Hey, kiddo,

Thanks for the much needed injection of humor and for the thoughtful piece on illegal immigration.

I’m forwarding something from the OK food coop about MRSA and its roots in antibiotic-loading animals intended for human food. BTW, going to organic meats (of all kinds) is the best way to keep from getting “Mad Cow” since the prions that cause it cannot be killed by anything, including high heat. Obviously, giving up eating dead animals is the ultimate solution. ;-)

I enjoyed the article about immigrants. Unfortunately, the way to stop “the illegal immigration problem” lies in making the penalties for employing them so onerous that no employer will hire them. No jobs = no immigrants, either legal or illegal.

That this obvious and simple solution is so universally rejected shows who is behind illegal immigration: large corporations who benefit from paying lower wages.

The growth of America’s economy has been based on the low wages of large immigrant populations throughout America’s history, from the Irish to the Chinese to the Italians, and all immigrant groups in between. This became even more obvious after slavery was outlawed in the US.

Every argument being used today to demonize the illegal immigrants from south of the American border was used in former times against whichever immigrant group was the largest at the time.

As long as natural-born Americans believe that immigrants are their economic enemies, both the immigrant workers and the natural-born workers are at the mercy of greedy employers.

Who benefits from slavery, from illegal alien workers, and from depressed wages for natural-born workers? Not the slaves, illegals, or the legals. The only group who benefits from free or cheap labor are greedy employers. Period!

As long as the oppressed workers can be separated into artificial groups based on trivialities like race and ethnicity, then they will not be able to unite and demand an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. They are thus manipulated by greedy employers into fighting each other instead of their common enemy. All of which ensures that wages stay down, corporate profits continue rising, and poor people get poorer, while their government safety net, never very much, is further unraveled.

The American model of economic growth is today being implemented in countries like China, India, Russia, etc. Those countries have large populations of citizens clamoring for improved lives, and as the middle class in America is killed off, it continues strong growth in other countries.

This is a global situation, not an American one. The US is no longer the only country with a voracious appetite for consumer goods. As economies in other countries grow, the market expands until America is no longer necessary as the world’s largest consumer country. Other countries will supplant it, have already begun supplanting it.

America is being economically dismantled. While American workers storm and rail against immigrant social problems, far greater and farther reaching economic damage has been, is being, and will be done.

The American government has become the rubber stamp for corporate greed with its lowering of corporate taxes and accountability. The American worker hasn’t benefitted. Former governors on corporate greed, such as trade unions and corporate taxes, have been gutted. Health care, once a personal choice, has been gutted. Education, once a local community project, has been gutted. Home ownership, once an achievable goal, has been gutted.

All this has been done while the corporate agents of dissent and disinformation have spread the lie that the problem is brown people from south of the US border. If we can all be convinced that “brown people” are the source of our diminishing quality of life, then we will never unite with them in our common goals of improved lives for ourselves and our offspring.

The problem is a top heavy US government passing bloated rewards along to its corporate sponsors, and gutting the laws that formerly made those corporate government sponsors accountable to the American people.

Yes, illegal immigration is a problem in America. But the solution lies in removing the reason people illegally cross our borders to live here: jobs that pay them more than they earned in their home countries, but less than even the artificially depressed “minimum wage” of natural-born American workers.

Stop employers from exploiting illegal immigrants and you stop illegal immigration. Nobody faces the dangers of illegal immigration into a country where they cannot better themselves.

Stop greedy employers from employing illegal immigrants.

Then, face up to the truth about America, your America, my America, our America: we are already a third world country. We just haven’t taken an honest look in the mirror yet. We’ve been too busy worrying about what the corporate mainstream media told us to worry about. And they’ve told us to be afraid, to be very afraid, of everything except how we’re being sold down the river, not by brown people, but by corporations and governments working hand in hand to choke us to death with our own fear, while getting rich off of us.

Much love to you,

Me ================================================================ Note: forwarded message attached.

July 24, 2008 Permalink: http://middlev.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/email-to-my-brother-mostly-about-illegal-immigrants/