Citizens’ groups are targeting day labor sites in Oregon and many other states, effectively harassing the men who show up and hope to get picked to do an honest day’s work.

     The men are generally undocumented Latin Americans. The group targeting them, called the National Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, goes to the day labor sites and glares at the hopeful workers, holding signs that read “Illegal Immigration is a Crime,” or “No Borders, No Country.” Members also approach employers who troll these sites looking for workers and tell them they are breaking the law by hiring them.

     Oregon chapter organizer Mike Forest says the organization does not accept anyone who belongs to a white supremacist group. Nice touch. But a person does not have to be a card carrying racist to be a racist all the same, and I’ve got nine dollars that says more than a few Mexican jokes are tossed around at group functions. Just a hunch.

     I can’t help but make a historical comparison, and it’s a difficult one for me, because to play the Nazi card is a tricky and sometimes tired argument, but in this case the comparison rings true.

     The National Socialist Party, later slanged into the Nazi Party, began in the mid-1930s as a grassroots band of German street thugs that would round up Jews, Gypsies and Catholics for the crime of being Jewish, Gypsy or Catholic. From those humble beginnings were born the Brownshirts – the bulldog shock troops of Hitler’s Political Machine, and from there was spawned the Waffen SS and the onset of the Second World War.

     Now, in the United States of America (a land built on illegal immigration by any Pawnee, Sioux or Athabascan point of view) a grassroots band of street thugs is beginning to harass immigrant workers for the crime of being “illegal,” and targeting the employers who hire them.

     First, on the argument that the immigrants are bad because they are illegal: Laws become obsolete. A crime is defined as something that society deems offensive. A law in Arizona, for instance, is still on the books making it illegal for women to drive cars by themselves after dark. Of course that absurd law is ignored today. Liquor was once illegal. Did liquor magically become okay when it was legalized?

     Also, what are these “illegal” immigrants doing while here? They’re doing an honest day’s work, and sending the money home to their families. In the process, they contribute to the Arizona agricultural economy to the tune of more than $3 million per year. 

     Consider this: Murder is illegal because it is wrong. Theft is illegal because it is wrong. There’s no debate there. But we should always question anything that is declared wrong solely because it is illegal.

     Two arguments advanced by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps are that people have been killed by illegals, and that illegals get free medical treatment while some Americans can’t get cancer treatment because they can’t afford it.

     First, on illegals killing people: Legal citizens kill people as much or more than “illegal” citizens. And “illegal” citizens may get free, or socialized health care, as do some legal citizens, but it’s not in the form of multi thousand-dollar cancer treatment. The comparison is at the same time lazy and sensational, if that’s possible.

     Next, on the employers who hire illegals. Who else are they going to hire? I see plenty of strong-backed legal citizens standing on freeway off ramps and street corners like crippled wolves asking for spare change. I used to see them while driving home sunburned and sore, after working all day in the sun as a carpenter. These were strong, capable, legal citizens, some of them with dogs to feed.  I saw one legal citizen holding a hand-written sign begging for money. It was written on the back of a Jobdango (a job finding service) poster.

     There are dozens of “work today, paid today” places in every city. Even if you’re a filthy junkie or half crazy or both, you should have no trouble spending 10 hours loading bricks onto trucks. (To clarify, my argument does not include members of the homeless population that have such mental disabilities that they cannot work; I am addressing the ones that can but refuse to work. And there are enough of them to go around.)

     By the way, when I worked construction, I worked with Mexicans, and listened to their music. And they laughed when they worked. And they worked hard. And they did hard, dirty work – work some legal citizens would rather beg on a street corner than do.

     So, who’s the criminal? And who of these two groups costs us more money? The ones that work or the “legal” dead weight?

     The immigrant workers are the embodiment of the ideals of Horatio Alger, the author who wrote stories of hard work and bootstrap upward mobility. There are no great authors who champion vagrancy and laziness, legal or not. And anyway, this is capitalism at work: the contract will go to the lowest bidder, and whoever works the hardest will succeed, right?

     On to the idea that “No Borders equals No Country.” The argument is not whether or not we should have a border. The argument is whether or not people who come here looking for an honest day’s work should be allowed to. And guess what? They’re going to come, whether it’s “illegal” or not, so to keep the current immigration and employment laws in place is to manufacture criminals out of otherwise honest people.

An open border is a monitored border. We can track and manage the majority of people who come here looking for an honest day’s work, and be much better able to focus on the ones that enter with criminal incentives. A closed border is un-manageable. That is proven every day.

     And since when does America deny a person looking for an honest day’s work?





   

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- also by this writer -

From Chugiak To Cuba

Beatnik & The Colonel

The War Effort