Do Mexicans Still Love the United States?

The bluster of GOP candidates, wanting to seal our “brown border” from all those nasty “brown” people clamoring to get in, fills the autumn air. No worries about that “white” border to the north. Look south. The vision of construction workers (how many would be “brown,” by the way?) setting steel and concrete to build the biggest and baddest wall since China built the Great Wall! But think of the economic hardship that American smugglers of small arms (bought legally at gun shows where background checks are just not required) will have sending guns to cartels around, under or through that “brown” border wall! Oh, I guess they can enlist the engineers who built a solid, reinforced tunnel – a full mile long – to bust cartel superstar El Chapo out of a Mexican prison. Or get some of those kinky home-made drug submarine builders to help them make the return trip worthwhile.

Gotta keep all of those rapist/drug-dealing criminals out of the pristine United States of America. Clearly, we don’t need undocumented workers in the fields harvesting our crops where stoop labor is required; lots of Americans want to work there and almost as much in slaughterhouses, digging ditches and doing hard unskilled construction work or cleaning dishes and other nasty menial jobs that would go begging and unfulfilled if those workers were swept up in the largest Trump-inspired and massively most expensive labor sweep in ICE’s (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) history.

Ok, if they stay, they even have the temerity to let their kids go to school, then college, and too many of those become horrible drains on society as teachers, engineers, doctors, etc. Make sure that those “dreamers,” kids who were brought here when they were very, very young and have no life-experience outside of the United States, are shipped back to a land they do not know.

Oh, and perhaps we should make sure that we also keep people out of our country who come from lands that are clearly our enemy… no special dispensation for emigres like we had for defectors from the former Soviet Union or from Communist Cuba… We should never have let that happen. How did Marco Rubio’s father justify asylum in the U.S., just by stepping on to U.S. soil? That was and still is the policy from folks from Cuba. Who knows how many saboteurs and spies did we openly let into the U.S. that way? Let’s keep America for white Americans.

For a land of immigrants, we sure like to show the world how downright mean and inhospitable we truly are… not to mention well-armed and ready to use guns as national policy or even apply a subjective test (wherever there is a stand-your-ground law) when murder is just plain forgivably fine! So exactly how are Mexicans (and more than a few from Central America) feeling about moving here these days? Let’s use numbers from a credible source like a recent report from the Pew Research Center.

“From 2009 to 2014, more than one million Mexicans and their families left the United States for Mexico, while more than 865,000 entered the United States, Pew said. The figures include unauthorized immigrants… An increasing share of Mexicans says life north of the border is neither better nor worse than life in Mexico, Pew said… The overall flow of Mexican immigrants between the two countries is at its smallest since the 1990s, Pew said.

“The findings follow Trump's call for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, a plan President Barack Obama has said is too costly and un-American…

“More than 16 million Mexican immigrants have migrated to the United States in the last 50 years, more than from any other country, Pew said…From fewer than 1 million living in the United States in 1970, the number of Mexican immigrants peaked at 12.8 million by 2007, Pew said. The total declined to 11.7 million last year.

“Pew has been tracking flows for about 15 years, said Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, a research associate who wrote the report. For its report, Pew analyzed government data from both countries…’ This is the first time that we have the actual evidence and numbers of people going back,’ she said.

“About half of all adults in Mexico believe those who moved to the United States lead better lives, but 33 percent say life is neither better nor worse north of the border, up from 23 percent in 2007, Pew said… Other reasons for the decreased inflow include the slow recovery of the U.S. economy after the recession and stricter enforcement of U.S. immigration laws at the border.” AOL.com, November 19^th. We are slowly (did I say “slowly”?) becoming a lovely land of paranoid hypocrites, violent and generally disliked by most nations on earth for our arrogance and bullying tactics around the world. We’re really good at shoving the helpless of the world around.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the heartland of American Evangelical values, I kind of wonder why brotherly love, unconditional charity and not sitting in judgment of others have been thoroughly purged from any interpretation of the Bible.