Raoul Lowery Contreras
February 2, 2004

Contextually speaking, one has to reach back to the White Citizens Council 1950s days in the American South and back to the 1920s heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, to find the total misstatement of facts, dissembling and plain ignorance manifested by critics of the immigration policy changes suggested by President George W. Bush.

Take, for example, Steve Sailer of Vdare.com (properly labeled a racist web site by the Southern Poverty Law Center) and his four examples of how guest worker programs, looser immigration into European countries and the very presence of Middle Easterners and Muslims in France have not bettered those countries.

I suppose it might be a stretch for me to remind Steve (I know him) that failure of guest worker programs in Germany and France and other such experiments in the Netherlands tells us as much about those countries as the failure of Muslims to assimilate into Protestant and Catholic societies.

France, we should recall, is the home of current anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim actions that reminds one of that which existed when the French Army railroaded Jewish Army Captain Albert Dreyfus into Devil’s Island and stripped him and his family of their way of life as French citizens.  Captain Dreyfus was, of course, later exonerated of espionage and treason and the French Republic eventually apologized for the great injustice against him.  Need I state that the French Army has never apologized.  Many blame Muslims for alienation from the French Nation, but truthfully, it is the French who have alienated themselves for centuries against all non-French people.

The Muslims, on the other hand, have never accomplished any sort of assimilation for the simple reason they don’t want to, wherever they live. Their mission is to convert everyone around them to the Star and Crescent, and, to despise non-believers who do not accept Mohammed‘s teachings and the Koran. The can accurately be described as the French of the religious world.

Germany, also, reflects longstanding racial animus against its guest Muslim workers from Turkey, who also spurn Germany as a host country for the simple reason that Germans aren’t Muslims and that Germany has always rejected them as inferior non-Aryan people. 

In brief, Sailer has no intellectual basis to compare the experiences of European countries and guest worker programs and worker ranks filled with foreigners in language, culture, ethnicity and religion. To make the comparisons he tries is intellectually dishonest. 

In brief, Sailer forfeits intellectual respect in trying to tie Mexican Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants who have millions of relatives already in the United States, with millions of jobs they already work at in the United States, with homes and apartments they already live in, and who speak English to one extent or another, to Muslims in Germany and France who are totally foreign in countries that hate foreigners.

Mexicans have been coming to the United States since they fought in the American Revolution just as Americans have gone to Mexico.  Mexican money was legal tender in the United States for over a hundred years after the USA was founded just as American money is legal in Mexico today. Mexican food is eaten and enjoyed by millions upon millions of non-Mexicans in the United States just as hamburgers are eaten in Mexico. Mexicans put the food on our tables just as Americans sell corn to Mexico.  Mexicans wear the uniform of the United States Army and Marines and serve throughout the world. Mexicans pay billions in American taxes. Mexicans, in Mexico, buy billions of dollars worth of American goods every day, making Mexico our second largest trading partner. The largest National Football League crowd in history didn’t watch a football game in the United States, it watched it in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium.

Compare these two centuries of American/Mexican experiences to the foreign totality of the Muslims in Germany and France and one quickly discerns that there is no way anyone can make any such comparison.

Other critics accuse the President’s pronouncement as opening the immigration gates to a flood of workers who will steal every job they can.  For these critics, I propose they open their eyes to see that there are 10-million illegals, or so, here already, most working, most working at jobs Americans won’t do for any price or wage. Some say if American employers would simply raise pay that there are plenty of Americans who will take jobs currently held by Mexican illegals.  That is not true and they offer no proof that such is true.  

In fact, in the notoriously anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican Washington Times we find a story how most Americans they interview will not take jobs at $10, $15 or more per hour.  They hold out for “better“ jobs, they don’t work much as a result.

Other critics arrogantly state that they want “guarantees” that more illegals won’t come if the President’s policy becomes law.  For those silly people, I submit:  We pass laws against murder, but people still kill; we pass laws against espionage, but non-Hispanic Americans still sell out their country; we pass speed limit laws, but people still speed; we pass laws against child molestation, but child molesters flourish. For these silly people I declare, there are no guarantees in life.

History, however, does put these people in their place.  In 1954, the United States energetically instituted a double-barreled program:  Deportation of over a million illegals from Mexico and a reemphasis on the “Bracero” guest worker program with Mexico.  Heavy legal recruiting and employment of Mexicans with American work permits caused illegal immigration from Mexico to plummet by 95% during the years 1953-1959.

When the program was slammed shut by the Kennedy Administration to appease his labor union support, the current problem of illegals began and has not subsided since. So, by the way, as concurrently the union movement killed itself by pricing its members out of the job market.

In other words, the very type of program offered up by President Bush has proven that it can cut illegal immigration to nothing and do so for years.  

Stronger border enforcement doesn’t work. We’ve tried that.  It is illegal to put troops on the border. We tried that against Apache brigand Geronimo and that didn’t work. We tried employer sanctions and that didn’t work. We tried amnesty and that didn’t work.  Amnesty didn’t work because we didn’t join it to a guest worker program.  So, let’s try work permits with, perhaps, some very long term permanent residency possibilities.  In the 50s, a bold guest worker effort worked, it can work again. 

We really don’t have any choice, do we?

Contreras’ three books, A HISPANIC VIEW: AMERICAN POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION; JALAPENO CHILES, MEXICAN AMERICANS AND OTHER HOT STUFF; and, THE NEW AMERICAN MAJORITY, HISPANICS, REPUBLICANS AND GEORGE W. BUSH, are available through any new books store, or at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and www.booksamillion.com/

E-mail: sdraoul@att.net

Raoul Lowery Contreras'
columns are syndicated by the New York Times Syndicate, New American News service.
 

The New American Majority
Hispanics, Republicans & George W. Bush: Accession to The White House

by CalNews.com's
Raoul Lowery-Contreras

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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