You already know I’m “one of those desert loving English”. I like Arabs and don’t see anything especially sinister in the Quran as I’ve known it to develop over the past millenium. But I have no quiver in my finger at shooting dead, dead, dead any son of perdition who would use it to justify the killing of innocent people trying to force its strictures on non-believers. I work to hasten the day some mullah will hang his 95 theses on the door of the Great Mosque at Mecca, thus beginning the demise of Wahhabism in particular and the reformation of Islam in general…as has happened with all religions throughout history, simply by people having more choices.
I hate kings and many Arabs have a penchant for kings.
So do the Democrats, it seems.
Moses Sands once said that America needs immigrants, to which we all agree, but he went on to say “The poorer the better.” On reflection, I agree. You see, I’m one of those beaner-loving gringoski’s, too. I’m simpatico.
In the spring of ’65, I put five dollars and some change in my pocket, another $200 in a sandwich bag in my sock, and began hitchhiking from the Ohio River to Juarez, Mexico to partake of their fine cervezas and black-eyed senoras del placere. You could do that in those days. You can’t anymore….safely. Actually you can’t do either things safely. I made that pilgrimage three times (my folks thought I was fishing Bull Shoals in Arkansas), and the only trouble I ever ran into was, no matter where I turned, some Texas kid was always trying to pick a fight. Of the two ways to get to El Paso, one is across 700 miles of Texas, “The sun has riz, the sun has set, and here I am in Texas yet” and filled with far more horses’ behinds than there are horses. Who knew football players from Rice could fight?
But the Juaristas? I loved them. I learned all the cat-house talk from the cabbies who drove you to Boy’s Town, and the proper pleasantries for the senoritas. And along the way, from Route 66 on, I found a Mexican flair to everything. To a boy raised on mountain oysters, this was heaven. To this day the best Mexican meal I have ever eaten was at a truck stop near Socorro and it cost me $4.87 plus tip.
When I left Japan in ’75 I got my last army assignment at Ft Huachuca, near the Arizona-Mexican border, passed the Arizona bar, then practiced law there for a few years in the Yavapai Apache region, before moving into industry. I still have clients there, and many contacts. Moses Sands lived near Sedona, though I never knew him at the time.
In those days there was no real immigration issue, at least in Arizona. Chavez was organizing workers across the hills in the Imperial Valley. In Arizona it was just a clash of culture and class. Arizona subculture was divided up by hippies who hated the pigs, so loved everything they thought the pigs hated, rednecks who hated greasers and hippies, bikers who hated everyone, and old time cowboys who didn’t hate anyone…unless he took a swing at them first. I was a tribal lawyer, so liked the Apaches a lot, but they were a sorrowful lot…lost between two worlds. I’d have been a drunk too, I guess. But the Mexicans?…most congenial manners and easy going way you can imagine, best food on the planet, cock-fights, dog-fights, and real class among their elders. While some of their children were criminals, the old donnas with shawls and rosaries carried a nobility about them that made me feel lucky to be invited into their homes…to counsel their bandit sons, who for three years I got to represent in court. You see, I was simpatico. I was the free lawyer of choice.
That was then, this is now.
The laws of economics apply no matter where you are. If you can find hard workers for low wages, you will hire them. Here in Virginia, there was usually a middle man named Manual who finds them and a straw-boss named Jose who brings them to the job. I say was because most of the jobs were in the now-struggling housing construction industry. In some places in California you just go a particular street corner and you sing out your needs, and they’d pile into the back of your truck. You may think they are just solo job seekers, men just seeking the same thing, a day’s work for a day’s pay. Think again. That corner belongs to someone.
The fellow hiring doesn’t really care that there is a whole lot more organization in that process than meets the eye. I recall once standing in a subway station in Russia in the last winter of the USSR, and watched a crippled beggar with a tin cup begging for stotinki coins (a tenth of a penny). I even sneaked over and dropped a ruble paper note in his cup, then returned to my post to watch. Eventually a tall man in fur hat and a fine overcoat with fur lined collar walked up (with bodyguards) to speak to this cripple, took all his folding money and tipped him with the remaining coins.
So, even beggars must have a patrone in all points on the globe other than America, so these are rules most Americans are not aware even exist. Only in much of America they do here, too. In the formerly-free America you did not have to pay for the ability to seek work. But I said “free” America, not the Democrat’s “other America” where everything comes with a middle man bribe-price. You see, illegals don’t know such freedom exists. They think paying a middle man is normal…and today give up that one freedom just in being able to come here, sort of like buying your way out of indentured servitude during the colonial era. For once here, they are now handed over to the Democrats who hold them in thrall forever.
Hold that thought, for the process will interest you, and the solution will come over you like a thunderbolt.
Moses Sands had a simple philosophy about illegals. He said it was important that they always have to sneak…always looking over their shoulder, always afraid the long arm of the law would reach out and grab them, and cut off that Western Union wire to family back in Coahuila. He said doing so made them grateful. In central Arizona I don’t think Moses saw illegals as much of a problem, thinking more in terms of the labor troubles in California, and Chavez, and Chavez was as anti-illegal immigrant as Jan Brewer is. Moses passed on to the High Pastures in 2006, and probably paid no attention to the influx and impact of illegal immigrants in un-Latino places as Chicago (which I saw first hand in the late ’90s, all the way up to Highland Park), and Virginia. We never talked about it very much. He was more interested in tricking communists, never wondering how that might segue into his own back yard.
The Rigid Jaw of Entitlement
But Moses “sneak-rule” was borne out by the sudden turn of my local community here the past few years at places Latinos (mostly Mexican) congregate. And it was all in the way they carried themselves. Our flea markets have been a home for Latinos since I’ve lived here, a little over 10 years. At first it was only the redneck vendors who didn’t like them. They blamed every bad thing on the Mexicans; a slow down in business, every little theft, even the smell of the place as Mexicans began selling farm produce. Most of those people had lived in the informal economy all their lives, never paid a nickle in taxes, and lived by buying and selling and all the artful dodges they could scare up on any given Saturday and Sunday. But they were still rednecks, always looking for a fall-guy.
The flea market is the Latinos weekly trip to the mall, a place they can promenade in their Sunday finest…their one day off. Reminds me of the Irish in NYC at the turn of the last century. They came in shifts, the sunrise crowd looking for tools, anything to turn a buck, followed by the after-church crowd, still in their Sunday finery, chiffon dresses and heels, the baby in the stroller (try finding one of those in Chiapas…or being able to afford it…in Chiapas.) The last set were younger men, in three’s and fours, mostly newly arrived, and over half illegal, their payday cash burning a hole in their pockets, just like any 19-year old, with all this cool stuff to buy, right here, when, what 6-8 weeks earlier, they were grubbing for worms in Sinaloa.
But somewhere along the line they picked up a cocky swagger and that rigid jaw of entitlement that almost screams out, “I dare you to say one word about my status.”
People noticed, and people started saying that one word. Illegal. Regular people. Even simpatico people. No longer just the rednecks. So, county police started showing up and then just as suddenly only Latinos who were confident their papers would pass muster continued coming. Once again, for the illegals it was a dice roll again, strutting their stuff on Sunday was a crap shoot. They had to sneak once more. (All this two years before Jan put her Brewer in 1079 in Arizona.)
There’s no question about the fact that it was this new face of illegal immigration that has changed public opinion so rapidly, and so harshly, from millions of Americans who were once simpatico to simple folk seeking work and a new beginning. People admire the man who quietly goes about his work, never sure he can make eye contact, always fearful, and ever grateful for the polite smile or simplest of Spanish greetings, as a way to say “I am not your enemy.” But when that return look is haughty and disdainful, and astride with swagger, then it is not so hard to connect the dots when in Washington or LA they are seen to take to streets in protest, with Mexican flags, and American flags upside down. Everyone makes that connection.
People have quickly gotten fed up as they see illegals take to those streets in organized, underscore organized parades and protests about their rights, clearly with this same sense of entitlement they already see on the streets of Virginia.
Remember those middle men I spoke of, above? Back to the Democrats and the other criminals on the Mexican side of the border.
Virtually no Mexican comes here without a “passport,” only they are written now on the other side of the border. As countless hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexican have found out the past decade, one does not simply get up from his hovel in Durango and decide he will go to America. He will be shot dead for sure…but for not paying the gate fee on their side. The fence or border crossing is the least of his problems, getting to it is the trick. Unfortunately the Ellis Island we once had (where “illegals” got their papers) now exists well inside the Mexican border, all because we decided not to set one up along that border. This photo is from 1916 
when Mexicans fled the civil war there that lasted several years. The violence, the poverty and that civil war goes on to this day.
So all this activity is organized, very little spontaneous, and involves all the parties who stand to benefit from those poor souls moving from a poor existence in Chiapas to a construction site in Toledo, where in the end someone will deliver their vote to the Democrats.
Only a fool would say that the four prongs of this enterprise are not in cahoots. At some point the illegals are handed over to the “administrative” control of protectors, who get them settled and oriented with the people who will find them jobs. These are the varied Latino-based community organizers, many receiving federal money, the old ACORN among them (I know people in rural Arizona who have been with ACORN for twenty plus years), all who have a political and financial reason for wanting these immigrants in the US under their supervisory-control, and finally the Democrat Party, who simply needs the new voter base and has the current ability to fund this process (launder) through those NGOs, top to bottom. Finally there is the Mexican government who needs that pressure valve of disenchanted poor released and all that Western Union money being put back into the economy, where they get an especially nice cut, since, like most socialist-fascist countries, almost all the privates sector vendors in Mexico are exclusive “licensees” of the state.
This is why the Mexican government was silent while the Obama Administration sold 1000 of the “assault weapons” to Mexican drug gangs, who then killed at least 500 (and counting) Mexican citizens, that Dianne Feinstein is trying to make illegal for law-abiding American citizens to own.
While the Mexican facilitators (crooks who fight over turf and transport just like drug gangs do, and often may be the same) can do all right by themselves, imagine the windfall profits once it’s known the leaseholders of the world’s largest criminal money laundering pit, the Democrat Party, are willing to fund their clients arrival under various circumstances? Jackpot! At the same time drug cartels need to secure mule paths and hide them with armies of collaterals and they pull out cash, and Muslim-terrorists who have their own stash need to get across to meet brotherhood friends in Phoenix, so all of a sudden these guys are rolling in dough. You can see why Chihuahua and Durango, especially, barren wastelands to the Mexican government for years, have now become jewels in the criminal crown, and fought over by rival drug cartels, federalis and provincial police, like the Silk Road once was in Asia. Your highway taxes at work.
Two simple rules
I didn’t start writing this with the intention of laying out a better immigration plan, but Moses suggested one a long time ago. Build an Ellis Island at the border, and just like the old one, run them through the mill, doctors, background checks, then pass them through with papers of passage. Three-four days. But also build, a few miles away, a St Helena’s Island, set up like Sheriff Joe’s facilities in Maricopa County, for sending rule-breakers back, where it is guaranteed it will take at least a month to process them back into Mexico. Set up in this way, this will guarantee those coming through the legal portal will likely be good workers, and behave like good citizens, while all the others, with mischief in their eyes, will find border crossing more difficult and much easier for states to interdict. They will not have any collateral cover.
Back to something Moses said, and something a fellow, Leo Rosten, wrote about in the 1930s, about the joy of “comink to America” and being a citizen (The Education of H *Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N…I can recommend no book higher for capturing that joy)…there is that idea of gratitude.
These are Moses rules, but also mine: The kind of immigrant we want is one 1) who blesses the ground he walks on because it is free ground, and 2) blesses the Document and the men and women who made and kept that ground free.
If instead, they must kiss the ring of the Democrat Party, or any constituent branch thereof, we not only don’t want them, but should spend every penny possible to insure they are rounded up and send packing.
And, inasmuch as 10%-20% only of the illegals who come here now are not already under some “contractual obligation” to those third parties, that system should be destroyed, top to bottom.
