Open Your Eyes, Immigration is NOT an Issue

Climate aside, without a doubt the great white elephant casting its shadow on the West is the issue of immigration. Regardless of what you have been told, or what you think you know about immigration, the reality at the core, is that immigration is a multi-ethnic class struggle. No where is this more visible than in the United States where an estimated 12 million migrant workers shed their blood, sweat, and tears; hoping as did all our ancestors that one day they too will be accepted into the fold and allowed to pursue the "American Dream." Yet, this land of plenty grows increasingly closed as opportunity is replaced by concrete ceilings; a sort of ethnic stucco full of unfair expectations, limiting (when not preventing) social mobility for those who do not share the luxury of having been born within this "land of the free. "

Despite what you may believe, immigration does not wear a Latino face, or any one guise. People from every ethnic group, every nationality, every religious affiliation, seek to share in America's prosperity and they are willing to break their backs performing the most distasteful of jobs in order to earn their keep, and yet, rarely are any of their efforts rewarded. A.C. Goodson, in his essay Outsourcing Malthus (2006) summarizes the plight of the contemporary immigrant in Western society in very forthright terms when he writes:

What is the immigrant if not a beast of burden? In his functional animality lies the root of the domestic issue with immigration in general. For he presents us with the human face reduced to servility if not outright slavery. And this is our own face, though we deny it by assigning it an alien identity. The effacement of the human in the condition of the immigrant is a threat to our human dignity. The offense is psychic more than ideological, for our residual humanism does not permit us to exclude this face from Homo sapiens. We accept immigrants on the same terms that our cotton-planting ancestors accepted their slaves, and for the same reasons. Their labor is our economic ease. They pick our fruit, maintain our estates, nurse our children, support our early retirement. In the case of illegal immigrants, some twelve million in the US, they pay social security taxes for benefits that they will never receive. In effect, they pay us not to work. What they ask for this thankless submission to the yoke is a modicum of personal respect. They would like to be considered as persons, not oxen. They would like their children to go to US schools, to become US citizens. Many would like to speak Spanish in public, to celebrate the Cinco de Mayo without fear of persecution by the authorities. It seems little enough.

The key to understanding why immigrants are rarely (if ever) awarded citizenship, is firmly entrenched in the socioeconomic reality that more citizens equate to a need for the government to provide more services, and even more critically important to the Wall Street power brokers: an increase in social security benefit pay-outs.

In the United States, demography can no longer be represented through the classic population pyramid. This is because the U.S. has reached a state of age based demographic stability that causes any would-be pyramid to appear more like a rectangle when drawn. That is to say, the birth rate is equal to the death rate. However, this is not without anomaly. In the middle of the "population rectangle" is a massive lump, providing it a look similar to that of a snake that has just swallowed something very large. This lump is in fact, the "baby boomer" generation, and it has been estimated that within the next decade, more than 30% of the American populous will be retired, and looking to collect their social security benefits. Combine this eventuality with the increased longevity enjoyed in the Western world due to advances of the medical sciences, and what emerges is a crisis!

Yet, to refer to anything as a being a "crisis" implies that there is no known solution, and that is simply not the case where immigration and social security cross paths. Earlier, I referred to this as a "socioeconomic class problem," and although the reasoning behind that should be obvious, I will elaborate by using the United States as an example. In the U.S. only a finite portion of an individual's gross income is open to being garnished towards the social security tax fund. Any income beyond $100,000 is sheltered from contribution. This translates into the middle and lower class (as well as migrant workers) shouldering a vastly disproportionate load of the socioeconomic burden. Leading into the logical, and entirely fair assertion that our world (not just the West) is in need of a radical redistribution of wealth, and a systemic overhaul of all the various political ideologies that view social stratification and inequality as models for success!!

Personally, I am sick to death of hearing about entitlement. "I work hard, and therefore, I deserve to drive this Hummer. I deserve to live in a house that has three bathrooms. I deserve to shove all manner of food down my gullet until my offending verbosity reaches critical mass, and then, after my heart attack, I deserve the best 24/7 medical care that money can buy!" What about the hundreds of thousands of people in India, for example, who work from sunrise to sunset, only to come home to a shanty made of cardboard walls and a roof that is little more than a sheet of plastic. No running water, no electricity, eating whatever garbage they can scavenge throughout the day. Do these people "deserve" to exist in this fashion? Are they "entitled," through their hard labor, to nothing more than this? Should they be condemned to this lifestyle simply because they were born into it? Please try to understand, that to deny them the right to emigrate away from such impoverished conditions, is the equivalent of believing that they deserve to be there.

The point I am trying to make here is this. The reason that immigration is a "problem" in North America and elsewhere, is because the economic elite do not want to share their prosperity with anyone they don't absolutely need to. This is how they amassed their wealth in the first place, so it should come as no surprise to us now that this attitude remains alive and well within their ranks. And I find myself asking when is enough ever enough? This is far beyond issues of wealth and creature comfort. There are homeless people in the United States that live as Kings and Queens compared to those elsewhere who are truly impoverished. No, this is about power and control. A maintaining of the status quo. If the powers that be, the old world money had half a soul, they could erase disease, hunger, poverty... and STILL be wealthy. But, as Saul Williams once said: "You can't make billions of dollars in this world without hurting people."