Thread: Illegal Immigration is Someone Else's Fault

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More columns by Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Illegal immigration is someone else's fault

UNION-TRIBUNE
May 7, 2006

In foreign policy, you have the misguided “blame America first” crowd. And in the immigration debate, there is the equally misguided equivalent: the “blame Mexico first” crowd.

For the blame-Mexico bunch, the world is a delightfully simple place. To listen to them, we Americans were just sitting in the back yard, sipping lemonade and minding our own business, when all of a sudden we noticed that our country was being invaded by poor, uneducated Mexican immigrants.

And it's all Mexico's fault. Not the companies who hire illegal immigrants, or the politicians who take contributions from companies that hire illegal immigrants, or Americans who lost their work ethic so that companies feel they have little choice but to hire illegal immigrants.

Putting the blame there would require Americans to do something that, these days, they are loath to do: take responsibility. That's one of the great things about living in America: No matter what “it” is, it is never our fault. Why should we expect the issue of illegal immigration to be any different?

A reader invited me to join the blame game. “Shout from the hilltops about the corruption in the Mexican government,” he said. “Focus on them until they act responsibly toward their citizens.”

The argument goes like this: The United States would not be taking in so many illegal immigrants if Mexico didn't provide so few opportunities. There's truth to that statement. But there's also truth to this one: The United States would not be taking in so many illegal immigrants if employers here didn't provide so many opportunities.

One reason that blaming Mexico is so tempting is because the Mexican government is so inept. The administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox actually is an improvement over what preceded it – a string of corrupt leaders from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

But not everything changes overnight. The Mexican government still serves the interests of the few who are rich at the expense of the many who are poor. And it has cynically turned its national embarrassment – the exodus of millions of its own people – into nothing less than an economic engine.

Last year, Mexican expatriates in the United States sent home nearly $20 billion. Yet, naive Americans want to know when Mexico is going to help the United States control illegal immigration. How does never sound?

And despite the knee-jerk assumption that Mexican-Americans are ancestrally disposed to defend Mexico, the opposite is closer to the truth. Every Mexican-American knows that somewhere in his family tree there's a Mexican immigrant who was cast aside by Mother Mexico and that there's only one nation to which they owe their loyalty and gratitude for all they have accomplished – the United States.

That said, as a Mexican-American, I have little interest in defending Mexico or the Mexican government. But I also have no appetite for the cowardly way in which many Americans duck responsibility for a problem they helped create through their addiction to cheap immigrant labor – illegal labor being among the cheapest varieties.

With demonstrations in the streets, a lot of Americans are demanding to know why, if things are so bad in Mexico, these immigrants don't go home and march there to bring about change in their own country.

Simple: Because they live here now and because their fates rest in the hands of the U.S. Congress, not the Mexican Congress. If they still lived in Mexico, they could indeed take to the streets there – as some demonstrators have already done in Mexico City in advance of this year's presidential election.

Here's the really troubling part – that by avoiding responsibility for the problem, “blame-Mexico-first” Americans surrender the power to find a solution.

It's just like the politics of victimization here in the United States. When a group – any group – goes around blaming its plight on the actions of others, what the supposed victims are really saying is that they're powerless to affect change and shape their own destiny. How pathetic.

Is that really the message that America wants to broadcast to the world with regard to illegal immigration – that this is something that was done to us, and so we can't do anything about it?


Navarrette can be reached via e-mail at ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com.

Granted...some is our fault. Hopefully we will be able to remedy a huge mistake. Somebody has to be the bad cop sometimes and there's plenty of toes to be stomped on. But we can't just lay down and give up because we are partially responsible. 2 wrongs don't make a right.