The American border has been, by design, a sieve for Mexican illegal aliens for longer than anyone can remember. Despite government electoral rhetoric to put an end to the deluge of another lands destitute the fact remains that millions of Mexican citizens already reside in the United States and consider our land their home.
Living in the midst of the US government sanctioned illegal Mexican sub-culture one can’t help but come into contact with the Mexican aliens in American society. In fact, due to the influx of Mexicans in Arizona, English comprehension is a major consideration in neighborhood schools, at the post office, and in the voting booths. To many people in the Southwest illegal immigration is a daily reminder that the government has an agenda that is not in the best interest of the United State or it citizens.
Try as we may, those of us who cannot afford to price discriminate are forced to live among people who do not speak our language, have no desire to join our culture, and have violated our laws by simply being in here. But our politicians, those millionaires who live in far removed palatial estates, insist that those scurrying across our border without or knowledge or consent are decent hard working people who are simply trying to make a living by taking jobs that no Americans want to do.
Aside from the obnoxious arrogance of stating that illegal aliens are taking jobs that no American wants (while we still have an unemployment rate), just how honest, hardworking or lawful are these people that our government insists we tolerate, welcome, and support? How do these people who have unlawfully wedged themselves into American society show their appreciation?
In 2005, I covered a Minuteman rally at the state capitol in Phoenix. Keeping behind the crowd taking notes and snapping a few pictures I was approached but two short but stocky Mexicans who wished to intimidate me. One stood slightly behind me to my left side while the other stood directly in front of me. Despite trying to focus on the lecture I was called a gringo, a racist and a bigot to my face for simply being at the rally. They proceeded to tell me that this land was really Mexico’s and that the “whites” stole it and had no right to be here. Naturally I was compelled to mention something about Cortez being welcomed as a god by the Aztecs and the theft, rape, and genocide that followed, but they didn’t seem to want to talk about that. Luckily, these gentlemen realized that there were police patrolling the event and took their anger elsewhere.
A few days after the rally the Minuteman sticker I bought and placed on the back window of my SUV, earned me a broken carpet knife blade embedded in the left rear tire. It happened in my driveway – more than 10 miles from the event. Was it the same people? Highly doubtful. Over the years that very same sticker has gotten me flipped off and cursed more times than I can remember - So much for free speech.
As the blue collar neighborhood I’ve lived in for more than a decade has begun to populate with Mr. Bush’s guests, my desert landscaped front yard has been regularly pelted with beer bottles, food waste, and clothes from my neighbors. The day after the previous home owner moved out and the new Spanish speaking neighbors moved in, my high-speed internet went down for the first time in more than a decade. Unbeknownst to my new neighbors my television cable is through Direct TV while my business class internet cable service is through the ground. I initially believed it was a coincidence, until the cable repairman told me that the alley junction box was broken into and the cable was ripped from its receptacle. Great first impression.
These days it appears that my neighbors have decided to live without electricity. Despite a semi regular flow of unfamiliar faces in and out of the house, I haven’t seen a single light on in that home in more than a week. I haven’t smelled a meal cooking in an equal amount of time. I’ve witnessed my neighbor’s children bathing under a garden hose on their driveway (soap and shampoo) and in their back yard. Since I know the father to be working for a contracting company I have to assume going without power and washing oneself by garden hose is a choice?
Within a fifteen mile radius of my home, at least 4 drop houses have been discovered in the last month. Drop houses are way stations where coyotes, human traffickers, store their cargo, sometimes dozens of people, in residential homes until they can arrange to transport their merchandise elsewhere in the US. Anywhere between twenty and eighty people are crammed like cattle into furniture void homes for days or weeks awaiting their next destination. Shootouts occur on Arizona highways as groups of coyote’s war over the merchandise they are smuggling. Often enough American bystanders are injured or killed as a result of stray bullets or reckless driving.
If anyplace can be said to be worse off than Arizona it would have to be California. Recently my mother decided to take my nieces to Disneyland in Anaheim. Apparently, the saturation of Mexican people, illegal or not, is much more severe in California. In fact, the Mexican people she encountered in California, thinking they weren’t understood, were openly obnoxious.
At their hotel only the front desk personnel could speak any semblance of English. At a breakfast restaurant a waiter made a face and grunted something in Spanish when my mother had the audacity to actually ask for a menu in English. Perhaps most alarming was their treatment in Disneyland by other patrons.
My mother, who uses a wheelchair, needs to arrive at events early to find a suitable viewpoint and avoid weeding through masses of people. It was just prior to Disney’s fireworks show that my mother and two nieces experienced Mexican hospitality first hand. A Mexican man in a wheelchair slammed into my niece and never bothered to offer any degree of apology. His ramrod tactic was used to clear a path for several people from his family to push through my mother’s party to get in front of them. All the while this man and his wife berated my mother and the girls, snidely calling them Americans, in Spanish. Unknown to this rude couple my mother speaks fluent Italian and understood the majority of what they said.
In another instance at Disneyland my mother and the kids arrived early to watch the Disney Parade. They sat next to a family with two very young children on a blanket. A Mexican woman came from behind and literally attempted to climb over my youngest niece while simultaneously trying to shove her child to the front. Outraged at the rudeness, my mother sent the woman and her child away.
These incidents are in no way isolated or unique to me, my family, or to Arizona. Americans across the Southwest are being pushed aside much in the same way American government has pushed aside the sovereignty and will of the American people for a global economy. For any American to be ridiculed for simply speaking English in their own country is an outrage. For local and state governments to blame the federal government for America’s alien problem and do next to nothing while America’s streets are being overtaken by foreign nationals is an egregious violation of the very principals that penned the Constitution.
Americans have been, for far too many years, unconditionally compassionate to those non-Americans in need. Americans have accepted with open arms people from all over the world and offered them refuge and hope. But there is a distinct difference between a welcomed house guest and someone who squats in a vacant home and uses the law, or the lack of enforcement of the law, to prevent expulsion by the rightful owner. There’s a difference between a grateful refugee and an obnoxious foreign squatter demanding things which he, by birth, is un-entitled.
The American poet Robert Frost wisely wrote that “good fences make good neighbors.” Despite President Bush’s or Nancy Pelosi’s feelings on the matter, the American people desperately need a good fence.
