As the Zone’s token Hispanic, and in response to the developing crisis in immigration, I suppose it is incumbent on me to publish a white paper on exactly where I stand on immigration and border issues. Both I and my parents were born in the US, but my family emigrated from Cuba to the US in the early 20th century, for purely economic reasons. I and my family have benefited greatly from US immigration policy–or the lack of one.

My grandparents came here looking for work, although under very different circumstances than are now the case. My grandfathers were skilled workers in a Cuban industry, cigar manufacturing, and they came here because their bosses sought a more business-friendly environment in the USA (unlike Cuba, there were few industrial unions in the US, and none in Florida). In those days, there was no INS either. You just hopped on a boat and there was a job waiting for you when you got to Florida. Nobody cared, Americans didn’t have the specialized skills of that industry, the skilled workforce was already in Cuba, and desperate for work. My maternal grandfather didn’t become a US citizen until the 1930s. None of my other grandparents ever did. They all either died or returned to Cuba after the cigar industry was automated.

In my own generation, there was also a fresh influx of Cuban immigrants, although this time they were political refugees, escaping the Castro dictatorship. The US encouraged the influx by relaxing immigration restrictions and subsidizing the exiles with special programs and outright cash payments. America was embarrassing Castro by offering a better alternative to his people,and we got the cream of Cuban society, the middle and upper classes, the educated, and the professionals. I’ve always found it ironic how Anglos are always complaining about Hispanics and their crime, poverty, birthrate, welfare and general racial inferiority and cultural backwardness. But with the Cubans, who have displaced many whites in business, management, and the professions, the whine is always about how “these PEEPLE are taking over.” You can’t win, no matter what you do. I guess that’s why they call us “the Jews of the Caribbean”.

Fidel had a safety valve that kept the pressure of a counter-revolutionary movement down to a minimum. The potential troublemakers got a chance to leave. Eleven members of my household came to the US because of the Cold War. It was Castro’s loss, and America got its money’s worth.

There is another dynamic at work here that is rarely mentioned. After WWII, people all over Europe and the US, the “developed world”, stopped having children. Birth control technologies and social pressures cut back on family sizes, as well as the post-war affluence. People wanted to enjoy the new prosperity, and government welfare programs and the safety net, as well as improved public health, made it less important to have a big family to serve as a safety cushion for your old age. The situation in Europe was even more extreme, as Europeans emigrated to the US. All over Europe, and to a lesser extent in the US, the population started aging, as life expectancy lengthened and birth rates plummeted. As the working population shrank in proportion to the aged, there weren’t enough working young people to pay for the new welfare programs, and there was an upward pressure on salaries as employers competed for labor. We certainly can’t have that, can we?

In Europe, especially, this was countered by an encouragement to immigration. The Germans started bringing in Turks, the English opened their doors to the huddled masses in the Commonwealth, their former colonies. France brought in Algerians, the Dutch, Indonesians. Even Japan started importing Koreans to work in their new industries. In America, agricultural Negro workers from the South flooded into the cities, particularly in the Rustbelt, looking for factory jobs, and Mexicans crossed the border into the Southwest for agricultural work.

The Southwest was historically Mexican territory anyway, many of the Hispanic residents had been there since long before the great North American annexations and land grabs following the Texas and Mexican Wars and California Gold Rush, and that border had always been porous anyway, as the Apache, Pancho Villa and the Romneys can testify. The Southwest was Indian for millennia, Mexican for centuries, the gringos were just a recent historical hiccup; a reality that seems to be dawning on them right now.

In short, the Cubans and Mexicans have little in common culturally, having separated from their Iberian motherland over 400 years ago. Little holds them together ethnically but increasingly divergent dialects
of Castilian Spanish. In the case of Central America, many of their immigrants don’t even speak Spanish at all; they are the true natives of this continent.

So who “belongs” in the Southwest today? Well, unfairly or not, its whoever is in charge now, and that is the United States of America. No American alive today stole the land from the Mexicans, and no Mexican today had his land stolen by the gringos. Fairly or not, some territorial issues are settled by conquest, whether it be at Wounded Knee, or Palestine.

My personal opinion as to what the US is entitled, morally, to do to defend its borders is pretty conventional. We get to decide who comes in, and who gets to stay, and for how long, a right pretty much claimed by every single country in the world. It is morally unacceptable for racial or cultural considerations to determine immigation policy, as it did in America during my grandfather’s day. (He got into Florida easily because his talents were needed, but US immigration was already discriminating racially through quotas at Ellis Island in the New York and Angel Island in San Francisco.

In my opinion, America has the right to limit immigration by language and by education, and to be selective depending on its labor needs. And it has every right to do so by legislative fiat. I couldn’t get a summer job in Mexico because of their labor laws, I don’t see why we can’t return the favor. I don’t feel guilty about using the term “illegal alien”, because that is exactly what they are. And I too, am very suspicious of “amnesty”. If nothing else, it is unfair to foreigners who came here and applied legally and played by the rules to get their citizenship.

I also recognize that to a very great extent, much of this debate is political. Democrat/Liberal motives in regard to immigration are often cynically guided by electoral expediency. They want the Hispanic vote and as long as they can point out Republican/Conservative bigotry and nativism it works in their favor at the polls.

But Conservative/Republican partisans should also realize that their exploitation of “illegals” as a source of cheap and docile labor, and their use of the border as a whip to threaten their workforce is an obscenity, not only to the Hispanics they are condemning to wage slavery, but to the American citizens who find their opportunities to earn a living severely degraded as a result.