What kind of world do we live in, when you have dumb-as-rocks and just plain dumb politicians at the forefront of the national immigration debate? Proposed solutions are little more than political posturing, where one party focuses on a border wall and the other on more money for increasing immigration officers and border security. They both skate past the fact that immigration has significantly reduced over the past decade, foreign students are increasingly choosing elsewhere for their higher education and immigrants cause less crime than the American population. Immigration security is declared a priority by Republicans and Democrats, catering to the racist-nativist sentiments of Breitbart and Stephen Miller.
In this sense, Trump and his supporters seem to have won the narrative early on by painting immigration as a problem. In no small part, this is thanks to disingenuous stories of American citizens killed by illegal aliens. And when the migrant caravan began its journey, the media wedded with Breitbart by depicting a movement of refugees fleeing mass violence in Central America as a threat. With this ‘threat’ and immigration officials, subsequently, making Central American refugees wait on the Tijuana side of the border to issue petitions, Trump was placed in an advantageous position to argue for a border wall and fulfill a campaign promise.
So, this is the situation we are now in – a three-week reprieve on a 35-day a government shutdown with both sides claiming to be more hawkish on border control. Ever transfixed with security, the traumatized post-9/11 snowflake brain is a perpetual position of welcoming perceived safety, whatever the cost or however preposterous the danger.
It’s almost like a boxing match in which both sides are brain damaged.
In the right corner, weighing at a whopping 350 pounds, is a party that doesn’t bother to hide its own Know Nothing racism. In the other corner, stands a soulless, smiley-face wafer that will go any way the wind takes it. One party gloats in its own stupidity and the other pretends to be nice. Both posture and insist, explicitly in the case of the 350-pounder and implicitly in the case of the wafer, that we should be scared of immigrants…Oh, America the brave!
Let’s not forget, after all, that it was the Democrats who built border barriers near major entry points under President Bill Clinton. As immigrants were forced to cross the border in the Southwest’s desolate, unforgiving deserts, this caused the deaths of 7,216 migrants. Democrats may not want a wall now, but they insist on keeping safe the imperiled American from immigrants.
Such fear and demonization of immigrants has made us forget the primary reason for illegal immigration: legal immigration is so damn difficult. These difficulties cause illegal immigrants to live in marginalized, underpaid shadows of American society. If it were a smoother process, illegal immigration would be disincentivized; then, perhaps, illegal immigration would be more fairly associated with actual criminality.