After the last presidential debate, President Trump received some derision on social media for his comments regarding the role "coyotes" and cartels play in human trafficking. The position of "humanitarian concern" toward illegal immigration as currently expressed by the American left, is (in my opinion) directly inverse of what it should be for a civilized nation.
I have a long history of loathing ignorance and hypocrisy when it comes to illegal immigration. When I lived in Monterey, California, I enjoyed asking tony coastal wine-sippers if they realized their chardonnay was the result of peonage.
Ah - the joy of being in one's twenties. I would probably get stabbed now for even approaching the table.
And my activism wasn't merely academic. When Mukato Hall (which was the school of Romance Languages at the Defense Language Institute that I attended in Monterey) was looking for a community outreach project, it was I who suggested that we spend a few Saturdays each month working on migrant housing in the Salinas Valley. If any of you are fans of Steinbeck, and want an idea of what life was like in his times, drive east from the coast for about an hour and you can relive his world in vivid detail.
For that matter, if you are intrigued with the color and romanticism of the antebellum south, you will enjoy the trip even more - since Twenty-first century California resembles 1850's South Carolina more than most Californians would care to understand let alone admit.
So then, if the obvious plight of imported serfs (for that is indeed what many illegal immigrants become upon arriving here) concerned me as a private citizen, you can only imagine how that concern was magnified by my work as a Spanish linguist in the Navy. Of a necessity, I will spare the reader particulars of these experiences. This article is not intended (nor does it want to be) salacious. I will leave the emotional (and thus salacious) portion of my experiences here with the following comment: That after nearly 30 years, I still have nightmares about it; and not for the reasons many on the current American left may think.
What this article does intend to show however, is that if we, these United States, are indeed a civilized nation - the only humane and civilized position we can have is to guard our southern border, and to discourage the trafficking of human beings across it for any number of nefarious reasons; and to question what possible motivations there could ever be for doing otherwise.
To that end, lets start with "coyotes". A coyote is a people-smuggler or, in other words, a person who - for a fee (usually quite a hefty fee) preys upon Central American peasants and political refugees for a price. An excellent fictional (but harrowingly accurate) representation of this process can be seen in the film "El Norte" (available on Amazon for $3.99; with English Subtitles) where, after the parents of two Guatemalan children are killed - the girl's godmother gives them her life savings so they can hire a coyote to get them into the U.S.
This hefty fee comes with no guarantees, and certainly with no level of comfort and/or security. Anyone who has seen the film"Men in Black" will probably recall the moving truck
full of illegal Mexican farm workers set free when the"coyote" turned out to be an alien from another planet.
Moving trucks by-the-way, are downright luxurious, and usually require a well-paid corrupt official on the U.S. side of the border to facilitate their entry. More often the crossings are more prosaic, like four people jammed into the trunk of a car.
Of course, many coyotes would not have enough business to survive on if they only relied on poor run-of-the-mill peasants. Poor peasants seeking a better, life rarely have hard-cash to pay the exorbitant fees and still retain some sort of buffer to live on after they arrive in the states. Here however, the next solution comes into play; cartels and their mules.
A "mule" is a drug smuggler, but a very specific type of drug smuggler, one who uses their person to conceal drugs. Even the inside of their person when all else fails. Drug cartels like mules because they are cheap, readily replaceable, and utterly untraceable. To quote from the article linked above under "Mule"...
"Some narcotics-trafficking organizations, such as the Mexican cartels, will purposely send one or two people with drugs on the outside of their body to purposely be caught, so that the authorities are preoccupied while dozens of mules pass by undetected with drugs inside their body."
And here is the horror in that. Often times the cartels pick the parents as the shills and the children as the internal concealers of the drugs, under the perfectly reasonable (and painfully accurate) supposition that the parents will willingly sacrifice themselves for the sake of their children, and that if the children survive the ordeal (of which sadly, many do not) they will at least be within these United States.
Since we cannot govern the actions of people beyond our borders, the only way to prevent this level of heinous abuse of humanity is to actually protect the border to an extent that the work of coyotes, cartels and mules is so prohibitively expensive that they give up. Another thing of course, is to refrain from using illicit drugs. I have always found it difficult listening to someone in Los Angeles complain about the plight of illegal aliens when they have abundant cocaine displayed on their coffee table. Just saying...
Which then leads us to"peonage". According to statistics from the Pew Research Center and quoted in a piece by CBS News entitled "These U.S. industries can't work without illegal immigrants", about 11.3 million people are currently living in the U.S. without authorization. The very premise of this piece by CBS is disquieting from the start, because it echos almost verbatim the arguments proffered by the south to justify negro slavery and the cultivation of cotton in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. At that time cotton represented 66% of our nation's gross exports.
Whereas I will agree that there is a need for skilled agricultural workers, this piece from one of our Socratic News Wire affiliates, news.com.au points out: native born and naturalized citizens are, "(‘I’m) not as exploitable as a foreigner’". The piece goes on to explain how a young, healthy guy looking for farm work in Australia is repeatedly turned away merely because, as a citizen, he is not subject to easy exploitation. And it is not just farm workers.
In another piece from another one of our Socratic News Wire affiliates, Aljazeera, entitled: "Invisible women: Domestic workers underpaid and abused", the feature explores the plight of domestic workers in these United States. According to Aljazeera, there are at least two-million domestic workers in the United States, and most of them are black Americans or immigrant women, and all of them are, to be blunt, little better than peons when it comes to labor and employment concerns. Whereas I am a free-market person and believe that everyone is entitled to work for a negotiated wage, having rights for some that do not extend to others in antithetical to both free-markets and "progressive" ideals - whatever they purport to be.
Looking at this map, we get a pretty clear idea of how prevalent the problem is, and how difficult it will be to correct. It is also interesting to see the correlation between intensive labor agriculture like apples, peaches, tobacco, almonds, and oranges, reflected in blue and darker green areas. New Jersey however, is more perplexing, unless you consider the large amount of suburban households in need of domestic labor. Likewise Nevada, whose hospitality industry requires a large number of maids, cooks, gardeners and chauffeurs.
In 2004, George W. Bush (himself a former governor of a border state plagued with this problem) sought in vain to establish a guest worker program for both agricultural and domestic workers, but there was little political support in congress for it, and the measure died an ignominious death. One must certainly ask themselves why?
And one must certainly ask the current American left why, with current estimates of 11.3 million people already subjected to the inhumanity and abuse incumbent in illegal immigration, we would want to encourage more people to seek "asylum" in a place where their lack of marketable skills, language facility, and general education - rarely advance their work prospects beyond the agricultural and domestic service offerings presented here. We also need to ask them why a"humane" people would tolerate, nay - enable parasitic entities such as coyotes and cartels by a policy of unfettered and undocumented immigration. These are valid and serious questions that should be explored with surgical logic not salacious emotion.
And for our friends on the current American left; ask yourself this. Are you prepared for the consumer cost increases that will be involved? Are you ready to forgo your inexpensive almond milk and almond butter? Your special $6.00 wines? Your farm to table organic produce? Are you prepared to raise your own children? Clean your own houses? Wash your own cars?
It is tempting to view this issue through the lens of capitalism and greed; to frame it as a worker's rights cause. However, that is misleading. Because the benefits of America's peonage system has deep roots, and affects us all at every level of the economy. It is an issue with no moral high ground; no social purity. Because the stain of American peonage and its use of illegal aliens is on all of our hands, at every level of our lives. To pretend otherwise is either myopic or delusional. It is in no way honorable; or in anyway humane.
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