Why Can't We Solve the Illegal Immigration Problem

People keep asking this question.  It's the wrong question. The question ought to be, "Why won't we solve the illegal immigration problem?"

I come from Texas and I can tell you why there has been a traditional reluctance to slow down illegal immigration. Two words:

CHEAP LABOR!
 

Even the party of "the workers", "the people" and the "ordinary guy" (Hint - the name of the party I'm talking about starts with a big D), lets slip on occasion when it's waxing rhetorical that the reason we want illegals in the country is to have someone take the jobs "Americans don't want".  Does anyone here banjos and the faint strains of "Dixie" when they say stupid things like that? I mean it sounds to me like they're advocating an off-the-books form of indentured servitude doesn't it? Please don't tell me the party of Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson aren't advocating something like that!

Since the bad old days when Democrats ruled the roost in Texas, several distinct industries have made their profits by heavily exploiting cheap undocumented workers. In East Texas the dairy, chicken raising and processing industries, the rose growing industry employee vast numbers of illegal aliens. Look on farms, construction crews, and household staffs and you'll find heavily underpaid illegals. In South Texas, the citrus industry, cattle ranching and other industries also depend heavily on low-paid illegals to pad their profits, not to mention the drug industry. Sadly, things are not much improved under Republicans, though to be fair, you don't fix more than a century-old problems in a decade.

Advocates in the illegal immigration debates often point to the existence of hundreds of border colonias - immensely poor and unclean communities packed to the walls with illegal immigrants - as evidence that we should "do something". Texas has a lot of colonias in heavily Democrat South Texas, but these kinds of places aren't limited to the border counties. East Texas, when I lived there, had a couple of dozen colonias its own self.  Now, you can't legally call them that because of a Democrat inspired law that limits the term "colonia" only to such communities that are within 150 miles of the Mexican border. 

Because you can't call them "colonias" legally, being too far from the border, they aren't eligible for grants to build water and sewer infrastructure - thank you very much.  Put simply, the Democrats in South Texas have gamed the system so that federal grant money for relief for the colonias can't be siphoned off by counties where Republicans rule the roost. 


How convenient!

However, the little collections of shacks tucked far from view, deep in the East Texas woods, are colonias in every meaningful sense of the word. They have little or no running water, sewers, roads or other infrastructure. Most are little more than a collection of cardboard and tar paper shacks. The women barter food stamps for a ride to town to get groceries. They ride, packed like sardines, in the back of a pickup truck. It costs about $100 a trip. They use powdered baby formula, bought with food stamps, for currency. The pickup truck drivers turn around and sell powdered formula to shady grocers and to drug dealers who use the fine powder cut shipments of heroin and cocaine carried across the border by drug mules who conceal themselves in groups of illegals.. The coyote drivers had to go to baby powder after Texas went to the Lone Star Card and you couldn't simply hand off your food stamp coupons anymore. These cockroaches always find a way to prey on the weak.

Let me say that there are a lot of good people out there employing illegals because there are jobs going begging and positions they can't fill. Many have tried to do things legally and found themselves buried in government red tape. Many talented immigrants have gone home and take their skills with them simply because American companies were required to meet onerous conditions in order to simply give them a job.  There's fault on both sides and this issue is not by any means black and white. The tragedy is that the immigrants and ordinary people are the victims of a lot of people playing political ring a round the rosey with human lives.

I visited one of these colonias in East Texas.  The grinding poverty these people live in is heart-breaking.  And these people are not criminals by and large. Most would love to learn English, have bank accounts and legitimate jobs. They are hard-working, deeply religious family oriented people. Those who employ them off the books take the men back and forth to the fields in trucks. Otherwise, they keep them poor, without transportation and with limited access to information lest they figure out how to escape servitude somehow.

The people who support this modern-day form of slavery do NOT want the borders closed and they are quite willing to tolerate the flood of criminals, drug mules and terrorists that mix themselves in with the refugees. Let the government worry about that. After all, they pay the government enough to deal with such peripheral issues.

I find it ironic that the party of "the people"; the party of the working man; the party of compassion is so willing to tolerate this massive abuse of people who are, in essence, refugees, poor and downtrodden workers. 

Shame on them.

It's time we go after the people who are supporting the immigration crisis for their own gains, only too many politicians won't do it. They get too much campaign cash from the slave-masters. Instead they settle for parking the detritus of this massive exploitation of human beings in ghettos and colonias surrounded by cops. Those who aren't safely in these more sophisticated versions of concentration camps are kept entertained either in prison or in transit to and from Mexico in order to give the appearance that something is being done about the "immigration problem".

I personally think the best way to get Democrat cooperation on slowing down illegal immigration is to send in teams of Republicans to convert the illegals and make conservatives out of them. The Dems would have tanks at the border tomorrow if illegals coming across were voting Republican.  Besides, we're a much better political fit for them really on issues like abortion, family values, economic opportunity, free trade and such.

It's time we stopped asking what we can do and start asking why we don't do anything effective. The answer to that question may light up some dark areas of our government and our society and would most certainly bring down some very important people - which is why it's not likely to happen given how dangerous it would be to expose such people for anyone who did so.

I'd just like to point out something, though - God is watching. It was Jesus who said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my children, ye have done it also unto me."  I suspect he will not be pleased at those who have done this to his children. 

© 2015 by Tom King