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. I made that pilgrimage three times, one once using my thumb, and the only trouble I ever ran into, no matter where I turned, was some Texas kid always trying to pick a fight. Of the two ways to get to El Paso-Jauarez, 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. The other is across I-40 and the Texas Panhandle, largely with truckers, then hang a left at Albuquerque, down the Rio Grande.
The Juaristas? I loved them. A friend taught me all the cat-house talk for the cabbies who drove you to Boy’s Town, and the proper pleasantries for the senoritas. And along the way I found a Mexican flair to everything once on the Rio Grande. To a boy raised on mountain oysters, this was heaven.
Later, 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 had a client there through 2008.
In those days there was no real immigration issue. Just culture and class. Rural Arizona culture 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 they took a swing 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…usually to counsel their bandit sons, who for three years I got to represent in court. You see, I was simpatico. I was their 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. Even here in Virginia, there is usually a middle man named Manual who finds them and a straw-boss named Jose who brings them to the job. In some places in California you just go a particular street corner and you sing out your needs, and they 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. But think again.
That corner belongs to someone and it reflects almost a universal law. 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 stotinkis (a tenth of a penny). I even sneaked over and dropped a ruble paper note in his cup, then returned to my post on the steps to watch. Eventually a tall man in fox ushanka 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. In Ukraine, there was a re-opened Orthodox Church that allowed beggars to beg, fee-free.
So, even beggars must have a patrone in all points on the globe other than America, but these are rules most Americans are not aware even exist. Even in California.
Besides, the fellow hiring them doesn’t really care that there’s a whole lot more organization in that process than meets the eye.
But I said “free” America, not the Democrat’s “other America” where everything comes with a middle man bribe-price. For you see, illegals didn’t know such freedoms existed. They think paying a middle man is normal…and today give up that one freedom just in being able to come here. And once here, they are handed over to handlers who handle them for the Democrats who will hold them in thrall forever, if allowed.
Sex-slavers (e.g, Albanians, Russians) will hold the passports of the girls they shop out, and it is no different with young men coming up from Central America. Someone is holding their papers.
Hold that thought, for the process will interest you, and the solution will come over you like a wave.
The Rigid Jaw of Entitlement
Since the early 2000’s our local flea market had been the Latinos weekly trip to the mall, a place they can promenade in their Sunday finest…their one day off. 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 being able to afford one of those in Chiapas.) The last set were younger men, in three’s and fours, many new arrivals, and often 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 in Sinaloa.
It was those attitudes that changed a lot of attitudes about all the Latino community, for somewhere along the line they picked up a cocky swagger with that rigid jaw of entitlement that almost sneered at their hosts.
People noticed, and complained, so county police started showing up and then just as suddenly only Latinos who were secure their papers would pass inspection continued coming. And the illegals had to sneak once more.
There’s no question about the fact that it was this new face of illegal immigration that 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.
Citizens are indifferent about a man’s status if he quietly goes about his work, and is polite. But when that return look is haughty and disdainful, 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.
Obama first introduced this swagger. And except for the short Trump interlude, people have 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?
Virtually no Latino comes here without a “passport”, only they are written now on the other side of the border. As countless thousands of Latinos 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 exit-fee. 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” were given their papers) now exists well inside the Mexican border, all because we decided not to set one up along that border.
So all this activity is organized, very little of it spontaneous, and involves all the parties who stand to profit from those poor souls moving from their poor existence in Chiapas to a construction site in Toledo, where someone will deliver their vote to the Democrats.
Only a fool would say that the four prongs of this enterprise are not in cahoots: 1a) The Mexican “passport agencies” are simple facilitators. Peons hire them to escort them safely across the border. They gather them in collection points well south of the border, then spirit them across, where they are met by various people on the American side, who may take them as far away as New Hampshire before than can establish new digs. 1b) The Greeters on the other side are also facilitators, and get a piece of the toll collected, but also get a fee for safe delivery. At this point the facilitators fall out of the picture and go back to Phoenix to make another haul, and the illegals are handed over to the “administrative” control of 2) Protectors, who get them settled and oriented with the people who will find them jobs. These are the varied Latino-based NGOs, community organizers, many receiving federal money, the Obama’s old ACORN among them (I know people in rural Arizona who have been with ACORN for years), all who have a political and financial reason for wanting these immigrants in the US under their supervisory-control, and 3) Democrat Party, who simply needs this new voter base and has the current ability to fund this process (launder) through those NGO’s, top to bottom. Finally there is the 4) Mexican government who needs that pressure valve of disenchanted poor released and all that Western Union money being put back into their 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.
While the Mexican facilitators, (crooks, they 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 money 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 let’s build an Ellis Island at the border, and just like the old one, run them through the process: 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 them back if they flunk, where it is guaranteed it will take at least a month to process them back south. 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.
Also, back to 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.
Bottom line, my simple rules: 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, we not only don’t want them, and should spend every penny possible to insure they are rounded up and send packing.
And, since the illegals who come here now are already under some “contractual obligation” to those third parties, that system should be destroyed, top to bottom.
In a recent essay, The American Theology of Liberty, I mentioned the Natural Law of cultural survival depending of a majority of each generation re-learning the connections, part religious, part patriotic,
