The Invisible Wall

Recently Trump claimed to have begun building his big beautiful wall and even had a plaque dedicating this section to himself as the first section of his border wall.

Now, as a point of fact, this section of the wall was built in place of an older barrier that was dilapidated and in need of replacement and was ordered to be rebuilt by then President Obama, who also authorized the funds.

This is not a new wall.

This was not his victory.

Since we cannot trust what Trump says, let’s look at what he’s actually done.

Trump has taken money from the military budget, against the objections of the Pentagon, and is trying to repurpose those funds to build the border wall. My mother taught me that when you take something that doesn’t belong to you, without being asked, It’s called “stealing.” It also makes you wonder how much of the new and highly expanded military budget, money the Pentagon didn’t even ask for, might also be “taken” to build his wall in the future.  I thought the whole big idea of building the wall was that Mexico was going to pay for it. That’s where he got his big applause. Apparently, that line was just a ruse. We are going to pay for this wall, and we aren’t going to have a say about it.

I guess we’ll just send Mexico an invoice or something.

Without a doubt, the Trump administration cannot be trusted.

Trump has put up some pretty impressive invisible barriers, though, while at the same time built a big beautiful door to which he invites conflicts on the world stage, including the possibility of wars on various fronts.

He has reduced funding to the United Nations, tried to leverage our allies, you know the ones we worked with to keep fascism from taking over the free world for 70 years or so, into contributing more toward the UN based on his vast and highly unsuccessful Real Estate experience. The United Nations is what you would call an invisible barrier, stopping would-be dictators and fascists from invading and taking over other nations. Russia, obviously, isn’t a member.

Trump also withdrew the US from the Human Rights Council, an organization that America used to pride themselves as being a part of to make the world a better place to live. This actually paved the way for America to befriend dictators and despots who live outside the law.

Which brings us to the fact that Trump has insulted and infuriated our allies, while at the same time tried to build relationships with the world’s most notorious dictators.

Talk about a destabilizing influence.

Another invisible wall Trump has recently torn down is his threat to withdraw Hundreds of Millions of dollars of aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, with the expressed purpose of trying to get them to stop the asylum caravans coming to our southern border.

Trump, if there was a fire in your kitchen, would you turn up the heat to the stove? Grab a can of gasoline, perhaps?

People are fleeing these countries because of poverty and crime. Taking money away from these governments will NOT make this problem go away–it will make it WORSE!

What we should be doing is giving more money or support to these countries. If we could help train their police departments and help them reduce crime, while also increasing investment in these countries to fight poverty and promote a happy and thriving middle class, then fewer citizens of these countries will want to walk for months to get here. Let’s face it, walking for thousands of miles is not anyone’s Plan A–it’s a last-ditch effort to stay alive.

The money we send to these countries is an invisible wall, keeping other nations out of our back yard. Right now, without our support, these countries are open for business to any other country that wishes to help support them in their effort to create a better economy.

Now that this invisible wall is collapsing, we are going to have Chinese and Russian influences and whoever else wants to encroach upon our sovereignty at our southern border, and our former allies are going to watch from the sidelines because you told them our “Patriotism” was all we needed and they could just go jump off a bridge.

Nice Trump. What are you going to do for an encore, play the fiddle as our nation burns to the ground?

AS you can see, international relations, or a lack thereof, form an invisible barrier to threats from foreign nations. We had some pretty good ones, but Trump doesn’t like those. He likes the ones he can touch and put his name on. The problem is, those kinds of walls don’t work like you think they will. Just ask Rome, China, or Germany, and all the other countries that tried to build physical barriers to keep threats out. Invisible barriers work better than physical ones. They also make more friends, and that’s one thing we could sure use more of these days.

 

America: the Mother of all Glass Houses

Proving, once again, that America is the mother of all glass houses when it comes to immigration and our national identity.

Ann Coulter ignorant on immigrants

Adios-AmericaWhat Ann Coulter doesn’t understand about immigrants and immigration makes me wonder why she even bothers to talk about it at all. The fact that she can write a book and actually get it published, with all the distorted and untrue facts it contains, and then go on tour and speak publicly about this misinformation and speak about them as if they were true makes me wonder about our society. How far should we be allowed to abuse the term “freedom of speech,” and how far should we be allowed to go to defend this freedom when it contains so much that is blatantly untrue? Do we not have any responsibility to the public? Shouldn’t there at least be a warning label, “Caution, the ideas inside this book may not be anywhere close to the truth and any resemblance to real people and events may be purely coincidental.”

CNSnews.com recently wrote a piece about her book, “Adios America” and in it they stated,

“Coulter’s thesis is simple: Since Senator Teddy Kennedy, D-Mass., rammed through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America’s immigration system has transformed from a device for enriching the nation for both native-born and immigrants into a scheme for importing anti-American voters.”

One of the problems with that statement is there are 50 years of evidence to back up such a statement. All you would have to do to verify this information is add up all the years since 1965 that had Republican presidents (the party she purports to defend in all her ramblings) to see if un-American voters were messing with our government unfairly. I counted 31 years that the US had a Republican president out of those 50 years; well over half.

So the majority of presidents since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 were Republican. Does that mean she is making the statement that Republicans are “anti-American voters” or is her thesis completely and utterly flawed?

Not all of her book is based on severely inaccurate statistics. She also apparently throws in a large amount of racism, apparently to make her facts sound more accurate.

In that same CNSnews.com article was this Anne Coulter gem,

“What made America America, Coulter argues, was a particular blend of Protestant religion and European civilization that led to the rise of the greatest nation in human history. What will unmake America, she continues, is a deliberate attempt to poison that blend with a flood of immigrants with wildly different values.”

One would expect this type of statement to come from organizations like the Klu Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation. There is just no masking the point of a message like this. What she is saying is if you are not a white european protestant, your blood line will pollute the pure American gene pool and we must get rid of you. Sounds eerily similar to fascist dictators we’ve heard from before.

Coulter goes on to argue that the number of undocumented immigrants currently residing in the USA today is 30 million and not the 11 million or so that are currently thought to be here by more responsible estimates. This is so wildly exaggerated it appears that Ms Coulter has no problem with facts that are corroborated by independent studies, peer reviewed research papers, non-partisan surveys, government census data, or any other useful type of trusted information. She just chooses not to bother to use that type of content in her writing at all. Why bother with researching multiple sources of information to see if your thesis is correct when all you have to do is write down whatever you want and be done with it.

As far as what makes this country great is concerned, Ms Coulter doesn’t wish to recognize all the different religions and peoples we have imported since the 1600s that has actually made our nation great up to this point, or any other historic milestone this country has achieved in the past, for that matter. She only counts the Protestant ones from European countries. Somehow, everyone else in the history of the United States didn’t really matter, including the unfortunate black folks we thought we needed so badly we kidnapped and brought here against their will. I guess the builders of this great nation brought Africans here to keep themselves company. The white Europeans must have done all the innovating, constructing, planting, harvesting, manufacturing and conquering all by themselves.

One of my favorite Coulterisms is when she was on The View and called out for being a descendant of immigrants herself. She flatly denied she was related to people who came from another country looking for a better life. Her ancestors were SETTLERS. Somehow these were not people who came from other countries, but who just magically came here and founded this nation, making her a native American and all native Americans becoming American Indians.

How convenient for her to have skipped the whole “immigrant” word altogether. Ancestral magic sounds cool. Her ancestors didn’t have to kill or steal or lie or renege on treaties or any of that stuff that would need to be apologized for. No admission of harming others or doing wrong. No pesky restitution necessary either. Her family history has been cleansed by the immaculate inception.

I’m betting the Scientologists fear her, for they will probably soon have to give up the claim to the newest religion in this country. The Bible of Anne Coulter should be coming soon, which begs two questions to be asked:

  1. Will she photoshop a selfie for the cover and make herself look even whiter than she already is and 20 years younger?
  2. Will it be available in Spanish?

Todd Schulte on mass deportations

Unknown-1A great article on what mass deportations would do to our country by Todd Shulte, the president of FWD.US, an immigration reform advocacy group. This article goes into some good statistics and helps to visualize what Donald Trump’s immigration policy would really do to our country and the people who live in it.

It’s one thing to say something provocative and get lots of people’s attention. It’s another thing to actually do what you’re talking about, and if Trump does get elected and he actually tries to mass deport 11.5 million people, this will not be a pretty place to live.

I also suspect that foreign investment in this country would plummet. Who would want to build factories or buy companies in a country that treats foreigners with such disdain?

Zuckerberg vs Trump

UnknownDonald Trump wants to deport all undocumented immigrants in the US. He’s said it many times. That seems to be his platform. He says Mexicans love him because he employs so many.

Mark Zuckerberg employs a lot of immigrants, not necessarily Mexicans, specifically, but immigrants just the same. Mark wants to help immigrants get access to legal status so they can continue to contribute to society.

One Billionaire wants to help immigrants, the other wants to vilify them.

Mark was recently quoted in Inc magazine as saying, “[D]eporting 11.5 million people would cost U.S. taxpayers $400 to $600 billion dollars, and would take at least 20 years to complete. Even worse, this mass deportation would reduce our GDP by $1.7 trillion–over 5 percent. Many industries would be hit hard, others–like agriculture, construction and hospitality–would be devastated.”

These numbers would suggest that Donald Trump doesn’t particularly care about our economy. Either that, or he really hasn’t studied the problem at all, and like all good reality TV personalities, he’s just running  for the fame and publicity.

Mark Zuckerberg is younger, wealthier and obviously smarter. Too bad he’s not running for President.

The battle for the 14th Amendment

For as long as our constitution has been around, certain members of our community and their hired guns in Washington have tried to change our immigration laws in an effort to “keep our country white.” The 14th amendment has been under attack since it’s inception during the civil war.

This infographic helps to demonstrate the effects on such an attack.

14th Amendment2

No Illeagles

Anderson Cooper says it all in this very short video about how highly uneducated people probably shouldn’t weigh in on important topics, especially ones they can’t even spell correctly.

An American Iron Curtain

We are creating an American Iron Curtain

US Mexico border fence with barbed wire

When I was a boy growing up in the sixties and seventies, the only places we got our news was radio, TV & the newspaper. Being young, I wasn’t much on reading because I was having a difficult time learning the language. English is not the easiest language in the world to learn. Some of the rules still don’t make much sense, so, as a kid, I mainly just stuck with TV, and even then I wasn’t much interested in the news. Grown-up TV was scary.

The John F. Kennedy assassination, then the Bobby Kennedy assasination, Martin Luther King & Malcolm X murdered too, the Vietnam war, Watergate, the civil rights riots, the Black Painters.

And that was just in this country.

The news coming out of Russia was even scarier. People who disagreed with the government disappeared, the KGB was out to get everyone, The Gulag or forced labor and torture camps sounded like hell on earth,  their highly censored media, and severely restricted travel and career paths. Our freedoms were as countless as the stars at night and you could thank heaven for growing up in this wonderful country.

For a long time (all throughout the Cold War) it seemed as if our whole national identity revolved around how superior we were to the Soviet Union, the number 2 world power at the time. We compared ourselves to Russia in almost everything: who had the most gold medals in the olympics, the first man in space, the first satellite in orbit, the first man on the moon, the most nuclear weapons. . . and of course, we compared our cultures; we had freedom– they didn’t.

In America, you could go anywhere you wish, freely, and without restriction.  In the USSR,  you needed travel papers before leaving your state, or entering another. In the USSR if you were born into a farmer’s family, you would grow up to be a farmer too. In America you could grow up to be whatever you wanted to be.

In America our society thrived on diversity. We imported some of the best minds from around the globe and became a super power because of it. In the USSR their lack of diversity, and their rigid control of everything, kept growth, innovation, and prosperity to a minimum.

berlinwall

In the USSR there were very scary structures like the Berlin wall, that symbolized their leader’s fear of freedom and transparency.

This wall served two physical purposes:

  1. To keep their own people in,
  2. To keep meddling westerners and their ideas out.

The wall had social, emotional, psychological and philosophical effects on those living on both sides of the border too. Families were separated, many people were unable to return to their jobs or their homes, and the desire to leave grew more intense for those who found themselves trapped within.

In the USA we can come and go as we see fit. The world is our playground.

iron-curtain-europeIn the sixties and seventies we were told, in school and in the news, that people trying to get in or out through the Berlin wall were shot and killed by guards in towers. They had bright search lights to find people trying to get in or out in the dark of night. The images we were shown were cold and loveless and this wall, as well as all the other walls set up to segregate the west from the USSR, were given a cold and loveless name, “The Iron Curtain.” Just the sound of it coming out of the TV was enough to create nightmares in your dark and silent room at night. This was definitely something we would never do to our people.  This wall was evil, and so were the controlling ideologies behind it.

It was something that should be stopped.

Growing up in the USA may have given me a slightly biased point of view regarding much of what we were told and shown, but many of the facts were quite visible; such as the Berlin Wall itself, its guard towers, search lights, and armed guards, barbed wire, dogs, minefields. A lot of thought, time, energy and money went into the creating and maintaining of this security system.

Today I find the news equally as disturbing as when I was a child. Millions of Americans are living nightmares that we are creating for ourselves. We are building a fence between our country and Mexico for many of the same reasons the Russians did in East Germany and all along the Soviet Union’s borders with NATO countries. Today we are deploying more than just armed border agents, some dogs and a big fence. We also have ground sensors, spotlights, double walls separated by many yards of open space, barbed wire, and even drones. There is talk of sending the National Guard to the border. The techniques of the past with the weapons of today.

We are spending more per year on border security than in any other single government agency. We aim to keep people out of our more prosperous nation and protect ourselves from the percieved negative influences of Mexico and beyond.

us-iron-curtain

We, too, are dividing families and communities that once moved freely back and forth from Mexico to the US and back again. Many migrant workers who used to come north during harvest season and go back home to Mexico when the harvesting is done, are now forced to either stay here in the US for fear of not being able to return to work when the picking seasons start up again, or stay in Mexico and search for new places to live and new means of sustaining the family.

Going back to the early sixties and seventies and the Berlin wall, even with all of the money and effort and labor that went into that fortification, it was far from 100% effective. It is said there were around 2,000 people who escaped through the wall. There were always people looking for ways to get something in, or smuggle something out. It is estimated that around 200 people were killed trying to escape.

So far, aside from the anonymous postings of hateful cowards, few people have publicly said they were in favor of shooting people trying to immigrate to the United States like they did in Germany and in various other countries in the Soviet bloc. “Joe the Plumber”  is a notable exception, and some so-called Patriots on the Mexico-American border. Herman Cain spoke of electrifying the border fence, but he quickly back-pedaled when called on it.

Someone should tell Joe, Herman, and all those “Patriot” nuts at the border that the Berlin wall has come down. It was viewed as a testament to the failure of Communism as well as the relentless attraction of Democracy, a sign that all men seek freedom and self-determination as a meaningful and important part of human nature that cannot be separated from us by any man made object.

President Ronald Reagan gave a speech shortly before the wall was taken down. He criticized the wall and pushed for its destruction. In that speech was a simple philosophy behind such idea:

“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.”

6/12/87 President Ronald Reagan

That would also mean it would be analogous to say prohibiting human liberty would be anathema to world peace, too.

Are the anti-immigration reform people opposed to World Peace, because a good part of their platform doesn’t seem to support that idea very much.

The old Soviet Union is far from the only country that tried and failed to overly control it’s citizens. There are many other examples of a failed fortified stance against immigration/emigration.

Every day there are news reports of security breaches in the Israel-Gaza wall, the Egypt-Gaza wall, and once in a while someone infiltrates or escapes from North Korea.

No wall ever built has been 100% effective at keeping people in or out.

berlin-wall-soldier

The great wall of China, arguably the largest, longest living, and most expensive border security barrier ever built, failed to keep many invaders out. It is a living testament for the entire world that erecting barriers to keep people out of one area or another does not work, and it stands as proof positive that you can spend all the money you want and take centuries to build something, but you still won’t prevent the entry of people who are determined to get in. Not even the walls and moats surrounding relatively tiny pieces of real estate, such as castles and forts kept people out who were highly motivated to get in. We have tried for aeons to fence things off and keep people out or keep them in. Prisons have escapees. Alcatraz was hugely successful, having a strong current and  hundreds of yards of bay surrounding their fences and guard towers, yet a few people escaped from there too.

Even if we were to figure out how to build an Alcatraz like system all along the 2000 miles of border between the US and Mexico, and even if we had the money to build it, that is not the only access point that is vulnerable to people wanting in or out of our country. We have airports, shipping ports, thousands of miles of coastlands, as well as our border to the north with Canada, and our Hawaiian Islands as well as the thousands of Islands in and around our country. It would take generations of Americans working full-time and many trillions of tax dollars to fortify all of our access points. It would take untold billions of dollars to install security systems capable of monitoring every person’s movement, and billions to install devices on each citizen or visitor within our country to ensure they have a right to be here.

Which brings up a very important question: What would a 100% secure America look like? Prison? East Germany? The Gaza strip? Israel? Would you want your children to grow up in a place like this? Would you want to live in even a colorful, sunshiny prison? Where would we vacation, on a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by high fences with concertina wire and armed guards in towers with spotlights at night?

If the old USSR isn’t a good enough reminder for us that isolation is a nation killer, we will surely follow in their footsteps, walling off our nation and isolating ourselves from much of the outside world, stifling innovation, killing our economy and relegating us to the land “formerly known as the USA.” We will have to watch as a new super power emerges to lead us into the 21st or 22nd century.

Is this the legacy we want to leave behind?

us-medico-border-barbed-wire

Do we want to be known as the generation that lead to the end of our status as the leader of the free world?

If you would like to prevent this from happening, please enter your email address and become a part of the movement that seeks to end this un-American ideal. Join me and the thousands of other people working to ensure we leave a healthy, vibrant country to our children and grandchildren. They will thank us for it.

 

The Republicans problem is not with immigrants, it is with themselves.

The Republicans have backed themselves into a corner on, not only the immigration debate, but in the electoral process as well. Each and every day more and more young voters, latino voters, asian voters, and more, turn 18 and become eligible to vote. Will they vote Republican? What possible reason would they have to do so?

The old white Republican voter base is dying and their replacements are not even close to the numbers they are losing. Without standing behind immigration reform that backs immigrants, small business and tech-startups, they are shrinking their popularity and their numbers, and will lose any hope of retaking the White House for decades to come.

It will be a long time before America forgets the way they treated immigrants, and women, the elderly and the poor. The stigma they have brought down upon themselves will last for many years, and because of that, America will be the poorer for it.

America needs a strong Republican party. America needs good values and a balanced government. Give anyone too much power, and they will become corrupt, selfish dictators.

America can’t afford to be ruled by fascists. We need a strong Republican party, just like we need a strong Democratic party. We need a balanced government, and because of this, Republicans need to stop trying to take over our government and focus on becoming a part of this great system we have built. If they don’t, they will alienate themselves from America and become hapless, angry voyeurs, who watch the parade of history go by, without ever having a float of their own.

How sad is that?

Jon Stewart- Immigration Reform Hero: sums up our immigration problem

Jon Stewart sums up our immigration problem in seven minutes.

Perhaps this is what it takes to get people to see the truth about the Republican platform and how disingenuous it really is:

keep it short and to the point.