OK, I lied. Here’s some content for today. Never let it be said that I’m not benevolent. Following Hobby Lobby’s stranglehold on the news last week the topic of “illegal” immigration has been bombarding every fucking news source I have this week. I was just going to leave the topic alone. After all everybody who is bitching about it this week will cease caring next week since this is America and we have the attention span of goldfish. But all of the outrage has lead me to believe that talking about “illegal” immigration is good for page hits. Also people are making some very strange assumptions that I feel need to be addressed.
Let’s consider what “illegal” immigration is. There exists a bunch of imaginary lines. I know that these lines are imaginary because I can’t see them when I go to where the map supposedly says they exist. Supposedly when somebody crosses one of these nonexistent lines without first receiving permission from some petty bureaucrat in a far away marble building it’s an illegal act. That’s a very strange concept to me.
Now let’s consider the thing that has most peoples’ panties in a bunch: costs. The main criticism I hear about the state failing to enforce immigration laws is that us Americans have to pay to care for these “illegal” immigrants. Apparently the people making this criticism believe that they will be required to pay less taxes or that their tax dollars will be used for better purposes if the state does a better job of enforcing its immigration laws. Guess what, that’s now how things work here.
First we need to acknowledge that the state doesn’t use actual money it uses debt. None of the money Obama has requested to deal with this situation exists. Second if we want to be honest with ourselves we should accept that our taxes wouldn’t decrease if people entirely stopped crossing the imaginary lines without permission. The state is already taking less from us than it’s spending so it’s not going to suddenly take even less. And the amount of money being spent on immigration related issues is a microscopic drop in the bucket. Third, even if we assume the money being used to care for “illegal” immigrants is real, we need to understand that money won’t be redirected for anything helpful if “illegal” immigration suddenly went away. It would just be moved to fund other parts of the police state we live in. Cops would get more armored personnel carriers to use on no-knock raids, the military would get more bombs to drop on the Middle East, and the politicians’ cronies would get more money to build worthless shit that doesn’t work.
Basically what I’m trying to get at is that arguing about “illegal” immigration is pointless. It’s a non-issue. Nothing would change if “illegal” immigrants suddenly disappeared tomorrow. This is just another fairytale created up by the state and it’s corporate media partners in an attempt to split us into two warring camps and distract us from the actual problems we’re suffering from.
The only thing I take solace in is knowing that nobody will care next week when our media overlords issue us our next weekly crisis.