I Am Neither Anti-Immigration Nor Anti-Immigrant

I understand from certain professors in my own church that I am, to my horror, anti-immigrant. Despite no evidence to support this allegation, I am apparently damned as an immigrant hater because I didn't vote for Joe Biden.

Balderdash!

I am an admitted conservative and as everybody knows we are racists and anti-immigration. But let me tell you a secret. We conservatives are not anti-immigration nor anti-immigrant. There's a word missing in that judgment. The word is ILLEGAL! The truth is that people like me have supported legal immigration of refugees throughout our history and these immigrants have done well here. Immigrant waves have been providing this country with valuable injections of brains, energy, and innovation that have propelled the US economy to the top of the world economic heap.

There's a problem with the left's sanctimonious support for all those waves of illegal immigrants. What those of you who support open borders are advocating is, in essence, the systematic oppression of Latin Americans. Democrats when I grew up called them wetbacks. The great thing about wetbacks was that they had no legal protections. Corporate manufacturers and big farmers (you know those corporations you leftists love to hate) love wetbacks. They shove them into colonias, where they live in tar paper shacks, no running water, no electricity, no sewer, no police. They ride to work in the back of pickups to their jobs on dairy farms, rose growing farms, chicken processing plants or orange groves. They work for starvation wages, without the protection of OSHA or medical benefits. If they complain the bosses turn them in to immigration and they have to flee or be deported.

It's slavery-lite and Democrat politicians in border states make a nice under-the-table side income protecting it. The government gives them food stamps, but coyotes take pickup loads of women from the colonias to town to shop because they have no other transportation from these remote villages. The coyotes in East Texas were charging them $80 or so worth of baby formula per trip. And this was 18 years ago. The coyotes sell the baby formula to drug smugglers that use the stuff to cut heroin and cocaine. I know. I helped get a bus out to a colonia in our area of East Texas to take the ladies shopping. The coyotes didn't like it and you can imagine how long that lasted.

Transportation is another huge issue for illegals. Every year hundreds of illegals are killed when trucks smuggling dozens are left baking in the Texas sun or roll over scattering migrants like dry leaves across the highway. Five were killed in the overloaded SUV shown below.

 The system hates change. The only thing it would actually like to change is to increase the stream of illegals (undocumented workers if you prefer). The more illegals that cross the border, the less you have to pay them. Trump's stemming of the tide of illegals has caused consternation among corporations that exploit them. They're having to pay more workers minimum wage these days. I'm not anti-immigration nor anti-immigrant. I'm anti-slavery. And it's no accident that Democrats and corrupt corporations support illegal immigration. They are surely feeling relief at the sudden surge of illegal border-crossings after the Biden inauguration. The surge will supply them a steady stream of cheap labor and grateful employers will supply politicians with plenty of extra income to look the other way. 

Legal immigrants, however are protected from exploitation by the Department of Labor, OSHA, and police. Want to help immigrants? Create a guest worker program. George W. Bush tried to, but Democrats opposed it and worked behind the scenes to kill the idea all the while posing as caring about those poor immigrants and nasty old Trump putting kids in cages. Actually, it was Obama that built the cages. Trump closed that facility.

Now Biden has reopened that same facility with all the cages again, that his former boss built and filled with Latin American children. You don't hear much from the media about that for some reason. Seems it's going to be back to slavery for the easy-to-exploit illegals. Your unearned moral superiority rings hollow to me. I've seen the colonias. The poverty, exploitation, and cruelty is protected by the very people who advocate open borders and winking at the sex traffickers, smugglers, terrorists and violent gangs that hide within the stream of undocumented folks. Once again they are streaming across the border into the virtual slavery, encouraged and protected by the same party that hood-winked poor Southern whites into fighting to preserve this same sort of "peculiar institution". 

It was that same party of the KKK, Jim Crow, Poll Tax, lynchings and segregation which fought for a hundred years to keep minority peoples oppressed. We on the right don't hate immigrants. We hate the massive corrupt system that lures desperate people here into the modern version of plantation slavery. By the way did you know that Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration? He even deployed union farm workers to the border to turn back illegals because they undercut his efforts to win a living wage for farm workers. So how about checking that moral high horse at the door and work with people who actually care about refugees? Democrats won't help of course, because legals tend to work hard, succeed as business owners and become Republicans. Most are escaping the various socialist tyrannies in the old world. Illegals, they figure, can be kept down, kept ignorant and forced to be dependent. Oppressed people are more likely to vote as they are told, which explains why Dems want to give them the vote.

© 2021 by Tom King