A Nation of Immigrants: Dehumanize, Deny, Fabricate & Deport

“It’s an unsolvable issue… The U.S. has a 2,000-mile border with Mexico. We need more asylum judges to process cases faster. People are waiting three and four years, and the geography of where they’re coming from is changing. The majority of people we’ve been seeing are Africans. We’re having to speak French instead of Spanish.” Nicholas Matthews, 24, a Tucson Samaritan who has opened his apartment to asylum seekers

There is no question that there are criminal immigrants at our southern border, but the statistics, for anyone seeking more than mere anecdotal evidence, tell us that such migrants commit far fewer violent crimes when they cross than American-born citizens. As our population contracts (US birth rates are 1.62 live births per adult women, while replacement requires 2.1), until recent years, immigration has been the growth safety valve that has kept out economy humming. As the US tightens immigration even for STEM-educated applicants, countries like Canada and UK can’t lap them up fast enough. Estimates suggest that we would lose about $5 trillion a year if Trump’s deportation initiative were implemented. For those who crossed from Latin America in recent years, they make up the backbone of our low-cost labor pool doing jobs Americans won’t take: agricultural stoop labor, grueling unskilled construction work, working in slaughterhouses, etc.

But for political reasons, immigration is now a topline issue. Assuming somehow, we can deport all those undocumented workers without a massive mega-billion-dollar program (a huge and unjustifiable assumption), what happens to some of our most basic costs – from food production to construction – if we have to replace those workers with US-born workers… probably at triple or more the cost? What happens when that massive cadre is pulled from the US consumer base? How much lost tax revenue do we suffer by forcing them to remain below the radar? But MAGA continues to refer to these hapless migrants as “vermin,” violent criminal drug dealers, “murders and rapists,” and other horrific epithets, renascent of WII-era Nazi descriptions of Jews, spewed to justify the Holocaust.

We easily forget that US addicts supply the dollars to fund cartels, who are powerful because of the firearms they were easily able to purchase in the US… easily smuggled south. Cartels with lots of money, lots of American-made weapons, making life in so many nations south of the border a hellish nightmare forcing their citizens to flee for their lives. We don’t even talk about that.

Obviously, there is a problem at our southern border. But there has been no major serious immigration reform since legislation passed in 1986 during the Reagan era. For Republicans, keeping that problem unsolved, has become a political issue that they have run on for decades. Trump went so far as to force his MAGA sheep in Congress to vote against their own immigration bill, one that Democrats were willing to accept, to keep the issue alive for the 2024 election. But with horrific problems all over the world – murderous conflicts to decimating realities as climate changes kills agriculture and habitability – migrants are now coming from everywhere.

Writing about this horror at our southern border for the October 23rd Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Fleishman tells us: “[More] than 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. are at the volatile center of the November election… The number of migrant apprehensions and other encounters with Border Patrol agents at the southwestern border has fallen sharply — from nearly 250,000 in December to 58,000 in August — since President Biden’s crackdown on asylum seekers in June. Over that same period, the monthly number of encounters with migrants from Guatemala fell 81% — from 34,693 to 6,420 — and there was a 76% drop, from 18,993 to 4,465, in those from Honduras, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. But decades of failed policies and Republican Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric against migrants have kept the issue a top priority for voters, prompting Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris to take a tougher stand on the issue.

“A drive with Tucson [Arizona] Samaritans along 21 miles of the rust-colored, slatted border wall in Arizona highlights the economic, political and human complexities in stopping a flow of people at a time when climate change, authoritarianism and economic uncertainty grip much of the globe.

“Immigration animates the American conversation on schools, jobs, crime, housing and the cost of healthcare. It is an unsteady balancing act involving compassion, the nation’s economic needs and bipartisan calls for stricter regulations often distorted by weaponized statistics and divisive politics… For men such as Jim Chilton, whose 50,000-acre cattle ranch runs near the Arizona border, it’s a matter of security: “We need to finish the border wall,” he said. “Our nation is built on immigrants. We need them. But we have to have legally accepted ones, not people coming in and saying, ‘I’m here. Process me.’… “There’s some really bad guys coming onto our ranch,” he continued. They’re packing [fentanyl] and guns. I don’t like it. They’re coming to poison our country.’

“Chilton’s concerns resound in [Arizona, a] critical battleground state. Democrat Joe Biden won here by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020. Although border encounters have fallen across the country, they remained persistent here over much of the last year, rising about 40% in the Tucson region to roughly 450,000. Those figures have dropped significantly in recent months, but furor over immigration has led to a November referendum, known as Proposition 314, that would allow state and local-level officers in Arizona to arrest and deport undocumented migrants…

“At the height of the migrant influx last year, up to 1,500 asylum seekers a day passed through Tucson, whose network of churches and nonprofits helped provide temporary shelter and supplies. Mayor Regina Romero said the U.S. ‘immigration system is completely broken. The House and Senate need to fix it.’.. A Democrat and daughter of immigrant farmworkers from Mexico, she said that Trump and Republicans have turned immigration into a ‘wedge issue’ while ‘spewing lies’ about migrants with ‘cruel and dehumanizing’ language.”

Yet his horror, which actually can be solved with well-funded preventatives and appropriate processes, just might elect a president whose stated disdain for immigrants (he married one!) and promised policies just might make the whole matter so much worse… while slamming the US economy. We choose not to… and it is a choice. We are talking about suffering flesh and blood human beings. To hate them and fight to harm them appears to be a wholesale condemnation of essence of Christian charity, the underlying vector of the entire New Testament of the Bible. Is the mission of MAGA evangelicals?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the scurrilous anti-immigrant rhetoric – mostly driven by fabrications and conspiracy theories – just might elect the most dangerous man to the presidency that we have ever had.