“Méxicano” translated into English: “Scapegoat”

A huge storm of controversy has risen over Arizona’s new law (SB 1070) 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.

2025: Yyyyyyikes. You were one blind-spotted white kid, young Corry. 😬

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’m 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 way less money and not paying taxes. One or two were day laborers. But most of them — particularly the ones with families — were doing the best they could to become American citizens. They weren’t trying to get a free ride and screw over American workers. They were just trying to improve their lives and help their families get away from the poverty, corruption, and danger south of the border. The problem with illegal immigration is the ridiculous red tape of naturalization and its lack of ‘user-friendliness’ for Spanish speaking people.

Even as a “natural-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 barely decipherable for me — someone who only speaks English fluently and regularly scored highly in math tests. Renewing my license and car registration has been costly (in Arizona and Nevada), time-consuming, and full of back-tracking when I misinterpreted 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 by design. 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’re desperately 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’s 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 on a stick of citizenship in front of them and pulling it away repeatedly.

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

2025: Almost all the problems I gave this law credit for attempting to solve are fabricated. I’m glad I was still against it, but I was obviously still steeped in anti-immigrant propaganda.

The Best Solution

…is not a Federal one. All the federal government has to do is 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.

2025: You utilitarian piece of shit…

If we’re worried about immigrants taking jobs from — let’s face it — white people who don’t even want these jobs, then don’t point your fingers at the laborers. Point them 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’re 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’re smart and ambitious enough to come here. Make it more profitable to hire Americans over 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.

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4/17/2025 Update

Some context was really needed for this post. When I wrote this, my memories of being victimized by gang violence in Phoenix, AZ were fairly fresh. I also worked in places alongside undocumented workers quite often and played minor league football with their relatives. I also had a few acquaintances in the police force who were actively resisting the Arpaio regime — and later lost their careers for it.

Because of this, and because while I lived there it seemed like Arizona may actually fight off its toxic police crime syndicate (naive in hindsight), I wasn’t yet in that ACAB mindset. I wasn’t yet at the point where I understood the relatively short history of policing, especially in the United States. I still believed that the system just needed tweaking rather than smashing.

Today, it’s clear where these laws come from and what the people pushing them want for the country — white supremacy and everyone else to be their slaves or dead. They want to siphon resources from the global south while denying them any access to the benefits. It’s a nihilistic, isolationist, fascist, racist, theocratic, black hole of an ideology older than European feudalism and The Crusades. It’s not new or innovative or surprising — grown no more enlightened in the near-millennium since, and no less resourced.

My friends in Arizona who’d joke about “playing the race card” when they got pulled over were making light of surviving a scary situation. The few cops who made friends with me were good apples that got summarily spit out shortly after standing up for themselves. I didn’t understand how payroll taxes worked, so I swallowed the narrative that the workers were the ones dodging taxes rather than their illegal employers.

Solutions

My states-rights-based “solutions” are half-baked unresearched ideas pulled out of the ass of a still-recovering ex-libertarian. I won’t propose a more mature solution now. It’s not my area of expertise, but I will say how I would change things today in effort to reduce harm until we can truly reform our immigration policies.

• Immediately dissolve I.C.E. and the Department of Homeland Security
• Release everyone held in U.S. backed concentration camps
• Disarm border patrol, suspend or terminate all employees with records of violent offenses
• Release all their data to the public and press to aid in separated family members finding each other again and serving justice to those harmed
• Begin gathering proposals for simplifying the citizenship process
• Begin planning reparations programs

None of this is possible without dictator-like powers that no one should have, but it’s what I hope will happen someday.