“Méxicano” translated into English: “Scapegoat”

A huge storm of controversy has risen over Arizona’s new law that allows police to detain suspected illegal immigrants. I am willing to speak on behalf of the new bill to a degree, but America is not ready for this kind of enforcement just yet.

While living in New Jersey I had no clue about any of this stuff, so don’t be too critical of this law if your state doesn’t have a Mexican border. Even Barrack Obama doesn’t really have any idea of what it’s like down there. You may look at this law and equate it with the unethical racial profiling that blacks and Hispanics have endured for years, but that is not the case.

It may be appearance-based in some ways, but the actions of an illegal immigrant are a huge ‘tell’ if you know them. I know several policemen in Phoenix, AZ and they aren’t racist. There may be one bad apple in every group, but I haven’t met him. I also hung out with lots of Mexican Americans (naturalized or native) while I lived there and they were never harassed by police. They were definitely harassed by the public on occasion, but never police. (I am obviously excluding people that play the race card when they get a speeding ticket. I get tickets too.)

The Rocky Road to Citizenship

If you know anything about illegal immigrants, you know that most of them want to be American citizens.

I’ve known many illegal immigrants. Yes, some of them were construction workers that had no problem with taking the jobs for less money and not paying taxes. One or two were day laborers. But most of them — particularly the ones with families — are doing the best they could to become American citizens. They aren’t trying to get a free ride and screw over American workers. They are just trying to improve their lives and help their families get away from the poverty, corruption, and danger of Mexico. The problem with illegal immigration is the ridiculous red tape of naturalization and its lack of ‘user-friendliness’ for Spanish speaking people.

As a naturally born, white, male American citizen, I know how confusing and daunting government paperwork can be. The IRS forms I have to fill out every year are only recently decipherable for me. Renewing my license and registration on my car has been costly (in Arizona and Nevada), time-consuming, and full of back-tracking when I misinterpret the order of operations (like smog inspection). There are endless forms to fill out, tons of archived identification papers to keep track of, addresses, social security numbers, etc. Don’t even ask me about applying for Food Stamps or Unemployment. Doing anything with the government is never easy. I don’t even want to imagine doing all of that without understanding English or knowing anyone nearby I can ask.

On top of these things, naturalization is an expensive and long process that most immigrants can barely afford. The fee numbers may not seem expensive to us, but the reason they come here is because they are poor. While they wait for citizenship, they often can’t get well-paying jobs with just a green card. And heaven forbid they fill out a form incorrectly and it sets them back several months. It is an economic jail cell where the government holds them in efforts to extract as much money and cheap labor out of them as it possibly can while waving the carrot of citizenship in front of them with a stick.

This law would be perfectly acceptable in my point of view if the Federal government fixed this process. Becoming an American citizen should not be difficult for those that want to be one. And it certainly shouldn’t be what it is today: a tool to provide big businesses with cheap slave labor. Once the process is streamlined and more accessible, we would only be arresting people who choose to remain anonymous to cheat taxes, commit crime, or take advantage of government programs.

The Best Solution

…is not a Federal one. All the federal government has to do it make Citizenship easier to obtain. After that, let each state decide how to maintain its illegal population. There are huge differences in how it affects each state, even neighboring ones like California and Arizona. A federal solution will be too harsh in some areas and too weak in others. One size does not fit all.

I want Illegal Immigrants to be legal. I don’t just want them to be kicked out of the country. I have no problem with brown people that don’t speak English. We need the tax revenue. We need workers willing to do shitty jobs. Most of all, we need as many domestic consumers as we can get. Most legal Mexican immigrants I meet drive American cars, for example.

If we’re worried about immigrants taking jobs from –let’s face it– white people, then don’t point your fingers at them. Point your fingers at the HUGE list of American businesses that ship our jobs overseas in order to stay competitive internationally (or squeeze a couple extra cents out of consumers). They are the enemy. That list isn’t even a complete one, but it encompasses millions of jobs. If you want to bail out the American worker, don’t strangle the impoverished Méxicanos that are smart and ambitious enough to come here. Make it more profitable to hire Americans over Indians or Chinese people overseas.

We’re the richest country in the world, but we have a 10% unemployment rate (which is way lower than the actual rate). How can we explain that if not because of outsourcing? If we took real measures to keep American jobs in America and domestic products competitive, we would have a hard time filling all the job openings.

It would be trickle-up economics. The only kind a humanitarian would support.