Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on Fair360.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of Fair360, formerly DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.
A recent Politico article states: “Long pilloried for being soft on illegal immigration, top Democratic officials have concluded there’s only one way they can hope to pass a comprehensive immigration bill:Talk more like Republicans. They’re seizing on the work of top Democratic Party operatives who, after a legislative defeat in 2007, launched a multiyear polling project to craft an enforcement-first, law-and-order, limited-compassion pitch that now defines the party’s approach to the issue.
“The 12 million people who unlawfully reside the country Call them ‘illegal immigrants,’ not ‘undocumented workers,’ the pollsters say.Strip out the empathy, too. Democrats used to offer immigrants ‘an earned path to citizenship’ so hardworking people trying to support their families could ‘come out of the shadows.’ To voters, that sounded like a gift, the operatives concluded.Now, Democrats emphasize that it’s ‘unacceptable’ to allow 12 million people to live in America illegally and that the government must ‘require’ them to register and ‘get right with the law.’ That means three things: ‘Obey our laws, learn our language and pay our taxes’or face deportation.”
Response: What foolishness. Pandering to haters is a slippery slope that always leads to self-immolation.
I have no problem giving someone the “gift” of earning their way to citizenship, especially when this country screwed up the process to become a citizen in the first place and didn’t enforce the law because it was convenient to have the workers here.
Here’s something to think about: We’re in the middle of producing an article on the prison-industrial complex. There are three for-profit prison companies that are publicly traded. Stocks go up when revenue increases, but the growth spurt in creating new prisoners has flattened out now that we imprison eight times the rest of the world’s average*. So what happens OH! Here’s an idea: Let’s round up the “illegals” and stuff them in detention centers (that the for-profit prison companies are busy building and staffing). It’s a move that will plump up stock pricesand employ thousands of people who will vote in their selfish best interests. Why didn’t it happen until now It’s not palatable to round up the “illegals” when the economy is booming and business owners NEED those workers, but a downturn in the economy means you can create new laws to prey on the people you’re now dehumanizing. Re-read your history of why the Weimar Republic endedand who ended it.
Which leads me to another interesting fact: Guess what other industry went up in this downturn SWAT-team attacks.
Interesting to think that the Second Amendment was put in place mainly to give the citizens parity with soldiers. (The British were an occupying force. The Second Amendmentand THIRD Amendment; have you read that one latelywere put in place to prevent future oppressive occupying forces.) We don’t have parity anymore. Every podunk police force has a “SWAT team” with MP5 submachine guns, black uniformsand hoods to hide identities. See what happens if you wear an outfit like that to Walmart.
So sure, let them round up them “illegals”yee-ha! We can concentrate them in facilities that the misery merchants will build for us. Hey, after all, Daddy Prisonbucks needs a new vacation home and that will employ people too! But who will they come after once that growth industry runs out After all, even with 10 million to 16 million “illegals,” it won’t take long to tap that vein. The water’s coming to a boil and we’re in the pot asking “I wonder what they’re cookingit smells so good.”
For what it’s worth, I have no problem with “illegal immigrants,” but I do have a problem calling someone an “illegal.” The minute you dehumanize a group (which calling a person an “illegal” does), you take a major step in treating people inhumanly. For example, you can whip soldiers up to “kill the g–ks” and “torch the ‘ville” and joke about it, but it gets personal sometimes. Diversity expert and civil-rights activist Dr. Betances once told me about seeing American Army posters designed to whip up hate to kill Cubans after Castro’s revolution (when we were noodling about invading Cuba). The posters dehumanized Cuban faces (so the soldiers would have a lower threshold to killing them). It was painfully clear to Dr. Betances that he looked a lot like the guys pictured in the posters!
The point is: When has feeding hate not come back to bite the haters in the buttoften fatally I see these people with their protest signs saying things like “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand” and I wonder at how readily foolish people can be manipulated to bring about their own destruction.
*Oh, and by the way, once they’re done making money from these felons, they drop them off on the taxpayer’s lap to take care of now that we’ve made them unemployable. It’s the same thinking that the Goldman Sachs people haveyep, we support the “free market” until it comes time to clean up the mess. Then the perpetrators get scarce and let the taxpayer deal with it.
