President Obama and his Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, former
governor of Arizona, are continuing the trend of turning the War on Terror
into a Race War against undocumented workers. Undocumented workers, many
of them are Latino and Native Americans, are guilty of a civil offense.
The dogs of crime fighting have gone beyond the mass raids, deportations,
and imprisonment such as at Postville, to the common traffic stop.
287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act allows local and state law
enforcement to be trained to enforce immigration laws. Not so much to stop
criminals who happen to be undocumented persons, the fear is that the
heinous anti-Hispanic apartheid card check of Arizona's Maricopa County
Sheriff Joe Arpaio will become the new norm.
I suspected something of this sort as I noted the increased attention to
traffic stops in the past couple of years. I was stopped for a tail light
and noted that the officer was very interested in getting me to tell him
about myself by asking, "you work at the University?" I could well imagine
the question of where I was born would be more likely if I wasn't white.
Last summer I experienced a license plate stop, wherein I was asked to
provide a drivers license, as a passenger. I was with the driver and a
Hawaiian friend. The Hawaiian was telling us just before we saw the red
lights about how when she and her African American boyfriend were stopped,
they were most always subject to a car search. And I had joked about maybe
we would be tonight. The officer checked all of our licenses and had us
step out into the cold spring night air so he could search the car.
Later last summer, I read that the Iowa City police were being advised
that they were required to make a minimum of twenty traffic stops per
month. Whereas an officer may, in good faith and restraint, have made only
that many in a year.And I had read earlier about how a notoriously crime
ridden neighborhood in Washington D.C. had been cordoned off and everyone
entering was stopped, whether in a car or as a pedestrian, to be asked
their business for being there.
It was about the time when I was thinking of my middle son stationed in
Baghdad. Reading about the frequent deaths of civilians who failed to stop
for a hastily erected military checkpoint. And I have since thought of the
checkpoint culture that the Palestinians endure.
Very few people would agree with me that our borders should be open and
unfortified. Our economy would benefit from an simple, routine and
efficient clerical system of documenting border crossers. The problem with
undocumented aliens is not their minor civil crime. The problem is the
unorganized and unregulated underground labor economy in which they work.
The simple remedy is labor law enforcement and union organizing.
Okay, most folks have some reservation about my open border thesis. But,
the question becomes how much police power do we want to unleash in this
country? If we didn't run out of money, we would certainly chafe at the
loss of our freedoms and the fact that our economy would sink as in quick
sand. How can it not be all about race and border walls? People from the
U.S., especially if they are white can cross the southern border without
worrying about breaking laws. But the reverse is not the case. Isn't the
increasingly walled southern border but a physical expression of the
sickness and obcession of race in our culture?
I simply lack the emotion and the logic to understand militarized borders
and the concept of people being illegal. I guess something must be wrong
with me