http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-06-25-1.html
World Watch
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC
By Orson Scott Card June 25, 2006
What Is This "Crime," Really?
A fifteen-year-old boy -- let's call him David -- has been yearning
for his driver's license for a long time.
But today all thoughts of waiting for his license are out the window,
because his little sister cut herself and he can't stop the bleeding.
His family's phone service was cut off long ago. His parents aren't
home. They live far from any neighbors. But they do have one uninsured
car that David's been tinkering with. It runs.
So David puts his sister in the car and, holding a towel on the wound
to apply pressure, he drives the car one-handed out onto the road and
goes as fast as the car can go, heading for the nearest medical
emergency center.
The trouble is, a state trooper sees him driving too fast and pulls
him over. David tries to explain that he's only driving illegally in
order to save his sister's life, but the trooper doesn't listen.
He drags David out of the car and handcuffs him and yells at him that
he has no business driving a car without a license, besides which he
was speeding and the car is not insured. "You will never get a
license, we will confiscate this illegal car. Driving is a privilege,
not a right, and you have forfeited that privilege by taking it
prematurely."
David can't think about any of this. So he screams, "My sister is
bleeding to death! Let me get her to the hospital!"
But it's as if the trooper is deaf to anything David has to say.
"Don't scream it me, you miserable pipsqueak! Until you have a license
you don't even have a right to be heard on these highways!"
*
I'm sick at heart about the number of Americans, including friends of
mine who should know better, who are proud of being exactly like that
state trooper, when it comes to the question of illegal immigrants.
"They have no right to be here in the first place. If we give these
people amnesty and let them stay and apply for citizenship, we only
encourage more illegal immigration in the future. Besides, they use up
our welfare and add to our school costs without paying taxes!"
In vain do the immigrants try to explain that their families were
desperately poor, doomed to continue to live on the edge of
starvation, and the only hope was America ... which wouldn't let them in.
Why can't we look at what these people are actually doing? Why can't
we see the bleeding child in the passenger seat, and realize that most
of these illegal immigrants are doing precisely what you or I would do
in the same circumstances?
No. All we can think to say is, "You broke the law to get here.
Therefore I don't have to regard you as a human being or consider what
your need was or look at what you have done since you got here. Since
you are here illegally, nothing you do or say makes any difference. I
want you out of here."
*
So what is this vile crime of "illegal immigration" that requires us
to throw out hard-working people who do jobs that no American was
willing to do (not at those wages, anyway, not while living in that
housing)?
It consists of crossing over an arbitrary line that somebody drew in
the dirt a century and a half ago. On one side of the line, poverty,
hopelessness, a social system that keeps you living as a peasant,
keeps your children uneducated and doomed to the same miserable life
you have -- or worse.
On the other side of the line, plenty of jobs that are going begging
because nobody who lives on that side is desperate enough to work all
day for a wage so low. But the wage is enormous to you. It would save
your family's lives, give you hope for your children. Even if you go
there alone and send money home, it would be a blessing. And if you
could get your wife and kids across that line, their lives would be
miraculously transformed.
Wouldn't you take any risk to get across that line?
*
Let's use another analogy. There's just been a disaster. No aid is
getting into your area. You can't get out. Your family is desperate
for drinking water and something to eat.
The local convenience store has food on its shelves and water in its
refrigerator cases. But the owner stands in the doorway and says,
"We're closed. We're closed to anyone but regular customers."
You try to explain: You'll pay. You'll become a regular customer. But
your family needs water to drink.
"Nope," he says. "I know who my regular customers are and you aren't
one of them. Go away."
But as you leave, you see that his back door is standing open! Now,
you have been taught never to steal. And you never would steal except
... he's being completely unreasonable; he's letting other people in;
you'd be glad to buy if he'd only let you.
In those circumstances, what would be morally worse: To sneak in and
take the water and a bit of food -- which is stealing -- or to let the
family you're responsible for go without food and water, and quite
possibly die? Which action is more to be condemned?
But he's a looter! you might explain.
Well, there are looters in such times, and looting is a crime. But
we're talking about stealing food and water for family members who
have no other recourse, not breaking in and taking fancy tv sets.
Isn't there a difference of degree? Can't we consider mitigating
circumstances?
*
We Americans, what exactly did we do to earn our prosperity, our
freedom? Well, for most of us, what we did was: be born.
Yeah, we work for our living and pay our taxes and all that, but you
know what? I haven't seen many native-born American citizens who work
as hard as the Mexican-born people I see working in minimum-wage jobs
in laundries and yard services and intermittent subcontracting
projects and other semi-skilled and unskilled positions.
I have no idea which (if any) of the people I see doing this work are
legals and which are illegals -- but that's my point. Latin American
immigrants, as a group, are hard-working, family-centered, God-fearing
people who contribute mightily to our economy.
*
"Yes, but the illegal ones pay no taxes! They're freeloading on our
system, putting a burden on our schools," yadda yadda. And why do I
say yadda yadda?
Because at the wages they're earning, even if they were citizens they
wouldn't pay income taxes. We don't ask people making that little
money to pay income tax in this country.
As for the other taxes, they pay them exactly as any other poor people
in America pay taxes. At the store, they pay the same sales tax as the
rest of us. When they buy gas, they pay gas taxes. When they pay rent
to their landlords, some of that goes to paying the property taxes the
landlord is required to pay -- just like every other renter.
Most of them are, in fact, paying exactly as much in taxes as they
would pay if they were legal immigrants.
*
"But they come here and commit crimes and live off of our welfare system!"
Wait a minute. Who is "they"? All of the illegal immigrants?
Only a certain percentage of them. But when we round up illegal
immigrants, do we make the slightest effort to distinguish between
those who commit crimes here, those who scam the system to get
welfare, and those who are working hard and living by all the rules?
No. We send them all home. There is, under present law, no special
treatment for illegal immigrants who, during their time in the U.S.,
work hard and don't take anything from anybody without paying for it.
No special consideration for those who live in shockingly desperate
poverty here in the United States so they can send most of their
pitifully low earnings home to their families in Mexico.
And yet most of the illegal immigrants commit no crimes, but instead
live frugally and work hard. In fact, I dare say that many illegal
immigrants work harder and obey our social rules more faithfully than
a good many citizens whose right to live within our borders is
unquestioned.
And if all you can say to that is, "It doesn't matter, send them all
home, give them no hope of citizenship because we don't want to reward
people for breaking the law to enter our country," then here's my
answer to you:
Let's apply that standard across the board. No mercy. No extenuating
circumstances. No sense of punishment that is proportionate to the
crime. Let's handle traffic court that way.
The penalty for breaking any traffic law, from now on, is: revocation
of your license and confiscation of your car. Period. DWI? Well, we
already do that (though usually for something like the nineteenth
offense). But now let's punish speeders the same way. Driving 50 in a
school zone -- lose your license and your car! Driving 70 in a 65 zone
on the freeway? No license, no car. Not coming to a full stop at an
intersection? No license, no car.
No mercy, no exceptions, no consideration for the differences between
traffic offenders.
Oh, you don't want to live under those rules? Well, you can't deny
that people would take the driving laws much more seriously, right?
"But it wouldn't be fair!" you reply.
That's right. It wouldn't be fair. Yet that's exactly the same level
of fairness that I hear an awful lot of Americans demanding in order
to curtail the problem of illegal immigration.
*
And here's the question that really needs to be asked:
What problem?
This isn't like drug laws, where despite the claims of some, we know
that these illegal drugs are life-wrecking, family-destroying
substances that would continue to create an enormous drain on our
economy and immeasurable damage to American lives even if we made them
all legal.
The only thing that makes illegal immigration a problem is that it's
illegal. If we simply opened our southern border the way all our
borders were open in the 1800s, then would there be any continuing burden?
Most of these immigrants would still work hard, only now they would
have their families with them and the money would not drain away to
Mexico. Those who prospered would pay income taxes. So economically,
there would be an improvement.
Some would freeload off the system; some would become criminals. But
do we have any evidence that Mexican or Latin American immigrants turn
to crime or freeloading in greater numbers than any previous group of
immigrants? Hasn't every immigrant community in our history had its
criminal element?
(Hint: There is no major immigrant group that has not spawned its
criminals. Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Russian Jews -- no
group, with the exception of some groups of religious immigrants, was
so righteous that criminals weren't able to operate within their
social boundaries in the U.S.)
And yet we would have regarded it as a great injustice to throw out
all the immigrants from each of these groups, just because some of
them committed crimes. In this country, we have a long tradition of
punishing only the individual who does wrong, not his entire ethnic
group. (Though, come to think of it, there are a lot of people who
would like to change that -- but that's another argument.)
So what, exactly, would be the cost to us of an open-door immigration
policy? What evidence do we have that the immigrants who would flood
across our boundaries would be any worse than the waves of Irish,
German, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Japanese, or
British immigrants?
*
The voice of bigotry speaks: "But they're dirty, they don't speak the
language, they live in such awful conditions."
Hey, buddy! They're dirty because they're poor and exhausted and they
work with their hands and they sweat from their labor! They don't
speak the language because they weren't born here and in case you've
never tried it yourself, learning another language is hard. And they
live in awful conditions because they're doing lousy, low-paying jobs
and sending the money home.
How clean, fluent, and well-housed would you be if you moved to
Turkey, took the lowest paying jobs in Turkish society, were
struggling to learn Turkish during the few moments you were awake and
not laboring, and had to support your family back in the home country
on whatever you didn't spend to stay alive in Istanbul?
Of course, these complaints are often disguised ways of saying, "We
don't want them here because they're brown and most of them look like
Indians." Only we know better than to admit that's our motive, even to
ourselves. So we find other words to cover the same territory.
Just remember this. Each new wave of immigrants from a particular
country looked different from those who had come before. But after two
or three generations, with or without intermarriage, we got used to
seeing them among us. Their skin and bone structure and hair type and
color became just another way of looking American.
Of course, Mexicans and Indians have been here all along. If they look
strange to you, it's just because you haven't lived in a part of the
country where it is common to see people whose ancestors lived here
long before those of European ancestry showed up.
And a lot of those who get mad at seeing "all these illegal
immigrants" may not even have seen any. Because a lot of people in our
country who look Mexican or Indian are actually sixth- and
seventh-generation Americans whose ancestors were citizens long before
yours were.
*
"But they displayed the Mexican flag!"
Yeah, well, that's because they're still Mexicans. If we opened the
door to their legal immigration, maybe they'd become citizens and then
they would feel differently about the stars and stripes.
Then again, maybe they'd continue to be proud of their ethnic heritage
and continue to display the Mexican flag from time to time. Kind of
like the wearin' o' the green, don't you think?
*
Here's a little history. When the nation of Mexico declared its
independence from Spain, it contained within its boundaries the states
of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, much of
Colorado, and bits of a few other states.
But immigrants from the United States came into Texas and California,
not asking permission, not making any effort to become good Mexicans,
but instead began to plot to throw the Mexican government out of its
own territory and replace it with the government of the United States.
And they succeeded. Those Americans in Texas revolted against the
Mexican government and succeeded in establishing an independent
republic that was absolutely ruled by the white immigrant minority,
which immediately began to oppress the legal Mexican citizens.
Then the Texans claimed the Rio Grande as their boundary, contrary to
the original treaty, and this time when the Mexican government tried
to protect its boundaries, the United States weighed in on the side of
Texas and when it won the resulting war, it not only established the
Rio Grande as the boundary of Texas, the U.S. seized all those other
states as well!
Oh, yeah, we "paid for them." And we did buy that Gadsden Purchase
portion of Arizona. Like they had a choice about selling them to us.
That's the nightmare story of illegal immigration. If Americans start
moving into your territory, be afraid! Be very afraid!
By one perfectly rational reading of history, the whole southwestern
quarter of the United States actually consists of unjustly conquered
territory in which the native inhabitants -- the legal citizens --
were torn apart from their fellow citizens to the south, and our
immigration policy consists of denying Mexicans the right to access
lands that were historically theirs, and where former Mexican citizens
who were involuntarily annexed to the U.S. were long oppressed and
discriminated against.
And let's not even get into the whole issue of Native Americans. But
even with that, take a look at how many of these illegal immigrants
are obviously primarily Indian in their ancestry, with almost no hint
of any Spanish or European blood of any kind. And these are the people
we say have no right to cross that arbitrary line in the dirt that our
forebears put there by brute force?
There is no historical basis for any American to claim the moral high
ground when talking about Mexican immigration to the United States.
Sure, those wars happened long ago. But how different do you think the
history of Mexico might have been if all that Texas oil and all that
California gold had stayed within the boundaries of Mexico, as by
right they should have?
So it's best if we don't bring morality into the discussion. We aren't
exactly on the squeaky clean side.
*
As for those who get all frantic about how America will become a
Spanish-speaking nation, all you're doing is revealing your complete
ignorance of the history of immigration in the United States. To put
it bluntly: You don't know what you're talking about.
All large groups of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries
have gone through a period of time -- sometimes many generations --
where large numbers of them lived together and spoke the language of
the mother country. We had many neighborhoods and even towns and
cities where the only language spoken was German or Yiddish or Swedish
or Chinese.
But these people weren't stupid. They caught on to the fact that
people whose children spoke English without an accent got better jobs,
advanced more quickly and rose higher through the educational system,
and had a better chance of getting political and economic power.
Mexican immigrants know this. The overwhelming majority want their
kids to be fluent in English. This is not even a problem.
But in the meantime, which is better, to have public documents printed
in the languages people who live here actually speak, or shut out
large sections of the populace because we want to punish them for not
having been born in America?
Efforts to "protect English" are the exact equivalent of those signs
saying "No Irish Need Apply" or the rules limiting the number of Jews
who could be admitted to prestigious universities or the laws telling
black people where they could and could not sit in buses and trains.
English doesn't need protection. People need protection from those who
would hurt them because they weren't born to English-speaking parents.
*
Today, what is President Bush actually proposing? Not amnesty -- that
would mean declaring all the current illegal immigrants to be legal,
no questions asked.
Instead, he's giving them a way to earn the right to become citizens
and become compliant with the law, without having to go back to Mexico
first. So they could keep their jobs, keep supporting their families,
continue to contribute to our economy and our tax base as they already do.
Since the only crime most of these people are committing is simply
being here without permission, we would give them a reasonable way to
get that permission without losing everything else in order to get it.
And then we'd provide a way for Mexicans to enter our country as guest
workers, which would help both Mexico and the United States.
Along with this, as a political sop to those who think that illegal
immigration is somehow picking their pockets (when in fact it's more
likely to be mowing their lawns or harvesting their food), he is
offering better border enforcement.
Meanwhile, the terrorists who actually threaten this country keep
getting in by air or sea or over the Canadian border, and doing it, as
often as not, with legal documents.
Ah well. Just as the "problem" of these "awful immigrants" has always
been with us, so also have we always had the grandchildren of
immigrants trying to slam the door in the faces of others who want to
do nothing worse than become part of our vast American experiment just
as our ancestors did.
Why in the world do we regard that as a crime?
Copyright © 2006 by Orson Scott Card.
Response from a Reader
Hey Scott. I don't always completely agree with you, especially
politically. (Of course.) But I have said everything you said here,
except less lyrically.
Did you see the article comparing illegals to home invaders? They move
into your home without your knowledge or permission, but you have to
allow them to stay because they keep the yard nice?
I was so incensed, I think I made some enemies. My point was yours.
Who says it's "your" home? So your great great great grandfather
fought the Indians for it? Okay. Would it be okay, then, for the
Mexican family to just shoot you and your children, and THEN move in?
Isn't that how the current owner got there?
I realize you're not the president and probably can't make anything
happen -- but it was still a wonderful thing to read that I am not the
only person alive who looks on the border hysteria as medieval racism
and the terrorist scare tactics as ridiculously transparent.
I have lived in Southern California and Central Arizona for most of my
adult life. These families are not "low lifes." Their kids work as
hard as their parents, think nothing of working two or three jobs and
saving the entire paycheck from at least one, for long term family
goals, regardless of the rigorous self-denial it entails. The second
generation emigres in my kids' schools were often the class presidents
and scholarship recipients -- not because they were genetically
superior, but because they were not afraid of hard work, and they had,
in many cases, the joyful, affectionate personality that we sometimes
associate with Latin people.
I made your argument, that the "crime" is stepping over an imaginary
line in the sand. Everything else is just us, inventing ways to
express our prejudice and superiority complex. As you have pointed
out, it is now an embarrasing case of "might makes right."
What about the golden rule? How "right" would it be if Canada became
powerful enough to invade us and take all the resources we need to
thrive, then tell us we are not allowed to come back without paying
their price? I'm no historian, but it probably goes without saying
that a lot of Mexicans died trying to defend their property when we
invaded their land.
Are we such bullies that we can't imagine how that would feel?
I completely agree with you that, until our borders are open, we can
never consider ourselves enlightened humans. Where do we get off
"owning" a section of the earth? Are we really afraid that our economy
will fail if we don't "keep out the riff-raff"? And I hope that sounds
as offensive to you as it does to me. I have lived and worked with
these folks. I would be a much finer person if I could adopt their
work ethic and their love and loyalty for their families and friends.
Why are we so afraid? Projection?
Kathy Green
Hayden Lake, Idaho
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