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A Deadly Infiltration
By Vicente Echerri
The rise in the U.S. of Hispanics--and not always
Spanish-speaking ones--is ever more obvious. Two nominees to the next Bush
cabinet have the typical Spanish-sounding names of Gonzalez and Gutierrez; and
two more Hispanics are being seated for the first time in the U.S. Senate. This
is the apex of a social ladder that immigrants from
Spain and Spanish America
have now scaled to the top.
The satisfaction of this triumph, however, should not lead us
to defend or justify--as do many columnists and commentators in our media--the
illegal immigration that breaches our southern border every day, nor to advocate
certain presumed rights that the illegal immigration voids at the root.
The
majority of illegal immigrants--including many of those who have been able to
establish their presence legally--do not merely lack the rudiments of English,
as one would expect; they are also illiterate in Spanish and they lack the basic
skills that would enable them to become productive members of the most advanced
nation on earth. The inevitable outcome is not "the American dream" but the
formation of ghetttos in all of our large cities where, far from having an
incentive to integrate--as happened with the migratory waves of the late 19th
and first half of the 20th century--these immigrants deepen the marginal
condition that drove them from their countries of origin and perpetuate it in
urban neighborhoods that become a parallel nation subsisting alongside the U.S.
rather than forming a part of it.
Needless to say, this marginality--reinforced by illegality
in the cases of millions of undocumented persons--inevitably corrupts the
character of a nation that based its enormous success on the crucible of
assimilation--the famous melting pot--where all immigrants, without regard to
racial or religious origin, came to adopt the Protestant work ethic and the
country's dynamic customs. The proximity of
Latin America
and the continuing affluence of this immigration have tended to frustrate the
traditional mechanisms of immigraton, although the second immigrant generation
has partially realized them. The recent arrivals from our countries are every
day more numerous.
As charitable as we might like to be, the most elementary
logic tells us that if millions upon millions of hungry and persecuted people,
from Latin America and other parts of the world, were to settle in the U.S.,
this country would cease to be what it is and would become a piece of the Third
World, incapable of exerting leadership or of setting standards for
international development; hence the need to legislate seriously, and severely,
in order to cut off this continuing and deadly infiltration.
A new framework for controlling immigration should be a
mixture of legalization, deportation and greater protection of our borders. Each
of these expedients alone would only be partly successful. Through a generous
amnesty, the State might welcome those immigrants who, though illegal, are most
capable and well-suited to join society; while with the same logic society can
resort to massive deportations in order to rid itself of the least desirable
immigrants; and borders need to be firmly closed, even if necessary by such
means as building electrified fences and raising schools of piranhas in the
waters of the southern Rio Grande.
© Echerri 2005
El Nuevo
Herald
Posted Jan 14,
2005
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