Illegal Immigrants: Furniture or People?:
Here's what the Rude Pundit thinks we oughta do about the whole illegal immigration "problem" to please conservatives: it's time to say that one is a human being only if one is a citizen or has a green card. If you're an illegal immigrant, rounded up at a Home Depot parking lot or in the vans of the Merry Maids or kept in the basement of wealthy Long Island, NY crazy people, you will be officially designated an object. Not an animal. Not anything so sentient. You will be an object, made into whatever is most useful. In fact, fuck it. Let's just turn them into furniture. No, no, we're not talking mass executions here and making shit Holocaust-style.
No, we'll just make Maria bend over and get on her hands and knees to be a coffee table. Three Hondurans positioned just right would make a fine love seat. With a Salvadoran child as an ottoman. Think how fun it'd be to fuck your boyfriend on a bed of Mexicans, of pissing in a toilet made of a Dominican woman. It wouldn't be slavery, either, at least not by our definition in the United States. The government's all about re-defining shit, like torture, so that when something looks like slavery to every other semi-civilized nation, we can say, "Oh, no, because, by the United States' definition, they aren't people. They're objects."
The rabid right has gone nuclear nutzoid over the illegal immigration compromise bill now being debated in the Senate. The bill, as it was negotiated between members of both parties and the White House, is pretty much a mouse maze for illegals, where, if they make it through all the dead-ends and electro-shock paths, they'll find a little morsel of cheese waiting for them at the end. The wonderful thing is the way the bill pretty much dicks over everyone except members of Congress and the Bush administration who wanna say they did something about illegal immigrants in this country other than hire them to make their gardens pretty and raise their children. And let their friends in industry hire them to pick peaches and lettuce.
The guest workers program is, more or less, the creation of an official servant class, one that'll serve to undercut the unionization of working class Americans and legal immigrants. By the way, the whole "guest workers" thing sound like we're gonna provide them with fresh towels and scones every morning. Why not just call them "shit detail workers"? The bill's filled with bizarre rules like if Jorge from Guatemala is a guest worker for two years, he's gotta go back to Guatemala for a year before he can come back here for another two years, for a total of six years. 'Cause no one's gonna break that law and stay, you know, illegally.
Oh, and then there's the fines, the total of $5000 that illegals would more or less have to pay if they want a green card, thus making the United States government into the largest coyote operation. The most festive provision is forcing the head of a household, no matter how many American kids that person has, to return to whatever country he or she got the fuck out of to come here and then turn around and come back legally, hoping that he or she gets back in to the kids, the job, the life that's been established. Immigrant rights groups are cautiously pessimistic about the bill - it's something, but, hell, that something ain't much.
As conservatives lose their shit over the bill, wondering why it ain't just a fence, mass deportation, and armed patrols shooting without asking questions, what's most apparent in their mad arm-flapping is the complete racist denial of the historic tidal force of populations. If massive waves of Mexicans and other Hispanics (75% of all illegals) wanna crash on our shores, changing the color shade of the place, it's gonna happen. And the sooner the United States accepts that reality - that, truly, in a couple of decades this is gonna be a Hispanic country, no matter what kind of immigrant apartheid the government tries to create - the sooner we can figure out how the fuck to adjust to that reality. Or we can all just build larger and larger walls around smaller and smaller compounds.
By the way, you know the most fucked-up part of this? If you told some poor woman who was driven across the border in a truck with other Mexicans, having paid some coyote thousands of dollars to transport her, that her job would be as a toilet for a middle-class white family in Phoenix, she'd gladly do it.
