White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

The Virtue of the Unwanted

April 29, 2010 by White House Chronicle 1 Comment

A young man drops over a fence in Arizona. He is so thin that his pants hang on the bones of his pelvis. His face is worn. He is scared.

He is a child of the oppression of poverty.

Now, uneducated and unskilled, he plans to make his way in a country where he is not wanted, and where he does not speak the language. Yet he hopes to get a life–even half a life–better than the one he left.

But the new streets of his life are not paved with gold. At any time, he can be arrested. He must live in the shadows.

He is an illegal immigrant.

Illegal, unwanted. It is an indelible stain, a sin that cannot be expiated.

He is a criminal. He is unworthy of medical treatment, social services, working or raising a family.

If he drives a car and works, he compounds his illegal status. If he marries and raises a family, his family can be sundered if a suspicious policeman demands identity papers from him.

All the days of his life here, he will be illegal. No statute of limitations will save him from his apartness from the mainstream. As a stateless person, he is an easy victim for exploitation by extortioners, crooked lawyers and exploitative employers.

Yet some illegal immigrants prosper in the shadows of society. They start businesses and accumulate cars, houses and successful children. A woman who runs a housecleaning service is putting her son through a prestigious university, where he is studying computer science. A man has a landscaping business with tractors, trucks and a large workforce.

These people left their native Mexico as desperate youths. Decades later, they are living the American dream in all but the paperwork.

They are vulnerable and they are frightened, as the debate has grown uglier and the law enforcement more draconian.

These are the Americans who never were and, under Arizona law, never can be. Their lives are written in invisible ink.

These are people who, in a different context, we admire: people of courage and self-determination. Through no fault of their own, they were born on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande. In an effort to improve their own lives, they have surrendered to a life apart, a life under threat. They are the exiles who cannot go home and may not be able to stay.

Yet America is under threat of conquest through immigration. There is no end in sight to those who would flood into our homeland from all of Latin America, and much of the rest of the world. But it is Mexico, in particular, that concerns us.

Guess what? We are lucky that our immigration threat is from that country and we can build a better border barrier.

Every successful, and semi-successful, country in the world has a problem with illegal immigrants. South Africa has about 3 million from Zimbabwe alone. Venezuela has millions from the rest of Latin America.

Western Europe is being swamped by North African illegal immigrants, who bring a very alien culture and an aggressive religion with them. They pour into Greece, Italy, Malta and the Canary Islands at a far faster rate than they can be handled. North Africans pose a much greater threat to Europe than do Latin Americans to the United States.

Illegal immigration is one of the great crises of the 21st century. But the real problem is language. The spread of a second language–assisted by broadcasters, motor vehicle departments, schools and greedy businesses–creates a parallel society in which people living in the shadows can function and assist the survival of other illegals.

A country grows within a country.

Dual-language countries are countries divided—think of Belgium and Canada. We resist illegal immigrants but make it easy for them not to assimilate.

This is folly. “One nation under English” might not be a bad slogan.

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Arizona, illegal immigrants, language

Comments

  1. Bill says

    May 7, 2010 at 6:18 am

    The dichotomy is obvious. We complain about losing jobs to illegal immigrants, but they are jobs that most Americans wouldn’t even consider taking. (Pick lettuce in the fields? Nah, I’ll stay on unemployment for the summer.)

    I think the Arizona stuff will be quietly reversed some time soon. It still brings to light a huge sub-culture in our country that can’t be wished, litigated, or legislated away. This country’s strength is its diversity – I wish more people would realize that.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
PBS Has a Future by Leaving the Past Behind

PBS Has a Future by Leaving the Past Behind

Linda Gasparello

Over the years, I have often been critical of the Public Broadcasting Service. That in spite of the fact that for 28 years, I have produced and hosted a program, “White House Chronicle,” which is carried by many PBS stations. It is an independent program for which I find all the funding and decide its […]

Notebook: Requiem for American Justice

Notebook: Requiem for American Justice

Llewellyn King

I have loads of my words to eat, a feast of kingly proportions. I don’t know when I started, but it must have been back when I was traveling on the speaking circuit. It doesn’t matter. This tale of getting it wrong starts in London, where I was asked to address a conference on investing […]

How Crowdfunding Brought a New Wind Technology to Market

How Crowdfunding Brought a New Wind Technology to Market

Llewellyn King

A California company, Wind Harvest, is in high gear to change the dynamics of wind energy and to vastly improve the economics of wind farms.  But the company wouldn’t be marketing to large energy users and wind farm operators today if it hadn’t used crowdfunding for its recent rounds of financing. Crowdfunding can get a […]

Notebook: Friends Who Share Friends Are the Nicest People

Llewellyn King

I treasure the friends who share their friends. One of those friends, Virginia “Ginny” Hamill, has died.  I met Ginny at The Washington Post in 1969, and we became forever-friends.  Ginny had an admirable ascent from a teleprinter operator to an editor in The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times News Service. She was promoted again to […]

Copyright © 2025 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in