Choose

All of us love a good WWII movie. Curl up on the couch, click on Netflix or YouTube, settle down to a great yarn where the good guys are unequivocally good and the bad guys are, well, literally Nazis. “Gosh, if I were back then, I would have been one of the resistance,” you tell yourself. “Fought those bastards. Maybe I would have smuggled Jews out of the country like that Schindler guy.”
Oh yeah?

The sad truth is it is easier to be brave while watching a rerun of  “Force Ten from Navarone” on your couch than when facing the proximate and inevitable ends of said bravery. Most of us would probably behave as the majority of Germans did–have a certain inkling that things are not right but shrug and figure that “The authorities know best.” Very few have the temerity or moral courage to stand up to an oppressive regime. We would have most likely been one of the many that when the reckoning inevitably happened, would bleat, “I didn’t know” or worse, “We were only following orders.” It is hard and dangerous to do otherwise, easier to accept an administrations’ lies, even though you know in your heart that something is horribly wrong.

There are times in a person’s life, and a nation’s, when we are called to stand up for what we believe.  To go beyond the lies, reach deep down, and do what is morally right. This is one of those times.

This nation is executing a calculated program of ethnic cleansing. Our Supreme Court ruled that a human being’s race can be used to snatch people off the streets. That is happening, not just in isolated incidents but as part of a systemic policy. Jack booted thugs with no identification and faces masked conduct pogroms of terror—smashing windows in an unconscious echo of Krystal Nacht, cudgeling women to the ground, shooting pellets of poison gas. They are incentivized to do so by a bounty system, so it is understandable that they are not too picky about who they pick up. “It’s not our guy,” one ICE agent is recorded to have told his colleague. “Doesn’t matter” the other responds. Hundreds of US citizens and aliens with legal status have been rounded up in indiscriminate raids. They terrorize communities while descending from the sky on ropes, a scene taken out of the dystopian and terrifyingly prescient movie “Brazil.”  Our conscience recoils at the images, yet the carnage continues.

But the men and women and children are all illegals, right? We are just defending our country. We are being invaded! (You parrot from the administration’s talking points.)

Setting aside the US citizens and aliens with legal status who have been rounded up–yes, they are here without legal status. Here is a surprise you won’t hear from the administration: It is not a criminal offense to be in this country without proper authorization. It is a civil infraction, on a par with a traffic ticket. Not a crime. However, it is a crime to cross the border without permission, and the two populations of the undocumented in this country are roughly split: 40% arrived legally, overstayed their visa, and have not committed a crime, and the rest entered illegally. Perhaps a distinction without a difference, but worth mentioning when the media and administration start shouting about “illegals.” And how despicable is that term? You might commit a crime, you might commit several. (You might commit 34!) But you are not ‘the crime’. You are in no circumstances  “an illegal.” If so, our president, convicted of 34 felonies, is most certainly an “illegal.”

Everyone ever born had a mother who loved them. They were born with a certain human dignity. No person—not even our president–is “an illegal.”

Semantics aside, let’s address the main issue: Yes, we need a functioning method of enforcing our borders and letting in the polity we choose, no question. But after Reagan granted amnesty in 1987, there were no undocumented immigrants in the country. How did this suddenly become a problem?

Well, it’s not because we can’t defend the border—essentially no one is crossing illegally right now, due to a heavy military presence there. If the US wanted to, it could have stopped the influx a long time ago, in a succession of both Republican and Democratic administrations.

The reason we have a large undocumented population in the US is that it serves large business interests to allow it. Undocumented immigrants are the perfect disposable labor force—they don’t do pesky things like ask for higher wages, or unionize, or insist on complying with those inconvenient OSHA rules! And contrary to Fox News’s breathless reporting, they commit fewer crimes than citizens do, for good reason—they want to keep a low profile. They are the perfect “overflow” labor pool—economy gets too hot, kick some out. Need workers, let more in.

We are being sold a bill of lies. Undocumented immigrants are in this country because big business wants them here. We could end much of it today by mandating the use of the E-Verify system, which checks that the SSN used to on an I9 form is legitimate. This would stop all the “gray workers’ who use false SSNs and whose pay is documented by W2s.  We paid for it, why is E-verify not mandatory? Ask who benefits from not using it.

You, and I, and all the undocumented immigrants are pawns of the moneyed interests that are ostensibly against illegal migration while they profit from it and ensure it continues. They can get away with this because it serves the administration’s interest to create an “us vs them” dichotomy—the exact approach that a certain well-known historical figure in those WWII documentaries used. We shake our heads at the “murders, thieves, rapists (some of them might be good people), and while we are distracted, big business laughs all the way to the bank.

Yes, we need to fix this system. We need to enforce the border standards so that we vet people who come the US and not just rely on the business interests to do our recruiting for us. The US needs people. We need, on average 2.1 births per woman merely to maintain the population. Right now, the “replacement rate” is down to 1.5.  What’s the matter with that? GDP—the economic output of the nation, is a product of two factors: The number of workers times productivity per worker. Productivity can only increase so far. We need workers to sustain increases in our GDP. Recall the definition of a recession: two consecutive quarters where GDP drops.

So why not kick out all the “illegals” and start from scratch with a cogent system that defeats the business interests’ goal of cheap, easily subjugated labor? Two reasons:  One, our economy is built on this quasi-slave labor. It would take a huge dip if we were able to suddenly kick everyone out, one from which it would be difficult to recover. We are already seeing signs of this happening in the building and service industries.

The second reason is moral. These people were tacitly allowed to work here by a system that exploited them. In a myriad of ways, we allowed them to share in building our nation, and they deserve some rewards for that effort. Consider a thought experiment: You sign on with a startup company and work hard for them for many years, expecting a payout when your stock options mature. There were some discrepancies with your work history, or maybe your diploma, when you hired on, but you were assured that it was not a big deal. Years you toiled, and when you are about to reap the fruits of your labor, you are unceremoniously kicked to the curb because the discrepancies that were known and ignored now loom large.

Many say that this is “jumping the queue” and unfair to people who came here “legally.”  Setting aside the hilariously blatant hypocrisy of this statement by people whose descendants did not come in any “legal” fashion at all (much of the land gained by the simple expedient of taking it and murdering anyone who disagreed), I submit that by working here for a time and staying out of trouble, they have earned a right to stay. Don’t believe me. Believe Patton. On the eve of his invasion of Italy, this is what he told his troops:

“When we land, we will meet German and Italian soldiers whom it is our honor and privilege to attack and destroy. Many of you have in your veins German and Italian blood, but remember that these ancestors of yours so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search of liberty. The ancestors of the people we shall kill lacked the courage to make such a sacrifice and continued as slaves.”

Patton, in his inimitable way, was making an astute point. Being American does not come from an oath, an allegiance to a flag, or an F16 flyover at a football game. It comes from a certain courage to forge into the unknown and seek a better life for yourself and your family. In many ways, these immigrants are the most American of all of us, imbued with the spirit of courage and hard work.

What this administration is doing—rounding up brown-skinned people—is wrong.  Stand up to it. In 20 years or so they are going to make documentaries and movies about this time in American history. You don’t want to be one of the guys that viewers boo at.