What if the only way you could provide for your family and children was to risk your life, cross a border in the dark of nightm risk death, and persecution. Would you do this for your children? These people are. Mexico has two classes of people, the rich and the poor, the vast majority are the poor and the rich do nothing to help them.
The last sentence is common knowledge; the rest of this quote is myth. Mexico, like the United States, like Brazil, like India, like Thailand, like most other countries, has its grinding poverty and shameful neglect by the rich (especially the rich among the government). But Mexico also has its working poor. This segment of the population is the group that is able to put together the means to make the travel north. But they bring with them, in general, a low level of skill relative to employability in a First World economy with housing costs astronomically higher than what they left, and they enter for the first time an environment with a pattern of employment that strongly favors high levels of skills, including a high-enough level of literacy to be competitive for jobs. It is a Third World/First World mismatch which lacks the social supports provided in the former Third World: government-subsidized medical care, social/economic support from extended family, competency in the host country’s language to navigate the social and economic structures of a radically more capitalistic country, moral guidance of the young from familiar relatives, and much more.
The native-born, English-speaking, adequately-educated American middle class has already been put at risk in our country, due to persistent economic downturns since March of 2008, and due to general cost of living increases (housing, food, medical care, transportation) which have climbed steadily, sometimes precipitously, over the last 20 years. It would be as if a middle-income working couple were to scrape together enough cash to move to Beverly Hills “to seek a better life.” What they would most likely get instead is a worse life, not a better one, because they would be entering a “world” which is beyond their means in which to compete, and in which no or few rescue structures exist.
Indeed opportunity still exists in this country – for education, for training, for that “better life” – for those abroad and those within. However, neither time nor any other commodities are available to low-skilled, illiterate, uneducated people who must substitute those educational opportunities with meager, poverty-wage kinds of employment in an unrelenting pace (working up to 75 hrs/week) just to maintain housing and a poor level of nutrition in an expensive country – compared to what they left. It is a
different life than what they left, but arguably not a “better” life. There are completely different assumptions in a primarily capitalistic setting vs. a socialistic setting, despite corruption in the latter. One could also present a case for the larger moral issue being a need to examine the brutality of the capitalistic system as practiced in the U.S. and applied universally here, regardless of the resources and the national origins of all residents within our borders.
I don’t have a whole lot of patience, or respect, for anyone in this country – whether clerical or lay, religious believer or unbeliever – who would so irresponsibly encourage such a morally compromised situation, which invites poverty upon poverty, and hardly is either charity or justice. It is actually a form of cruelty, not to mention dishonesty. Combine that with support for the illegality of this kind of “immigration” – which puts such an illegal entrant into an even more precarious position with regard to survivability – and I’m just glad that I am not responsible for the consciences of others, because personally I could not live peacefully with such a level of deception.
Indeed, splitting families is a terrible outcome, but one initiated (as Tigg points out) by the decisions of adult foreigners to migrate secretly and thus put at risk themselves and whoever travels with them. However, the larger issue is that virtually never does such secret migration include the very extended family which has provided the moral guidance and family stability in the country of origin. Rather, the wage-earners (and less often their minor children) travel alone, with a high probability –by the way—of being raped during the illicit crossing, another moral outrage which is endemic to illegal immigration as opposed to legal.
It is the wage-earners who have done the initial destructive splitting of the family unit, not the U.S. government. They have left behind key members of the family who have functioned as supplemental child-rearers, and would need to function as sole child-rearers in an expensive country which requires both parents to work brutal hours for the survival of the family.
I’m sorry: Perpetuating this is “compassion?” I think not.
