And you think we've got troubles - Arizona is now in a wild ferment over passage of Arizona SB 1070, which cracks down on and deports illegal immigrants back to the various Latin American countries from whence they came.
People in Arizona are frustrated with the problems ostensibly caused by illegal immigrants, as well as the issues of inflated crime and strained safety nets. The side against the passage of the bill cites the fundamentally racist intent behind the bill, and vows court cases against racial profiling and what will surely result in a surge of cases filed in the courts against police.
Fine. Both sides have their points, and denying either side's truths is not going to get us closer to a managed civil society. The only thing that will get us there is some understanding of the deeper causes of the immigration in the first place. The first is the lack of any reasonable long-term policy for guest workers in the United States. And the second is the civil collapse that is embracing all of Latin America because of the mind-boggling extent and stupidity of our ongoing War on Drugs.
First things first - we need a guest worker law that makes sense. Our farm economy depends on the hard-working trabajadores migrantes that work the fields and tend the cows. It is a fact - Americans do not want to do these jobs. It is pointless to rail against either the migrant workers who do, or pass value judgments against Americans who don't want these jobs. At the federal level, we must figure out quotas that meet the farm industry's needs and establish safe transportation and some type of stable market for migrant labor. Workers must be assured of decent living conditions, reliable transportation and humane working conditions just like any other American. Riding in the back of a someone's trunk while a coyote, an illegal trafficker in human persons, hauls you across the border and leaves you in the middle of the desert facing a 40-mile walk is insane. It is a fiction that is costing hundreds of human lives, and it is beneath us as a nation.
But the second is more insidious, and goes against the national conscience in a more profound way. We must end the War on Drugs, and we must do it now. We need to legalize marijuana, and regulate all the other more extreme substances and treat them as the public health problem that they are, not as a criminal problem. Not facing this fundamental problem of our society is killing people - thousands of them. From 2006-2009, at least 18,000 people died in drug-related violence across Mexico. Notable to many people because of the bizarre and violent methods of death were the executions of women in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso. But the real truth was not that women were being killed, because if anyone has the impression that it was just women being killed, they would be wrong. Hundreds of people are being killed, and the U.S. media, in love with their own version of scandal, promoted the feminine angle and ignored the fundamental indiscriminate nature of the killings.
One cannot even come to terms with the billions of dollars wasted that have flowed arms into the gangs of drug runners. We are literally arming the destabilizing forces that are driving illegal immigration. In the process, we are creating a nightmare problem that will make today's immigration problems look small in comparison.
If we want to get to that better place, we are going to have to face our own failed beliefs. And that means creating a meaningful guest worker program and stopping the drug war. Noted author Chuck Bowden said it best. "We're a 12-pack nation that won't let anyone have a joint."
Chuck Pezeshki is a professor in mechanical and materials engineering at Washington State University.
