I’ve been thinking about France lately. Unless you’ve been disconnected from planet Earth, or if you just ignore France because the French are evil cowards, you’ve seen or heard something about the violent rioting in the streets of Paris and other cities. The unrest there led to a massive police and even army movement, night curfews, thousands of arrests and thousands of cars burned with Molotov cocktails.
The riots, France’s biggest since World War II, happened after two French-Arab teenagers were electrocuted at a power station while hiding from police who were apparently chasing them. These events forced the country to confront the anger coming out of France’s neglected suburbs (slumps), where French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants believe they are treated as second-class citizens.
The uprising has me wondering … You surely remember the Los Angeles riots of 1992, ignited after the police officers who beat the hell out of African-American motorist Rodney King were found not guilty of excessive force. Both that incident and the recent events in France reveal a sad and simple truth: We live in a very divided world with a lot of small subdivisions. In the US, there’s still segregation amongst groups, and it seems not a white vs. African American vs. Chinese vs. Latino thing, but a rich vs. poor thing, with the middle class — the one that served as a middle ground for tolerance — rapidly disappearing.
I would like to say to all who want to close the border with Mexico: Even if you land-mined the Arizona desert, as long as huge economic differences between nearby countries exist, people will find a way to get in. Every day, on the other side of the Atlantic, Africans from Sub-Saharan countries walk for months in the desert for a chance to reach Europe. That’s the Sahara, a desert that makes the Arizona-Sonora desert look like a sandlot. Yes, the poverty levels in Africa are atrocious, but Mexico is not getting any better and Mexico’s second source of income is … wire transfers from workers in the US.
So, raise the border, put a 15-yard-high, 10-yard-wide electric fence across the whole 1,951 miles of it (hey, it’ll even attract some tourists), but people will find a way to get here, and once they’re here, they will find jobs. There are 10 million illegals, most of whom are working, sending money home and spending the rest here. If they all just disappeared, as some hard-core intolerant people wish, you’d have the poor manager of the Wilkesboro Wal-Mart worrying about his 20-percent sales drop.
There’s a need for control, but through measures that would integrate these people in a fashion that’s both humane and orderly. If immigrants are “stealing jobs and fracturing the economy,” then legalize them so you can compete with them.
You want to punish those who hire them? Those are businesspeople; they’ll find another way to get cheap labor. You want to stop the banking wire transfers? That could get a lot of legal Hispanics a nifty little side business.
Since it appears that politicians are too divided, not pushing either issue, things will stay as they are for a while, with undocumented Hispanics working in subpar conditions and living in trailer parks disguised as “low income housing”; they’ll continue getting suspicious looks by the cops and perfecting the survival techniques of the less fortunate.
Let’s hope for some action before a fire is started.
Hernan Mena, a native of Mexico, is associate editor of the regional Hispanic weekly newspaper, Que Pasa.
This article appears in Dec 14-20, 2005.
