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xephyrx: you were the one proposing shooting people at the border for trying to cross. so that really positions you as an interlocutor in this conversation. worse, you seem to confuse killing people who try to get work in the states without documentation with a reasonable response to a problem that you appear to not understand.
you provide no compelling argument against my offering a counter terminology. you dont even see a choice in the terminology. all i said was that it is false to call these folk immigrants, in the main, because of the overwhelming role of reverse migration.
you offer no information to counter the claim, preferring instead to wave your hands and act as though reality is dispelled thereby. whatever. and then, after you do not address the point, you wander away into the realm of false analogy.
this kind of thinking may persuade others who share your politics--but if you seriously want to persuade folk who are not in accord with how you frame this question, you really should work a little harder logic and information-wise.
the bypassing of employers in your next point is simply bizarre. behind it seems to lurk the kind of reductive-to-the-point-of-surrealism econ 101 models that make of firms simply agents that respond to consumer demand.
there is a long long list of problems with this kind of reductio-ad-absurdum modelling of economic activity. starting in on them would constitute a threadjack, i think.
anyway, you effectively concede as much yourself, when you move (apparently unmotivated logically, but perhaps as a function of the weakness of your general position) to a series of points that target firms and their actions directly.
but let's say, hypothetically, that there is something to your second point. the consequence of it would be to organize consumer boycotts, to organize protest actions that would be aimed at forcing firms to change their actions--or, if your politics really do prevent you from imagining that capital can ne anything other than totally rational--changing demand patterns. either way, nothing in what you say functions to support your fundamentally repellent views on migrant/undocumented workers themselves. and there is nothing AT ALL in your arguments that would get you even close to a legitimation for a campaign of state-sanctioned massacre on the borders.
third: when i said old school, you misunderstood. but whatever.
it is the logic of your own blinkered view on this matter that forces you to make a fetish of tyhe fact of your own citizenship, to move from there to constructing some kind of hallucinated community that you are afraid is being swamped by a wave of Others from far away. that you are willing to fantasize about murder on the basis of such flimsy arguments is kind of creepy.
your position is different from pan's in that i think pan has trouble embracing the implications of his position, whereas you are right there, greeting all with open arms.
btw: a side question---if you sell you labor power for a wage, you are interchangeable with anyone else who also sells their labor power for a wage. your citizenship is no magic talisman that changes that. and you would have to be an idiot to imagine that the holders of capital would care about your legal status unless they were forced to. and they arent being forced to. and nothing about politics like yours would force them to. your solution appears to be a kind of blind paranoid violence that could perhaps be differentiated from a race war or a war between linguuistic communities in your world, but in mine, the distinction is hard to find.
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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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