Grumpa Joe's Place

“Out of many is one,” is the motto of the United States of America. Lately my thoughts have been on immigration because of the reading I am doing and also because I now have a genuine immigrant for a life partner. The United States is froth with success stories of people who went through monumental hardships to get here just to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities afforded by our country. Of late, we have been deluged with stories about people crossing into the country illegally. Our country has laws and we like to say we are a country of laws, and for the most part we try to obey them all. Every law has consequences, break one and find out what it is. Most laws can be bent depending on who has broken it, and what relation he has with those in power. The powerful can bend, break, ignore, any law if it means advancing his fortune or position in the world. If you are a poor unconnected schlub like me you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

What we see going on today is a gross mismanagement of immigration law at our southern border. Rules are being broken every minute of every day and no amount of policing seems to be able to control the flow. Of course much of the current control is window dressing to convince the rest of us that the administrators are doing something. Bullshit, they are looking up into the sky while waving them in. I know I sound ruthlessly unmerciful, but I am one of the people who believes in rule of law. Mostly because I have never found myself in a position to have to defend myself against the same.

Our history of laws controlling immigration goes back to the days of our first president George Washington. Since then there have been several iterations trying to control the flow of people. Each time the laws get more and more complex and each time they get more confusing. The result is that we have reached a quagmire that may only be corrected with a rest. In other words a complete cleansing of all immigration laws to be replaced by new laws which better define the twenty-first century demands. The trouble is that not a single politician has the balls to sponsor such an action. Currently, there are so many people in our country that have gotten here by by-passing the official government procedure that, it near impossible to play catch up. To wipe the slate clean which is an action people like to call amnesty is the only answer I ever hear. The problem with amnesty is that is evokes the ire of every red blooded citizen especially those who came as immigrants legally. Politicians both win and lose on this one. the result is a stalemate, and nothing advances.

The radical left uses this situation to advance the spread of communism in the country. The more people they can get into the country and onto the public dole, the sooner the country will go bankrupt and a dictator will be necessary to take control. I don’t know about you, but the thought of being controlled by the likes of someone like Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Pot Pol, Xi Jinping, Nicolas Maduro, or the fat man of North Korea Kim Jong-un makes me want to puke. I’d sooner want to duke it out with guns and eliminate the entire population that thinks in that direction. Thats what happens in dictatorships. That his why Stalin and Chairman Mao killed millions of their own people to get the message across that it was their way, or a bullet to the back.

Yes, we are a nation of laws and we are a nation of immigrants, but there are limits. I believe we must allow immigration to continue but lawfully. We should base the number of people we let in on our ability to assimilate them. We can’t just let the entire world population flood into North America and turn us into a dung hole overnight. That is a sure fire recipe for disaster and the ruination of the land of opportunity. I would sooner take the countries that people are fleeing and make take them over as U.S. territories so they could be controlled by our system and thus open the doors of opportunity within the geographic location of the population.

Whenever I think this way I remember that Puerto Rico is one such an experiment. It is not a state yet, but a territory free to operate under our system. They are a dung hole already on the cusp of bankruptcy because of a heavy reliance on left wing democrats who like to spend freely, and to tax the constituency even heavier. The result is a two class system of very rich haves and the very poor the have nots. Without a middle class which our Republic relies upon to survive.

Back in the nineteen seventies I often debated with myself trying to solve the issue of using capitalism to solve world problems. Back then, labor unions in the USA were huge, but we were a manufacturing economy. In order to compete with the new upstart economies in Europe and Asia we needed cheaper labor, but the unions would not hear of it. There are only two ways to solve this conundrum I thought. Either we lower the wages of our work force, or we raise the wages of the rest of the world. It seems that lowering the wages of our work force is the direction our congressional leaders is taking us. They can’t do it by getting unions to negotiate lower wages, so the new tactic is to import people from very poor regions, who can live on a few dollars a day, to fill the jobs that union people will not take. The end result is the struggle we see happening today. Poor people are flooding the borders to get the jobs that we can’t afford to take. Eventually, these poor will succeed in lowering the cost of labor. High paying unions job will still exist, but not in the numbers needed to give all of our middle class people work. The idea is to force them to take what is available by competing with those who know how to live on a dollar a day. It is not going too happen.

The book I’m reading is titled Out Of Many, One. Portraits of America’s Immigrants.” It is by George W. Bush our former president. He has selected 43 immigrants to paint portraits of, and to feature in a short life story vignette about their reasons for immigrating. There isn’t a single story without a happy ending. Yes, these are sterling examples of how people can succeed in our country. The problem is that for every one of these success stories there are probably a million that haven’t achieved a level of success. Too much immigration without the time needed for these people to assimilate is not going to work in our favor. Not everyone has the self motivation to get up from a failure and to keep trying again and again. Too many will opt for the short route to feeling good by taking drugs or alcohol. They might have done better had they had coaches pushing them hard to succeed. Instead we do things like our war on drugs to solve the problem. We all know how that works. It made the cartels stronger and they developed ta strong market for drugs by outwitting our drug enforcement efforts for decades. The end result is we make drugs legal, so they are easier to get, and then we stop sending drug abusers to prison. We tax the drugs and remove the prison cost so the state wins big time. The immigration problem continues.

Filed under: Aging, family, Government | Tagged: Communism, despots, Drugs, Immigration, Many to one, Puerto Rico | 2 Comments »