Saturday, May 1, 2010

Paranoid visions

Undocumented, as in undocumented immigrant, means unknown. Unknown is scary. So we react out of fear of the unknown by building walls, discriminating and incarcerating undocumented immigrants. In other words, criminalizing what we don’t know. I believe that, what we don’t know, or can’t see ..we fill in with our worst nightmares dreams. Pretty soon we’re seeing illegals everywhere .. suffocating us ..overrunning our schools, workplaces and neighborhoods. So, we start encoding these paranoid visions into law. My question is, if undocumented workers are so productive, don’t they deserve some of the same benefits as working citizens ..? Instead of wasting so much energy battling the unknown, I say we get informed. I suggest that we actually document them at the workplace, kind of like an information-only social security number, then start collecting statistics. I’m not talking about legitimizing or prosecuting anyone, I'm talking about getting informed and seeing if it's really as bad as we fear. I suspect not. But I also suspect this may not be so easy to do ..they are just as afraid of us as we are of them.

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