Most illegal immigrants are hard working and, for that, low paid. Poised against this and the constant watchfulness is an informal benefits package paid by but beyond the reach of most Americans.

Those downstream from their extraordinary effort do very well, but an invisible wage is an untaxed wage. Illegal status also makes the purchase of insurance (auto, life, or homeowners) impossible and we all underwrite the de facto policy for such impossible insurance. Finally there is the availability of benefits normally granted to poor and/or prolific citizens: :

• An earned income tax credit
• Section 8 housing and subsidized rent
• Food stamps
• Free medical care
• Free breakfasts and lunches at school with bilingual teachers and books
• Relief from high energy bills
• Upon becoming aged, blind or disabled, qualification for SSI and hence Medicare

If a century from now found the descendants of those who liberated this nation or immigrated legally to it overwhelmed by a far different extraction that had predominately snuck in or over snuck a visa, then democracy and America would surely have let each other down. Decades of those who abandon their own country’s vote would have simply blended into and usurped a portion of our own democratic power; while those Americans who grasp out of context at an earlier open-door policy, would have set America up as poster boy for democratic shortcomings.

In what follows any remarks regarding Mexican illegal immigrants are about the difficult cultural context that surrounded them before emigrating and in no way are to be taken as racial slurs.

The Numbers:

In my part of Massachusetts, illegal immigrants are mostly from Brazil, but many to our loss are returning home. The stick has been pressure from the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and ICE wannabes; the hay, the value of the Brazilian real (currency). From my experience the vast majority came to earn funds that would either support relatives back home or become the basis for a successful business there. Brazil’s birthrate, now heading below replacement, is more comparable to ours; in general they seek neither refuge from crowding nor a place to raise a family.

Alternatively the Rio Grande is an escape valve to the pressure of decades of misguided pride in enormous families.  Although crowding and limited resources have compelled a decline in their native fertility rate, no such compulsion is upon those making it state side. Whatever may have been their original reasons for coming across they often end up staying and burgeoning.

The Lawlessness:

To avoid deportation local, undocumented Brazilians usually stay out of trouble and drive even more cautiously than we do, but across the country homicide and DUI manslaughter committed by illegal immigrants are inordinate to their numbers.

My guess as to why my local experience differs from the national is that:

Brazilians come here with neither a sense of our being indebted to them nor one of shame in being poor. Our forefathers and even not so fore fathers did not deprive theirs of anything and, in their homeland, there is a greater willingness of the wealthy to live but a stone’s throw from the poor. Nor did Brazilians grow up along cocaine’s corruptive trail through Central America.

I believe that in the U.S.A. it is not poverty that sets one off to steal bread money or in time to still a life; it is the disstatusfaction beheld in one’s poverty; and unfortunately for some Mexican immigrants that poverty began long before they could have contributed to it: in fact, long before they were born.

The Hope:

Those illegal immigrants who during their stay fulfill their dreams lawlessly abandon far better dreams: their own and those of resident compatriots suffering guilt by association.

I am entangled by two images of the Southwest and can no more separate myself from them than them from each other. One is of early Conestoga settlers building the region towards what it has become and the other of their descendants working hand in hand with migrant workers to finish the job. By virtue of their sweat and hardship, a thread of Mexican ownership now runs through the orchards and cleaned office buildings of the Southwest. That thread offers nothing more tangible than pride in what had been accomplished, pride not very different from an early Conestoga pride.

Is their ownership of still more substance? In the seventeen years leading up to 1853, the United States acquired or took from Mexico land now known as the Southwest. Returning it now would deprive a thousand times as many as had been deprived in its acquisition, but there is another issue.

Winning the Second World War was no slam dunk. For instance, had the parents and grandparents of today’s Pakistan and India not fought Japan, the Imperial Army may well have taken over the Raj soon enough to change the outcome of the war. This notion is not so far fetched; to mock it is to discount the courage and skill of those troops. Perhaps Mexicans have a claim to the Southwest, but it would seem that they ought to get in line behind other peoples, since lacking their efforts, the vacuum left by Mexican neutrality may well have brought an end to the Rio Grande as a border: no Southwest, no Mexico, only the provincial Land of the Setting Sun.

Securing America’s Borders:

The Boeing border-security initiative tried to do too much. The major expense would have come from computer recognition of people crossing the cameras’ views and the consequent triggering of more refined human observations. Preliminary results were discouraging.

I propose that the thousands of images be made viewable online for access by registered monitors. Place a bounty on recognitions leading to apprehension with special provisions for those that were confirming or of terrorists. At some point illegal immigrants must begin to notarize their presence in anticipation of a revised immigration policy supported by a national ID card.  

Would this altered border-security initiative and such a card threaten our privacy?

·        Upon whom else might such monitored cameras end up focusing? By warrants based on an established right to privacy, such border cameras and their publicly monitored offshoots would not watch particular persons but rather public space into whose purview people may or may not enter.

·        To whom might a person’s confidential information be revealed? In my earlier article, A Tale of Three Databases, I propose a national, ID-card information system that appears to meet the challenges of safeguarding the privacy of personal information.