Immigration
March 18th, 2009
Cameron: I’m always interested to hear your progressive opinions on geopolitics. But isn’t the mainstream media right on issues like Lou Dobbs on immigration? You’ve seen this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1UQMd7VMw. Aren’t Americans justified in their anger?
I’m not sure. Whenever I run across horrible no-win situations like these, I try to go back to identify the underlying force that caused the thing to go so horribly wrong. To me, it goes back to man’s inherent flaws: greed, selfishness, lack of compassion for others–the flaws that lead to the idea (and it’s completely true) that power corrupts. There is no form of government that clever, selfish people cannot and will not corrupt.
We’re talking about two countries, the US and Mexico, that have two different 400-year-old political and cultural histories, each with its own corruptions. This has led to a condition in which we have millions upon millions of desperate people who can be counted on to move across the border illegally, or take part in dozens of different criminal activities to maintain a reasonable standard of living.
The US has been largely free market capitalism with a legal system and cultural norms that drive an ever-growing gap between the haves and the have-nots—all exacerbated by the rampant government criminality of the past decade. I know less about Mexico, but it seems that it has taken an even more direct route to corruption and the misery that it produces for the people, with lawlessness at the very top that no one has seemed to get a grip on.
And it seems to me that this corruption is growing worse. A few decades we could have at least hoped that no one could operate above the law. 35 years ago we brought down Nixon in a drama that stood as a shining example of this rule of law — a beacon of fair play and the pinnacle of what democracy really means. Now, obviously, we have far more egregious offenses against the constitution that we simply write off because we’ve become so numb, so blind, so apathetic.
But here’s something else to consider: What is the true cause of immigration issues driven by economic imbalances? It’s fundamentally that the Earth consists of 180 +/- independent nation-states, each one competing for the same scarce resources–180 different artificially formed groups, each with its idiotic patriotism. There is very little recognition of the fact that we’re all the same under the skin, that our common humanity can and must supersede our ethnic and cultural differences. Personally, I think the geopolitical paradigm of nation-states is doomed to failure as times get tougher, the population expands, the atmosphere fills up with CO2, etc.
But where exactly do we go from here? I hope readers will comment and let me know.