Immigrants are Money in the Bank
The Real Reason This Country Will Not Create a Path to Citizenship
Story by Christopher Patrick Nelson

Feminist authoress Betty Friedan, in her book the Feminine Mystique , wrote, “The business of America is business.” The U.S. government permits millions and millions of undocumented Latin American immigrants to live and work here. As the film A Day Without a Mexican pointed out, this same government arranges things so that we cannot do without them. Recently, however, it rejected the Comprehensive Immigration Reform, which would have made current undocumented residents into citizens, and the DREAM Act, which would have made undocumented immigrants who graduate college into citizens. With Friedan in mind, ask yourself: Who makes money off of a population of illegal immigrants?

I know my share of undocumented immigrants. They rent a couch to sleep on, work from dawn into the night, perhaps eat when they come home, or perhaps pass out from exhaustion. The apartments they live in have rats and roaches in the walls, and strange, green life forms on the ceiling that choke them, but the landlord does nothing. I refuse to name names. These people do not come here for “a better life,” as most reporters say. They flee for their lives, period, from economic agreements made without their knowledge or voice, like GATT or NAFTA. Undocumented immigrants suffer.

Those who make their victims suffer are not motivated by the wish to cause them harm, for the most part. That “devilish” portrayal of evil comes from horror films. Most people who deliberately cause others pain do so because they get something from it. Former German Chancellor Adolph Hitler got elected in the democratic Weimar Republic because he promised economic strength. When he murdered millions of the disabled, Communists, Gypsies, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and others, all their money and land became the property of the State, and so he fulfilled his election campaign promise. What about us? The United States no longer has the official slavery of the African Holocaust to make it an economic superpower. However, our government currently keeps Latin American immigrants to the United States illegal, and profits much as it did before it moved African-American slaves from plantations to prisons. How is that, exactly?

Some who wish not to hurt the feelings of illegal immigrants call them undocumented immigrants. It is true that they have no documentation, which costs thousands of dollars that poor village-dwelling Mexicans who flee certain death do not have. So, when they work here, they use someone else's Social Security Number. As I said, it is not their own number, and although they pay taxes into Social Security for decades, they can never claim that money for a pension. The government receives all this money it will never have to pay back, which is very convenient for the government. If the U.S. grants citizenship to the millions of people who live here illegally, or even the ones who graduate college, it will have to pay them back for all the taxes they've paid into the system. Why would we ever want to give up a population who basically make up a modern slave class? After all, they have no right to organize a union, or demand an eight-hour workday, or ask to be paid workers' compensation for an injury on the job. They have no rights at all. Their mere presence here is illegal – criminal. Employers always have that threat. Remember that Republicans call themselves Conservatives not because they want to conserve Earth's ecology, but because they want to conserve money, power, and the cultural conversation with those who possess it now. Given that the generation of babies that boomed in size after World War II will fit the requirements to receive Social Security payments very soon, you can see why the U.S. government wants to hurt illegal Mexicans and Latinos so much. It's nothing personal. As Betty Friedan said, the business of America is business.