. Why are we allowing this? It’s long past time for a change.

And if you think I’m crazy, wait’ll I tell you about the international adoptees whose “parents” made zero effort to get them legal here, or about the indigenous people of the American southwest and Mexican northwest who never asked for that fucking border and who don’t even speak Spanish, much less English, if ICE or the Border Patrol happen to pick them up on their own fucking territory. There is so much broken in the system that we are never going to fix if you keep turning off your brain by declaring millions of people to be “illegals” or “illegal aliens” and siccing the military on them. So how about we stop fucking doing that. Thanks.