Five Big Lies about the undocumented immigrants
Waiting for an honest effort from President Obama to finally bring some relief to millions of human beings that have already been punished for decades for their crime of loving this country enough to try to build their own American Dream here, it may be useful to remind to readers several of the most common fallacies from the extremist wing of the G.O.P., those who profit from the broken immigration system and the suffering of so many Latino immigrant families.
5. “They deserved (to be hunted) because they choose the break the law”. The fact is that for many there is neither a real legal path to immigrate here nor it was their choice. The current system can have a parent can wait decades from an incompetent bureaucrat approval (if any) to be able to hug and kiss their own children that happened to leave in the US. The yellow brick road only exists in the professional haters rhetoric.
4. “They constitute a heavy burn to the American economy”. Probably the fattest of all lies. The United States of America was built from hard working immigrants. That happened before, happens now and, if God permits, the new immigrants will pay for this generation retirement. Their economic contributions are clear to anyone who is willing to see them.
3. “Immigrants are criminals because they crossed the border illegally”. False. It should be noted that for several years the Southwest border has been pretty much closed (at least to Mexican immigrants who have a net immigration rate of zero for close to a decade now). Recognizing that staying in the country after someone visa expires constitute an infraction to some administrative rules, it’s a huge nonsense trying to define a person for that. And lets be honest, pretending to criminalize children for fleeing a bloody drug war is pure crazy.
2.”Immigrants constitute a threat to the American values”. Over and over has been said that and always proved false. Immigrant integration has been continuously an ongoing process in this country; first with the British, then the Germans, Italians, Irish, Greeks, etc. Latino and Asian immigrants are the most recent waves of newcomers. And besides making the American food options richer and tastier, it is a fact that these communities admire, love and respect this nation like anybody else, or even more.
1. “At the end the self deportation strategy will succeed”. Following political advise from the suicidal caucus, some people focused in the very dysfunctional electoral map of the 435 districts pretend that (a) Latinos do not vote, (b) that they do not care about their father or mother without papers, therefore anti-immigrant candidates will win elections over and over again just pretending Latinos are not real. Well, all wrong again. With more than 9 million Latinos already voting, plus 1 million more Latino kids getting 18 years old every year for the next 20 years, becoming the party of the old white (angry) male does not look to be a very smart investment.
So here we are, in the verge of a (hopefully) brave political decision of the first non-white American President. An imperfect determination (almost by definition because an immigration reform should be the result of a legislative action); probably not enough to help all the mothers, workers, entrepreneurs, and students that deserve the opportunity of a better life, but (hopefully) good enough to place Mr. Obama in the right side of history.
Latino immigrant will wait for the new scenario, deal with it and, of course, keep fighting.
