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pan: there are a few reasons why i have difficulty taking your positions seriously except insofar as it reflects your immediate opinion (that is your arguments bear on your particular situation in a way that is not really political, in that it is not and cannot be generalized without thinking more about how you link your opinion to some larger context)....
1. you do not seem to have considered the matter of definition. you are complaining about a population that seems to me parts of migrant labor pools---which are basically diferent from immigration---- in that reverse migration--that is, going back--is much more central to undocumented pools [so far as the data have seen can determine]--you could even wonder if these folk are "immigrants" at all--or whether there is some ideological function to classifying them in this manner--you know, just as there is an obvious ideological aspect to calling them ILLEGAL immigrants as opposed to, say, undocumented workers--which is both more accurate and less inflammatory. but if you referred to them as undocumented workers, the rest of your association would fall apart, so no wonder you prefer the more incorrect and inflammatory term.
2. your posts do not take the role of empoyers in the states into account.
the employers create the pool, pan.
folk come here to work.
migrant workers come here to work.
most send money back to where they come from, come here for a limited period and plan to return--or would, unless idiotic plans like "shoot to kill" at the border operates to trap the populations here that you complain about. (so much for the reasonableness of that goofball scheme.) anyway, the driver of these pools--their scope and density of activity---is employers in the states.
it is not the fact that people come into these pools--it is that these pools are viable sources of cheap, unorganized labor for firms--which operate in a political context that sanctions all such actions (e.g. the creation of labor markets for undocumented workers) implicitly under the rubric of a "rational" quest for increased profit.
in a general sense, you have to link the pull of these labor markets in the states to another broader context, which is the--um---uneven development north/south that shapes the reality of globalizing capitalism. but you said earlier--along with stevo no less--that you do not care about the economies of other places. to my mind that means you do not care about even trying to think about this topic--you prefer to vent. feel free--but dont expect folk who disagree with you to waste their time trying to take seriously the way in which you do it.
3. if you incorporate the simple fact of the matter--that migrant labor pools exist because firms create the demand for the workers--then extending the problems, such as they are, that are generated by the existence of these pools into the logic of old-school captialist-style class warfare is pretty easy.
and bvy refusing to think in this direction, you fall straight into one of the oldest types of class warfare--setting one group of exploited folk against another. the americans love that shit--think reconstruction. but we are not alone--you have a truly sorry history of the diversion of petit bourgeois resentment into truly foul political actions in western europe--think the entire history of lovely radical nationalist movements--to avoid being explicitly inflammatory- look into poujadisme in france, or the fron national, or the politics of heider in austria, the bnp in the uk....you'll see.
since you exclude critical factors from consideration, your views end up tracking into very strange ground, pan---i have other stuff to do so will defer going into this--but if you look at the front national or bnp, you'll get a fair idea of what i think of this politics you are working out for yourself.
the abbreviated version: i do not find the way in which you, and your temporary (far-right) colleagues above frame the question of migrant workers, documented or otherwise, to even be coherent. so you should not be surprised that there is no real interest in engaging you across your frame of reference. you act as though you have thought out and resolved questions before you begin to write stuff that so far as i can tell you havent even posed logically. then you get snippy that folk do not respond directly to your "points"--which are wholly knit into a framework that is in itself not coherent, so far as i am concerned.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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