Reply #14: I understand where you're coming from [View All]

[Tansy_Gold]

It's the same where I live in Arizona. The AZ Republic had a front page story on Sunday 3/13/05 on the fact that most of the people building the houses in the housing boom can't afford them. And we're talking about "modest" single family homes as postage-stamp lots in ticky-tacky developments that are $125,000-$200,000. Arizona is a right-to-work state; unions have never had much power here.

But as another poster said, look up for the source of the problem, not down. Look at the contractors who are employing low-wage workers. Look at the developers. Do you have any idea how sick to my stomach I get every time I think that Jim Pederson, multi-millionaire developer, is head of the AZ Democratic Party???? :wtf:

Imagine, for just a moment, that you are a resident of Juarez, Mexico, and you can look right across the Rio Grande into the bright lights and opulence of El Paso, Texas. How painful do you think it is for people to look at that pathetic trickle of water and know that that is all that separates them from a chance at a better job and better living conditions for their children? If you were in their shoes, wouldn't you be tempted to risk it?

Or imagine you live in a village in Chiapas, where some corporation has grabbed all the land and left you nothing to farm on. So you move farther and farther north in search of a job or a place to farm, and there is nothing. You hear the stories of a few who have escaped to Phoenix and you think, "I'm young and I'm healthy and I'm strong and there is nothing here for me but poverty and misery. I can make it across the desert, it can't be that hard."

The young men -- and they are mostly young men -- who risk their lives on el camino del diablo have nothing to lose, except their lives. And many of them do die. Can you imagine risking your fucking life for a chance to be a dishwasher? a pool cleaner? a sweeper-of-sidewalks-after-the-lawn-has-been-mowed?

Imagine then that you are confronted by some American at the border who says, "No, you can't come into this country and try to have a better life. You need to go back to the poverty and hopelessness you came from, because the good American life is reserved for Americans. We're special by viture of having been born here, by the grace of the same God you believe in (but he likes us better). We don't want you taking our good construction jobs away from us (never mind that it's our employers who took them away) and of course we can't do anything about the corporations that shipped our factory jobs over to Mexico, so you just go right back to your little sun-drenched dusty village and stay there, kinda like the happy slaves on the plantations in Gone With the Wind. We'll let you know when we need a nanny or a maid or a pool guy or a landscape laborer, but until then, don't call us and don't come across our border. We were here first (yeah right) and you're just shit outta luck."

Too many Americans -- and I confess I'm sometimes in that group though I try really hard not to be -- feel ENTITLED to the privileges that come with being an American and they don't understand that our privileges, our wealth, our comforts, come only because we have the ability to forcibly keep others from what is rightfully their fair share. The anti-immigration rhetoric is just another example of blaming the victims.


Tansy Gold