How refreshing!

Periodically, somebody will clutter up my email box with some jingo nativist crap about how all those awful Mexicans are destroying our purity of essence. Often there will be stupid gifs of weeping American Eagles or bogus statistics about the big drain on the economy (with no mention whatsoever about the huge dependency our economy has on their back-breaking work). Often there will be some delusional notion of mass deportation of the 11 million people who are now so integrated in our economic system–by us–that there is no chance in hell (and no moral way) that we could just rip them up, destroy their lives and our economic system, and send them back. And, often at the back of it, is the same sort of nativist anti-Catholicism that fired the Know Nothings. Damn furriners! Leave Americal to good white post-Protestants. All you have to do is watch our TV to see we are superior!

I usually just delete such junk. But one of my readers replied to one such spam (somthing about drug dealers getting rich and all the damn furriners being rich drug dealers) recently:

I doubt the driver has a social security account. In fact, illegal aliens pay billions in payroll taxes that are never collected because they’re illegal aliens and can’t collect benefits. The Social Security Administration reports that illegal immigrants pay $7.5 – 8.5 billion each year to social security and medicaid — a bonus for “real” Americans who collect those government benefit. Nobody knows how many millions get paid into state unemployment funds for the same reason. In contrast, the RAND corporation reports that the government spends $1.1 billion for health care on illegal immigrants who don’t have health insurance through work (78%), while the illegals themselves pay $321 million in out of pocket payments. (BTW, most of the money spent is on American-born children who are, under the Constitution, citizens). America’s net profit is likely consumed by the expenses of educating illegal-immigrants’ children and locking up that portion of our criminal population who are illegal. But those criminals will continue to enter and operate in America so long as white Americans (that’s where the money is) have an appetite for cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

As to the children, why do people assume that the creation of a class of hispanics who speak English, hold American citizenship, and adopt American cultural attuitudes is a terrible loss to our country? Those “cultural soldiers” may well come in handy in Americanizing Mexico rather than Mexicanizing America. Sure, they have their own agendas. Who doesn’t? Consider the National Council of La Raza; if they were a Mexican organization trying to influence the Mexican government, the group itself would be crushed in six months. NCLR is a truly American organization because it relies entirely on the American political culture of community organization and rights language. Yes, there are Aztlan Supremacist groups. But white people can be just as crazy — America won’t be safer because it has run off MeChA and kept the KKK.

I had to laugh at the photographs of the drug lord’s American house. The photos were taken by Mexican police, who raided the Chapultepec mansion of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese man wanted by 80 countries for money laundering and drug peddling. Those aren’t brave DEA agents in the photos. They’re brave Mexican police, who are dying by the dozens to root out the drug trade funded by white Americans. Zhenli fled to the United States, where he was arrested near a JC Penney store. He is now represented by the best “real American” lawyers his remaining money can buy.

The original person who generated this email is moron because he or she wrote that our cost of living is increasing because of illegal immigrants who can afford to buy anything they want with an unending supply of cash. If illegal immigrants have unending supplies of cash, why is the same author crying about their welfare payments? What kind of millionare would put up with welfare paperwork to save a couple of hundred bucks a month on food? The reason our cost of living is increasing is because the federal government (which is run by “real” Americans) has been inflating the money supply for the past two decades. More money in circulation = higher prices. And the “real” Americans have been lying (just like illegal immigrants) about the consumer price index for twenty years. For the benefit of the moron, the consumer price index (“that thar thingy that means inflation”) is the standard measure of the cost of living, calculated (“figgered”) by the sum (“reckonin'”) of prices in a list of consumer goods (“vittles”). When a good becomes too expensive, like steak, the feds drop it from the CPI index and replace it with hamburger. I’m not going to list all the tricks they’ve been using. Suffice it to say that real inflation is running at 14%, not 4%, because the feds are printing money. Put it another way, if the American government hadn’t inflated the money supply, Zhenli would have needed only $80 million to buy the same drug-lord power he now has to pay $100 million for. The fact that millions of illegal Mexicans get hired by Americans for less than the minimum wage has nothing to do with the money supply.

Ramos and Compean fired their weapons at a drug-runner after a high-speed chase ended in a foot pursuit. The drug-runner fell down as Compean and Ramos were shooting at him, then got up and ran into Mexico. Compean and Ramos disposed of the empty ammunition casings (otherwise known as concealing evidence) and fellow border-patrol agents gave evidence against them at their trial. They were convicted by a jury. Compean discussed the incident with fellow border-patrol officers before he was arrested. Only after he was arrested did he claim that he acted in self-defense. Now you have to ask yourself, why would two police officers fail to report a justified use of deadly force? Why would they conceal evidence that such a deadly force had been used? I don’t know about the border patrol, but the small-town police department I served in as a reserve officer required a report whenever an officer’s service weapon was discharged at any time and for any reason. You shoot your pistol at a bank robber, you make a report. You shoot yourself in the foot while cleaning the gun in your living room, you make a report. You go to the range and practice, the range officer makes a report. I don’t know about the Border Patrol, but I’d bet a dollar that they have a regulation requiring officers who try to shoot someome to make a report about it. So we’re back to asking the same question. The only possible reason for covering up what they had done is that they believed that they would be exposed to dire consequences for accurately reporting their actions. Conservatives think Alger Hiss was a spy on shakier evidence. A jury convicted Ramos and Compean. Some of them later said they were “tricked,” but we’ve imposed the death penalty when jurors say that, which they often do when their verdit is unpopular. Bush (who is probably a “real” American) refused to pardon them. It’s not like they were strung up by a mob of Mexicans for protecting a white woman.

Mexican truckers? Personally I think that was a bit too much to ask. The United States Clinton promised that to Mexico in NAFTA. NAFTA was negotiated by Republican President Bush, and Democrat President Clinton. The laws necessary to pass NAFTA were voted for by the House of Representatives, with 234 in favor and 200 against and in the Senate by 61 to 38. Over half the yes votes in favor of NAFTA were by Republicans. Mexico has waited 15 years for the United States to live up to its agreement, and paid for it by reduced employment and income in Mexico’s farming community, which Mexico agreed would have to compete with US agribusiness. But you have to ask yourself, why is illegal immigration going to be less of a problem if the United States continues to be wealthy and Mexico continues to be poor? As much as I like the idea of a border fence, I know that our best solution to the human misery of illegal immigration is a prosperous Mexico. We have to trust Mexican truckers? There are 110 million Mexicans, and the country has the 11th highest GDP in the world. I’d recommend building a relationship of trust with Mexico, and if that means letting their truck drivers pass border checks, insurance requirements, safety inspections, and tests on US traffic laws, it’s a risk we should take.

A fence is fine if it’s regulating the free flow of Mexican commerce and labor into the United States, but “Fortress Amerika” is something we can do without.

And Mexican drug dealers and “patriots” could still blow up an “Amerika Wall” like this.

You can’t build yourself up by keeping others down, and that’s all the original author has to say. That, and the ridiculous crying Eagle. It reminds me of the ad where the Indian cries about litter. Hey, I’m sorry if you were just enjoying the pictures, but emails with these messages always get my goat.

Bravo. Our economy is happy to exploit these people. Has been for years. Don’t give me a bunch of sob stories about how they are taking over the world while you benefit from their labor and give them a pittance in return.