Don't Blame "Undocumented Aliens"

Don't blame the victims. Fix the problem!

Ease off on the illegal immigrant rhetoric, guys. My sympathies are actually with many of the guys crossing illegally. Truth is that they are being lured here and massively exploited by the very people who claim open borders are "merciful" and "the Christian thing to do." But guess who is most invested in you believing this progressive propaganda.

Surprise, it's big corporations and big agriculture. Chicken plants, dairy farms, flower nurseries, orchards, cotton farms benefit big time from illegal immigration. Employers for these places pump money into political campaigns so that their representatives in government encourage illegal immigration and then overlook it when they exploit illegal workers. 

Don't believe me?  Watch the Democrats waffle and drag their feet should conservative legislators put forward a program to bring illegals under the cover of OSHA and the Department of Labor. Set up a guest worker program that allows illegals to make a decent wage (at least minimum) and have the protections all American workers have. Set it up so that these workers can go home when they are done, having worked, helped their families and paid taxes like the rest of us do. That by itself would spoil the game employers play which allows them to misuse migrant workers who have been lured here to work in semi-servitude. Hardly surprising since Democrats have a history of exploiting the poor and minorities not to mention actual slavery.

The evidence of this criminal mistreatment and oppression of refugees escaping here illegally with the encouragement of our Democrat overlords is there to see if you don't shut your eyes to it. There are hundreds of colonias all over, especially in areas near the border or along migrant worker routes coming up from Mexico. These tar paper shack villages don't have water, sewer, paved roads, police protection, or even electricity in many cases. Authorities overlook the abuse of workers and the awful conditions they face. 

For their troubles, employers get cheap nonunion labor and maintain control over these virtual slaves by threatening to deport anyone who complains. It's the Democrats simply doing slavery light. They've always liked cheap labor (and money on the side). We're seeing massive exploitation targeting poor desperate people here. The ones we need to go after are the politicians and the employers and corrupt bureaucrats that keep the "system" working. Notice, nobody is talking about that sort of systemic racism. They wouldn't. Too much money and power in keeping it going and too much guilt for those who support it with propaganda and protection.

Also, the flood of actual refugees from Latin America is being used as cover for drug cartels', terrorists' and smugglers' activities. A cold-blooded calculation has been made that the crime and flood of drugs, guns and sex slaves is worth it to keep the money flowing into party coffers. Thus the sign above above. No attempt to curb the dangerous traffic. Just a sign warning people not to go where it's going on. 

So, I don't blame the people being lured here from awful places south of the border. I blame the politicians and the lawyers and the drug lords, smugglers and terrorists cold-bloodedly using them. We can stop it if we would just stop doing one of two things:

1. Stop buying the whole, "If you are a Christian you would support open borders" propaganda. Like all propaganda, the narrative is designed to distract you from the real purpose of those shoveling it out.
2. Stop vilifying illegals. There is a huge supply of hard-working people who would line up to come work here in jobs us college graduates have no interest in. They are family people, conservative, anti-abortion, religious and big on free market capitalism

I heard a Hispanic comedian joke that if a Mexican gets his hands on a hand cart, he'll have a taco stand set up and running overnight. That's someone who is a free market capitalist. I went to school in South Texas and I'm here to tell you the folk coming over the border, by and large, will find some kind of work to do. The American economy right now needs that kind of energy shot in the arm once in a while. 

We've absorbed waves of immigrants in our history. British, Irish, Scots, Polish, Germans, French Hugenots, Italians and any number of Chinese and Japanese have come and joined the melting pot. In my neck of the woods, there are Russians, Ukrainians, Vietnamese, Indians, Polynesians, Asians of all sorts and yes, Mexicans and South Americans. 

The thing is they come here to work. Instead of encouraging that, our government offers them either dependency on welfare or exploitation by corrupt employers. If we quit throwing up roadblocks to people trying to start small businesses, we'd see a boom in immigrant-owned business like you wouldn't believe. Here the principle that a rising tide lifts all boats kicks in. As new workers make things and build things, they spend money for goods and services which creates more jobs than there were before they came. Nobody loses out. They just get opportunities to do new things and to rise in the world.

And to the horror of our Democrat friends, given half a chance to make a living and take care of their families, immigrants, being already conservative, start voting Republican. That's how we get folks like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in the Senate and Donald Trump winning big majorities among Hispanic South Texas voters - all giving nightmares to the left.

So instead of trash talking our refugee friends, let's help them. Let's close the border. Get a guest worker program going. Offer English classes at our Mexican consulates as a path to immigration and citizenship. Many who are born in corrupt cultures and nations are already Americans in their souls. Let's harvest those folk by giving them a way to come home to the United States. They make good citizens. If we just look the other way, the folks crossing the border are infiltrated with criminals and bad people. Not their fault. If we create a way to manage the flow of immigrants and block the flow of smugglers, sex traffickers and terrorists, we win this battle and increase the number of family-oriented, entrepreneurs, hard workers, pro-life Christians and conservatives. It's one way to turn the tide and win the voting block the left thinks it owns.

In no time the Democrats would be clutching their pearls and having a fit of the vapors. Next thing, they'd be building a border wall with their bare hands.

Just sayin'

© 2022 by Tom King

NASA Defunds Trump Administration Supported Mars Ice Mapper Project.

 

Changes in a project to return Martian soil samples has put back the sample return to 2033 and prompted a shifting of budgets. Apparently, as a result, NASA has decided to "discontinue funding for the International Mars Ice Mapper project," a project originally added to NASA's budget under the Trump administration. NASA cites "budget constraints" as its reason for scrapping the project. Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division said, "Mars Ice Mapper originated from NASA agency-level objectives.....Exploring Mars ice reserves emerged as a focusing requirement and thus a need, not only for the scientific value, but also in preparation for human exploration." 

If Elon Musk plans to find a likely place to land on the Red Planet, it appears he's going to have to find a way to pinpoint a likely ice patch for himself. You have to wonder how much this had to do with NASA priorities has to do with politics as much, if not more than science. There's also Musk in the wings champing at the bit to blast off to Mars ahead of our "progressive" government, which at this point doesn't seem to be making much of all that progress they promised.

 

NASA seems to be content with muddling along doing wildly expensive cost-plus contracts with its aerospace contractor buddies. These traditional contracts build expensive single-use spacecraft like the Orion Artemis rocket which for hardware alone will set taxpayers back 568 million dollars at the lowest current estimates. These estimates do not take into account for Joe Biden's inflationary economy or delays caused by government fiddling along the way.  We're talking more than 2 and a half billion for just the spacecraft and boosters, and not including fuel and technical support to launch just 4 missions. And that's just the lowest "reasonable" guess at the cost - such guesses being notoriously short of actual costs. 

 

 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk's ambitious Starship could cost as little as 10 million a launch or less after just a few initial successful launches since the Starship is a reusable ship. Meanwhile NASA's Artemis is one shot and then space junk technology dating back to the early days of spaceflight.  SpaceX's Falcon 9/Dragon launches meanwhile charges its customers just 62 million dollars per launch because it reuses its launch vehicles, one of which has gone up and been recovered a dozen times (as of March 2022) with several other SpaceX boosters set to tie that record soon. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, already successfully launched, runs 90 million if the launch vehicle is recoverable or 152 million for a deep space launch in which the boosters cannot be recovered.  That's still a whole bunch of buckazoids cheaper that nearly 600 billion for NASA's big old baby.

Perhaps a different, possibly less "progressive" government could let NASA pass the Ice Mapper Project off to Musk or one of the eager competitors trailing along in SpaceX's wake. Could be a lot more affordable, especially when it would help Musk move his Mars colony project along.

 

I had always hoped that one day I might catch a ride to space on a rocket. Not very likely now what with my advancing decrepitude, but at least I've had a glimpse of what's becoming possible for us Earthlings as far as ascending into space.

And if that's possible, what might we see someday in the Earth made new. It does give one hope, even if the science guys scoff at the idea of something beyond this life. It just seems to me that with the gift of eternal life, what dreams might we humans bring to fruition, given the time to work them out.

© 2022 by Tom King

Same Method, Different Time