The latest over hyped catastrophe that has been circulating throughout the pre packaged and deeply infected news landscape is the bogus claim that the current wave of illegal immigration is obliterating the middle class structure in America.
I’m referring to the bigoted misinformation that was unloaded when the story about H.R.4437 broke through the media a few weeks back even though the bill was introduced a few months ago.
H.R.4437 is a bill that was introduced by Rep Sensenbrenner (R,W. I.) in December 6 2005, according to The Library of Congress web site, and that bill has caused some controversy as it set out to enforce stricter illegal immigration laws.
If enforced it would have penalized anyone who assists an illegal immigrants in terms of shelter or providing hot meals and water and would force 11 million illegal immigrants to be charged as a felon or be forced to go back home no matter if they have already built a life in America.
It was passed by the congress but fell apart in the Senate and even though it didn’t pass into law the attitude of this country towards illegal immigrants was eye opening and hard to take.
These blood thirsty teleprompter reading puppets with their insanely unsympathetic smiles would have you believe that the influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico is the main reason why the lower to middle class of citizens in America are struggling to feed their famished children.
It is so convenient for these unbearably heartless news conglomerates to shift blame from the vile antagonists that have been suffocating the lower income earners for the past few years to a group of people who are escaping a poverty stricken country in order to support their family.
Forget what Lou Dobbs has been force feeding down our throats for the past few years about how the illegal immigrants are taking American jobs and just for moment begin to contemplate whether you can remember the last time the U.S. government has gone out of their way to ensure that all of our employees are fully able to live out the American dream.
We have to ask ourselves whether or not all of our businesses or current employers have providing the proper healthcare, acceptable wages and safe work environments that have become essential to insuring that every hard working civilian is not being taken advantage of.
That is the first step to investigating if the claim that the illegal immigrants are the sole reason that the lower income bearing families are struggling to keep up with current economic trends is true or just another false premise perpetrated by the television media.
The talking heads would also have you believe that illegal immigrants are just aptly and indiscriminately walking up to people at work and taking their place and collecting their paychecks.
These are people who are escaping to America just to find any available work and are working off the books for an unlivable wage and are giving up any semblance of their human dignity without uttering a complaint to the employer.
We have to be straight about who should really be taking the fall for the current decline in jobs that are available to eager men and women who need these jobs. The minimum wage by law in America is at an embarrassingly low $5.15 dollars an hour and if you go by 2005 dollars when it comes to inflation and other changing economic factors the minimum wage in 1968 of $1.60 an hour would come out to $8.85 an hour, which is obviously higher than now (If you’re interested in how I was able to gather this information you can check it on wikipdia.org.).
That is unfathomable that in a nearly 40 year time period we have made no significant progress when it comes to raising wages of our hard working people.
Now was it the illegal immigrants who voted down proposal after proposal to increase the minimum wage or was the always on an extended vacation senate that defeated what would have been a big step in what will be an ongoing battle to raise wages to an acceptable wage?
Nobody in our government ever holds the employers accountable for hiring the illegal immigrants in the first place for an off the books wage in order to avoid paying Americans at least the minimum.
All the free trade agreements that we have signed have ripped out our poisoned intestines of our once industrialized heartland almost as if we committed the Japanese suicidal ritual of seppuku and let the rest of the world finish the job and carry on with the gruesome decapitation and we can do nothing but bleed profusely over our foundation.
Before we know it the headless corpse collapses and we have nothing to show for it but large trade deficits.
Sure, we’ll ship jobs overseas to pay the low wages but if illegal immigrants come here to work, than it’s an issue. These hypocritical monsters exploit these illegal immigrants in order to deflect attention away from the real reasons why we are starving and why programs like food stamps are being cut out of the budget in order to make tax cuts permanent.
These suit wearing terrorists seem to be attacking human dignity instead of buildings and are trying to brain wash all American into sharing the bigotry that is being spewed from your television screen every night as many of you are slowly being poisoned by a food item on a dollar menu.
If we are being told over and over again about how illegal immigrants are going to turn America into another Mexico and that we are loosing our jobs at an inconceivable rate than we are going to begin to believe this nonsense.
The other ludicrous argument is that the illegal immigrants are taking jobs that Americans do not want and that is the same rhetoric that has been circulating through the grape vine for quite some time but the cold truth is that they do the jobs that our citizens cannot afford to do because minimum wage is not a competitive wage in an uneven economy.
There is no way to support a family with that miniscule wage especially if you are a single mother with more than one child. Employers would rather pay immigrants a lower amount and abandon any thought of providing worker benefits.
People would love to scrub toilets or work at Burger King if they were being offered $15.00 an hour with benefits or a dental plan. Raising these wages and enforcing tougher labor laws would be a good beginning to stave off the illegal immigration increase if people were really serious about solving the problem of illegal immigration.
I am also disgusted to hear about how the baby boomer generation continues to wrap themselves in the American flag and wax poetic about how these illegal immigrants are ruining the country and are refusing to integrate themselves to our inherit rules.
We seem to continue to forget our history and forget that we didn’t always live on the land that we inherited and that we were not the first humans to set foot on this piece of land.
Part of Texas and California were part of Mexico at one time and for us to raise our fist and proclaim that if you want to come here it has to be the right way or if you do come here you have to join a guest Worker program is almost criminal and inhumane.
It’s hypocritical to act as if the land is a big toy that no one else can play with and it gives the impression that we’re a selfish child who cries when the other kids want to share.
To support a guest worker program that uses the illegal immigrants to boost the economy and forces them to pay into the system but after six years, we begin to send them back home, is a complete joke.
According to The San Francisco Chronicle on November 7th of 2005 Louis Freedberg writes about another ridiculous proposal which was created to begin construction of a giant wall or fence and that idea was backed up by a republican from San Diego called Duncan Hunter.
The proposal was originally introduced by a group called Let Freedom Ring, which is being funded by a conservative named Dr. John Templeton.
Are we this far removed from civilization that we can live with ourselves even after we build a wall to reject a desperate and hungry hoard of people who will work hard to make a life?
There are so many other complications that include the declining Mexican Economy that is creating a horrifying unequal distribution of wealth and the ongoing dilemma of the world wide spread of outsourcing.
But, it’s very encouraging to see the public outrage and record breaking protests that have been taking place over the last few weeks and to see Republicans and Democrats not to be able to come to an agreement in the senate to put the bill into law.
That’s not to say that this is the last time they will make this an issue and this is just the first bit of legislation that will come down to punish the illegal immigrants as if they are felons.
It depresses me to no end to think that if the Americans that are already here protested with the same veracity of the illegal immigrants, but instead against the war in Iraq, Bush wouldn’t be in office anymore.
What pushes your buttons? Do you agree with Erich? Let us know. Email us at nathasha@audacitymagazine.com .