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Illegal Mexican Scapegoats

Branding illegal Mexicans criminals simply because they lack the proper documentation, casting them wholesale in same category as rapists, murders and thieves, is scapegoat xenophobia. The reason they come into this country illegally is that they are too poor to come up with the cash to pay off the corrupt bureaucrats in Mexico who grant the legal documents. Passing a law requiring them to go back home and “get in line” at the Mexican emigration office is therefore tantamount to permanent banishment, a law they cannot possibly abide by willingly. True, some illegals turn out to be, or are driven to become. petty criminals, but not in greater proportion than among the native population, Filthy rich drug lords, on the other hand, can buy all the documents they need, come and go across the border as they please in private jets, and conduct their dirty business from executive suites in five-star Las Vegas hotels. They and their well-funded, well-lawyered henchmen, many of them American citizens, are the ones wreaking havoc in our Western states. Challenging them, however, them can have dangerous consequences. The unemployed and financially hurt by the real estate bubble in that part of the country need a convenient scapegoat for their ills, and illegal aliens, like all poor and defenseless folks throughout history, make the best scapegoats.

Consider, further, that if all illegal immigrants are to be regarded as criminals , then, by that broad definition, nearly everybody in this country—-people who drive 10 miles an hour over the speed limit, make illegal u-turns late at night when the cops aren't watching, hedge a bit on their income taxes, smoke Cuban cigars (Rush Limbaugh and Arnold Schwarzsenegger, among others) would also have to classed criminals. And how about our national heroes, icons like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and, for that matter, all of our Founding Fathers? Didn't they break the law? Didn’t King George decree they be hanged as common criminals?

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