MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL! Mr. OBAMA DON’T BUILD THIS WALL!
Reading William Finnegan’s Letter from Mexico one wonders why more of them, more Mexicans don’t come here, illegally if necessary. We should be surprised that so few citizens of this failed, or nearly failed land (not yet a nation) do remain at home, do not try to cross our border.
If you’re not convinced read what Mr. Finnegan writes in the New Yorker of May 31:
“…the dismembered body of a young man was left in the middle of the main intersection. It was an instance of what people call corpse messaging. Usually it involves a mutilated body and a handwritten sign. “Talked too much.” “You get what you deserve.” The corpse’s message—terror—was clear enough and everybody knew who left it: La Familia Michoacana, a crime syndicate whose depredations pervade the life of the region….
“Although large-scale trafficking had been around for decades, the violence associated with the drug trade had begun to spiral out of control. More than twenty-three thousand people have died since President Calderón’s declaration [in 12/09 of a war against the drug traffickers]. La Inseguridad, as Mexicans call it, has become engulfing, with drugs sliding far down the list of public concerns, below kidnapping, extortion, torture, unemployment, and simple fear of leaving the house.”
We ought to forget about trying to stop them from coming here. Their wanting to leave is a sign of their mental health. And why would we want to stop them? They are right to want to come here at any cost.
And they come here to work. We should rather turn our efforts to making sure that what’s here for them makes their coming here worth it to them, and to us.
It’s really unimportant how they come here (just as it always was in the history of this American nation), legally or illegally. It’s what they do when they do come, it’s what they’re able to do when they do come, it’s their coming here and being able to work and make a life for themselves and their families.
What’s important today, no less than in the past, is our making sure that the American dream is still alive for them. This is what has been all but forgotten in the mean and childish debate that we’re having, actually mostly not having over immigration.
And this non-debate is analogous to the just as irrelevant, non-debate over the continued failure of our public schools to substantially educate, help, and propel forward into positions of strength and leadership the majority of the children who attend these schools.
And just as it’s only important what the immigrants do when they get here, so it’s only important what the students do in school. As things are too many of them are doing little or nothing while the educators do little or nothing but talk, talking incessantly about standards and choice and teacher preparation, indulging themselves in one toothless reform initiative after the other.
The educators ought to be talking about the kids, and how to motivate them. Here the immigrants are at a great advantage, being for the most part motivated when they arrive. Not true of too many of the kids who attend our public schools.
Furthermore, it’s probably true that the percentages of immigrants, even illegal immigrants from Mexico, who succeed here are higher than the percentages of impoverished and disadvantaged children who succeed in the classroom and school.
Again, we seem to have forgotten what’s important. That the immigrants who come here want to work, and we should help them to do so, and that the kids in our innercity schools by and large don’t want to be there, or at least don’t know why they’re there, and we ought to be most of all in the business of motivating them.
The irony is that in regard to the motivated immigrants to our shores, we would throw them out, and/or put a wall between them and us.
And in regard to the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of unmotivated kids we would hold onto them no matter what they do, or rather don’t do, keep them there in school while almost never making them fully realize that they, no less than the immigrants to our shores, have to work and earn a place for themselves.
