Mr. Navarrette pretends that there are no real differences between, say, Italians waving the Italian flag at the San Genaro Festival, and Mexicans waving of Mexican flags at the LA May Day rally. Let me point out a few differences:
Italians, Jews, Poles, and Irish are not pouring into the country illegally, and in huge numbers. By-and-large, they are filling out forms and paying fees and waiting endlessly to come into America legally. And the ones who are overstaying their visas are not holding rallies and setting up sanctuary cities and hiding behind legal advocacy groups, and calling their adversaries racists when they get caught doing what they knew was illegal in the first place. They know they are here illegally and are trying to keep a low profile so they won’t get deported (they also know how much more difficult it is to get back into the US after you’ve been kicked out to say, Milan.)
Perhaps it escaped my attention, but I do not believe the Irish, Italians, or Jews have demanded that whole departments at almost every major American university be devoted to their exclusive self-study and tribalist self-promotion (And, Boyo, if the Irish did create the equivalent of groups like la Raza or MEChA on campus, they would be drummed out of the college as fast as you can say “Flan O’Brien”). Even a cursory study of the various Chicano Studies Departments across the US reveals such a host of utterly indefensible racists, radicals, Che bootlickers, and tribal kooks that if Mr. Navarrette really wants to do something worthwhile, he has his own Augean stable right in front of him.
Add to this toxic mix all the political and cultural figures within the Mexican-American community who have long-standing ties to racist and tribalist groups that for decades have espoused crazy schemes of reconquista (along with violence, infantile identity fantasies, and racial belligerence), and it’s no wonder that so many Americans have about had it with the Mexican flag waving and public demands to give them an easy path to citizenship.
And if there is a tension between Mexicans who did arrive here legally, and the hundreds of immigrant groups who came here before them, I would place the blame for this frisson squarely on the shoulders of the Hispanic tribalists and Che flag-waving activists who have done their legally settled compatriots no favors. Between the millions of illegals who have gamed our system, and the anchor babies, and the public tantrums, and the lost tax dollars and the strain at every level of our infrastructure, and the incessant charges of racism, is it any mystery that so many Americans from someplace else are having trouble distinguishing between a good citizen who emigrated from Mexico and the throngs of men and women who pour across the border?
Mr Navarrette knows full well the analogy between say, Israel and Mexico, and the real problem of illegal immigration is preposterous, so I’m not even going to bother to go through the myriad reasons why they have nothing to do with one another, but when tens of millions of poor, barely literate, largely unskilled, Jews from Israel pour into the East Coast, and with tens of millions right behind then ready to come, and they begin making it all but impossible for anyone to deport them, and then go so far as to publicly claim anyone who tries is a racist anti-Semite, I’ll concede his point. Oh, and when the entire economy of a poor, third world country had become dependent on the remittances from their citizens illegally working in their neighbor to the north, then I’ll worry about the immigrants from that nation as well.
The plain truth is that Mr. Navarrette is a tribalist whose primary concern isn’t universal, but specific. He has a little perch at the San Diego Tribune when he can act as an advocate for his favorite group of people at the expense of other groups of people. What Mr. Navarrette actually advocates, though he won’t actually come out and say so, is a privileged path of access to the US labor market for one particular group that happens to be closest, geographically, to the southern border; a group that, as coincidence would have it, is the same group that Mr. Navarrette belongs to. What the Mexicans, and to a lesser extent, the Central Americans (though the Mexicans work very hard to keep them from entering Mexico) seems to believe is that their tribe possesses a unique right to live and work wherever they want to, even in another sovereign nation, and even at the expense of people from other tribes who might have a better legal claim, or may have a more valuable set of skills to the host nation–and they are encouraged in this belief by racial chauvinists like Mr. Navarrette and other Hispanic activists. The Raza tribal chauvinists do not care about Poles or Malaysians, or Filipinos or Nigerians, just themselves, and people who look and speak like they do. They know that when one group bum-rushes the border, it creates all kinds of complications for all the people, from less geographically advantageous parts of the world, who are trying to arrive here legally, but frankly, they don’t care as long as they benefit. Tribalists like Mr. Navarrette also know that this huge population of illegals may create a large enough political block that can obstruct anyone from doing anything about the next wave of ten million.
It must be irritating for all those people from around the world who would like to come to the US, or who are filling out forms and waiting in line, to see Mr. Navarrette’s people drive by, contemptuously thumbing their nose at them as they roll to the front of the line and over the fence. I can imagine it would make filling out all those forms and waiting in those lines look pretty stupid; what’s the point of following the rules when so many people are shirting them with no consequences? And it will only get worse as illegal immigration by Mexicans gradually supplants legal immigration; the sheer weight of the illegals will make it increasingly difficult to take in legal immigrants from poor countries. Our rhetoric about rules and laws must look ridiculous to those people.
As a real liberal, I believe in a rational and fair immigration policy; one that treats people from different parts of the world equally, without regard to how far away from the US they were born, and I believe it is our responsibility as US citizens to give those people a fair shot at getting here if this is where they want to be. Concomitant to this belief is making the effort to protect the rights of those people who are following our immigration rules, by permitting one group of Yahoos from storming the gates in sheer disregard of anyone but themselves.
Lastly, listening to apologists from mostly homogeneous cultures like Mexico lecture citizens of largely heterogeneous cultures such as the US is risible; like listening to Saudis dictate to the West on women’s rights. What’s even more laughable is listening to a tribalist like Mr. Navarrette habitually treat a tremendously complex tribal and ethnic nation like the United States as monolithic gang of nativists and xenophobes (the know-nothing “Anglo” hillbillies that Chicano Studies majors are so fond of caricaturing as “know-nothings”).
