How do you make a scandal out of a legitimate profit-making enterprise? Use loaded language, smears, and distort prosaic facts.
Jailing Undocumented Immigrants Is Big Business ran the headine in The Huffington Post; the fact that this appeared beneath a link to another non-story – about Salma Hayek’s “boobs” – should have been a dead giveway.
The article is accompanied by a video that could teach Dr Goebbels, Molotov, or even Alastair Campbell a thing or two about spin, or as it used to be called before it was sanitised — propaganda.
Let’s begin at the beginning, what does the phrase undocumented immigrants mean? Try illegal immigrants, get the picture? People who enter a country illegally are by definition illegal immigrants or illegal aliens as in that song Englishman In New York, but without the romanticising.
The video, which is an attack on the State of Arizona, is literally hysterical. Woody Guthrie wrote an equally hysterical ad hominem filled song about the same subject half a century ago, Deportees.
The United States, the Great Satan, is such a terrible place that everyone wants to emigrate there, including the world’s poor. The United States also has a poor country — or more accurately, a country that has a large pool of desperately poor people — right on its Southern border. Many poor Mexicans want to leave their country to seek their fortune, or at least a welfare check, in the Promised Land, but the American Government doesn’t want to let them in, at least not countless millions of them. That does make sense, every country must have some sort of immigration policy, and every country worthy of the name does.
Currently, China has a population of well over one billion; although in recent years the Chinese Government has brought in social reforms and has also been doing its best to raise the standard of living of its people, you can’t please everyone; now supposing just one percent of China’s population wanted to leave the country, and for some bizarre reason they all wanted to emigrate to Holland, they should all be allowed in, right? Otherwise that would be racist, would it not?
We had this sort of hysteria in Britain for decades, often with stronger epithets, and due to this hysteria we have ended up letting in all manner of undesirables, including some people who have been implicated in the Rwandan genocide. People who have tried to enter Britain on false passports have been stopped at the airport only to claim — and receive — political asylum. What would happen to any British or American citizen who was stopped at the airport, perhaps in Mexico, and found to be travelling on a false passport?
The United States was once open to all or as good as, but now the doors are closed; the US doesn’t need and doesn’t want anymore immigrants except those who have demonstrable skills or bundles in the bank, and let’s face it, apart from Agent Reyes of The X-Files and Carlos Santana, who has Mexico ever given the United States that it couldn’t live without?
Returning to the video, the commentator weaves a skein around any individual or organisation that opposes the gaoling or even the expulsion of “undocumented immigrants” and ties them in with neo-Nazi groups, the phrase “obscure ties” is used, something which is reminiscent of Gerry Gable’s favourite word “links”. The truth is that we all have ties and links, some of them obscure. Serial killer John Gacy was once photographed with the First Lady of the United States and was actually both a staunch Democrat and activist; Paul McCartney is a staunch vegetarian, as was Adolf Hitler. So what?
Apart from seeking to open the State of Arizona and the US of A to all illegal — sorry, undocumented — immigrants — from everywhere but especially from Mexico — the video and Huffington Post article are equally staunchly opposed to the private prison system that is operating in the State, which is said to be a money machine in search of profit. There is of course a very simple way for anyone to stay out of Arizona’s private prison system — don’t break the law, which includes entering the country illegally.
One might ask why are there so many illegal immigrants from Mexico in the United States, a question that has a very easy answer; the Mexican Government is exporting or allowing the export of people it considers undesirable, which can include the indigent. In an earlier era, the British did this, sending undesirables including petty criminals and those who were simply poor to the New World and later to Australia. Much as we may and should empathise with the Mexican poor, they are not the problem of the United States; Arizona does not owe them a living.
For the record, there is another country that has strong laws against illegal immigrants. In that country, being an “undocumented immigrant” is a crime punishable by up to two years in prison. Foreigners “who are deemed detrimental to ‘economic or national interests,’ violate [the] law, are not ‘physically or mentally healthy’ or lack the ‘necessary funds for their sustenance’ and for their dependents” can be deported.
That country is called Mexico.
[The above op-ed was first published August 17, 2011.]
Back To Digital Journal Index