In the May 2006, issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Marc Cooper has written a brilliant book review essay of five books on the illegal immigrant crisis. The article is entitled "Exodus: The ominous push and pull of the U.S.-Mexico Border."
But before I examine this review essay, some thought provokers:
* The British settlers of the thirteen colonies were illegal aliens.
* The first American settlers of Texas were illegal aliens.
* Canadians represent the second largest group of illegal aliens in the U.S.
Two books represent a more conservative, partisan and even draconian perspective; they are Illegals by Jon Dougherty and Whatever It Takes by Congressman J.D. Hayworth. The best of the five books, according to Marc Cooper, is Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family by Charles Bowden. Luis Urrea has written two books: The Devil's Highway and By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border. Marc Cooper states:
Altar---around 10,000 people---has become a primary staging area for Mexican migrants before they make their desperate bounce across the border. . . . mostly men, mostly young. Coyote [smuggler] cost, $1500. . . . drawn from future income.
A Red Cross worker asserts: "I tell them they run a great risk."
A wall map reveals: "Hundreds of fatal red dots cluster just above the border. No one listens. The necessity is too great." 40,000 migrants a month through Altar. Jorge Solehage, a Mexican diplomat who works out of the Mexican consulate in Phoenix, "processed the deaths of 219 Mexicans in the Phoenix area."
Charles Bowden "describes the poverty that swamps even the more prosperous Mexican border cities and that relentlessly churns the human flow northward." "Concentrating on the front line of the endless and fruitless war on drugs, he captures the barbaric and bloody energy generated when and where the North's insatiable pull for drugs meets the coke, cash, and corruption pushing up from the south. For Bowden, the same inexorable law of supply and demand explains the flow of human cargo of illegal immigrants."
Bowden: "This is the largest cross-border human migration in human history." 15-20 million people over a period of 20 years. Exodus to "the promised land." The choice: stay in Mexico and earn $4 a day or pick grapes in the US for $60-70 a day.
Cooper: "Making the crossing ever more dangerous [meaning more deaths] seems to be the only tangible result of US border policy in the past decade."
Before NAFTA, 1993, around 2.5 million illegal aliens. Since NAFTA, around 5,000,000. Cheap, subsidized, American agricultural products flood Mexico. Result: "Over a million Mexican subsistence farmers have been wiped out, and left with no choice to head north."
Next, a look at our past history with Mexico based on a book entitled The Wars of America: Christian Views. The War with Mexico, 1846-1848, is analyzed by Christian historian, Ronald Wells. Some Americas saw the war as "unavoidable or necessary;" others saw it as a "blatant act of aggression against a helpless neighbor." If based on human rights, not solely national interests, the war is highly questionable. If based on justice, not Manifest Destiny, the war is highly questionable.
But Manifest Destiny---the idea that it was God's will for the US to spread from coast to coast---dominated the debate. Skeptics would assert that Manifest Destiny was an attempt to get divine approval of US imperialism; that is was really ethnocentrism and greed that drove our foreign policy.
In 1847, Congressman Abraham Lincoln contended "that the Polk administration had deceived the American people and continued in a cover-up of the truth." The real facts were that President Polk wanted California and its ports and was willing to deceive and invade if necessary. First, Texas; then, California. Texas was taken illegally; California was to be next---and what land there was between them.
Ethnocentrism declared Mexicans as "inferior beings." This made imperialism less morally offensive. "The clergy, and the constituencies of most denominations, were generally prowar."
Problems north of the border.
In the US, most news reports focus on problems south of the border---Mexican problems, Mexican dirty laundry such as drug lords. We need more focus on our dirty windows such as :
* an insatiable demand more land, to spread from coast to coast.
* an insatiable demand for drugs caused by a loss of meaning, moral values; America now driven by the shallow American trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism.
* an insatiable demand for low-cost cheap labor to grow and harvest our crops.
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