HOW THEY HAVE IMMIGRANTS COMING AND GOING 

                                                      

                                                             Neville Raymond

Here is a thought on immigration. 

Every public venue has a lawful occupancy level.  Just like a country.

When a venue gets too crowded and there is danger of exceeding the occupancy level, the fire marshals show up and start asking people to leave.  

What about when a city or state or country gets too crowded?   

Is it lawful for the counterpart of fire marshals to show up and ask people to leave?   

It has nothing to do with Emma Lazarus.  

Or racism.  

Or diversity.  

Or even compassion. 

In the case of public venues, it has to do with a fire hazard.  

In the case of a city or state, it has to do with traffic gridlock, overcrowded schools, swamped court systems and overburdened social services. 

There is only one class of people that is uniquely positioned to make a killing from this criminal state of affairs.  

It is those who orchestrated it in the first place.  

They the ones who created the intolerable conditions in the mother country that dispossessed millions of people from their ancestral lands.   

Who are we going to blame for the surge of Mexican-born immigrants into this country from 4.6 million in 1990 to 12. 6 million in 2009?  

The exodus of 5 million family farmers from Mexico between 1991 and 2007?

Or the influx of U.S. subsidized corn and other products that drove them off their land?

The real villains of the immigration drama are not the innocent border-crossers. 

They are the corporations that wage economic and military wars that turn their countries of origin into uninhabitable wastelands - 

and then turn around and profit from the divisive pool of cheap labor at their disposal.  

This is the narrative that the mainstream media studiously avoids.  

It prints sob stories of immigrants families torn apart, while turning a blind eye to how American families are torn apart by the need to work two and three jobs because they can't make a living wage from one.    

This is the elephantine irony in the newsroom.  

The bloviator in the White House trumpets his anti-immigrant stance while diligently taking his marching orders from the same Wall Street cabal whose trade policies created the immigration debacle in the first place. 

Mr. Moneybags rides into the Oval Office on a wave of nativism and xenophobia, flaunting the banner, Make America Great Again!

And hardly anybody notices that all that immigrant bashing is a popular backlash to the plutocratic plot his cronies hatched to divide and depress America and debase it to a Third World country!    

 It is not a question of immigrants staying or leaving.  

It is how they have immigrants (along with the rest of us) coming and going.  

Here is just one question we should mull over.    

Remember when corporations in the 1990s started including bilingual options in those automated customer service phone messages?

Did you feel all warm and fuzzy at how corporate America was giving the nod to diversity and inclusiveness?

Or did you get chills running up your spine at how the corporatocracy was thinking ahead to how trade deals like NAFTA were going to throw open the floodgates of immigration?