What Is To Be Done?

"What is to be done?" A loaded question and, not incidentally, the title chosen for manifestos penned by Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov (Lenin) and Ali al-Shar'iati, intellectual architects of the Russian and Iranian Revolutions. It is a revolutionary question, and it calls for revolutionary answers. The debate over illegal immigration in this country has come to the point where this is the only relevant question.

There has been a demographic revolution in this country during the last decade. That much can not be denied. If it continues to be denied, it will result in a counterrevolution that will incorporate the ugliest tendencies of humanity. This issue must be addressed honestly. Both extremes must abandon their delusions, and they must do so now.

First, the left. It is a delusion to imply that the recent wave of immigration is in any way analogous to prior waves.

More people have entered the United States illegally since 2000 than entered the United States legally during the peak of immigration, between 1890 and 1920. Prior immigration, being predominately by sea from Europe, could be regulated. There were strict and specific standards as to nationality, education, financial means, health, criminal record, and so on.

Now, it is perfectly reasonable to argue that the United States should allow immigration from countries outside of Europe. As a nation, we made that decision in the 1964 immigration reforms. At that point, the United States was 90% white, 10% black, and nearly entirely Christian and English-speaking.

The decision was made in the 1960's to endorse a more diverse image of what America would embrace as its own. This was a decision that I agree with. The point remains, however, that even when the parameters for immigration were expanded, they remained legal.

There has always been loosely regulated migration across the Mexican-American border. This has been a mainstay of the economy of the southwest since that region was seized from Mexico. These workers, however, were always understood to be itinerant workers, not legal immigrants and residents with the inclination to enter the broader domestic workforce.

In the 1950's, there was a crackdown on such laborers who had begun to overstay their work visas. Operation Wetback, whose name illustrates the coarse insensitivity of the time, was carried out by Dwight Eisenhower. His primary ally was none other than Caesar Chavez, a man who it would not be hyperbolic to call the Hispanic Martin Luther King.

I mean here only to make the historically factual observation that the recent wave of immigration, which has involved between 10 and 20 million people, primarily from Mexico, is unprecedented in the history of our nation.

For the left to compare Irish or Italian immigration 100 years ago to Mexican immigration now is rhetorically too clever by half and historically ignorant. To compare the regulated entry of certain people to an unauthorized and uncontrolled influx of whoever was lucky enough to survive sneaking across the border is to ignore all distinction.

Here is what the left must understand: the scale of this wave of immigration, and its lack of regulation, has no precedence. Illegal immigrants are undercutting the wages of American workers. And if I were al-Qaeda, I'd be taking a good look at these people. Those realities can not be denied.

Despite America's well-documented faults and sins, people want to come here. Many of these people, far braver than I, are willing to die to get here. If there is no regulation at all, if anyone who is able to make it here is allowed to stay and work here, this country will be inundated with uneducated, impoverished millions who do not speak English.

I can not for the life of me understand how anyone could argue that unregulated immigration to the richest country in the world is a good idea. America is a real thing, with real borders, and it is worth being defended. We should not apologize for defending ourselves.

If we allow an unregulated deluge of poor folks who will serve as the cogs in our machine, our society will crumble amid bitter recrimination, where strangers will kill each other over an interview at Wal-Mart. Perhaps Jay-Z said it best, "I can't help the poor if I'm one of them / so I get big, then give back / to me, that's the win-win".

Now, for the right. The right has it right, to a certain degree. The federal government has not only failed; it has publicly refused to do its first and most important duty. The first and most important duty of the federal government is not, despite what one may gather, to invade impoverished Arab states 6,000 miles from America's shore to ward off theoretical attack, but to protect the border of America, which is 0 miles from America's shore. Easy access.

The border is the skin of the nation; if it has no integrity, there is no nation. We should at least have a debate before we give up our nation.

Here's what the right needs to understand: We're not going to deport these people. I refuse to live in that country. And so should the right. Right-wingers are often more coldly dispassionate than the left and, as such, they should be able to realize that the immigrants are not the enemy. The enemy is the government and business owners who sell us out by feasting on helpless immigrants for cheap and unsafe labor.

Right-wingers, including some I love, speak glibly and utter such tripe as "if they walked here, they can walk home." Let me get personal for a moment. I'm typing this blog in a house with 15 other people living in it. I am the only person in this building that speaks English as a first language, and probably the only person here who could produce a valid Social Security card.

In other words, my house is illegal, and I live here, so what does that make me? I live in our new economy, in our new demography. This is my community. A great many of the people who rail about immigration would be physically frightened of walking through my neighborhood supermarket in the middle of the day. I'm not calling them racist; I'm calling them unrealistic.

The immigrants are here. And I love them. I love them because they are my brothers and sisters in the eyes of God. And I love them because they're Americans. They're Americans because they got here. They walked across a fucking desert, leaving behind everything they've ever known, to take the hardest jobs in this country. Why? Because they love their families. If you can't appreciate and embrace the humanity in that, then you have no business calling yourself an American.

So, what is the solution? Firstly, we must shut down the border with Mexico. It will take money and soldiers. Too bad we don't have any left. In all seriousness, it needs to be done, and it needs to be done without apology. Know what else? How about some perp walks for business owners who hire illegals?

Secondly, every person in this country must be made legal. None of us should consent to live in a land where some of us have less rights than others, where some of us can be sent out of the country, separated from our children, for running a stop sign, where some of us are not safe to report crimes or to testify against criminals.

I defy the right to answer this: what would this country look like if all illegals were subjected to immediate deportation? How many doors kicked in does a fascist state make? I'm going to sleep tonight downstairs from illegal immigrants who, on balance, are eroding the tax base and earning power of American citizens.

What do I feel? I feel compassion and love for the immigrants, I feel derision and contempt for my government and the businesses that grease its wheels, and I feel that if we lose sight of each other's humanity over this issue, we will all lose.