Mentholyptus
01-04-2006, 01:47
There seems to be a great deal of talk about illegal immigration in the US (and especially my home state of Arizona). Some of it is reasonable discussion, some of it is angry shouting, and uncomfortable amount of it is racist or xenophobic paranoid gibbering. A lot of pundits (cough cough Lou Dobbs) have been blowing a lot of hot air about the issue, mostly on the enforcement-only "deport all them Mexi-cans" side of things. It recently came to my attention that Dobbs is making a special broadcast about immigration from Mexico. This seemed to me at first a good idea: he'll see what conditions there are really like, give himself and his viewers a fresh perspective on people's motivations for illegally crossing the border.
Then, I discovered he was actually broadcasting from Cancun. Cancun is, for those uninformed, a city in Mexico with an economy supported primarily by rich Americans on vacation. It is to the rest of the nation what that one hotel in Dubai is to the rest of the middle east. So doing a story on illegal immigration there (very far from the whole problem) is a bit like doing a story on LA gang violence from beachfront property in Orange County.
Anyways, I think it'd be a good idea for all the talking-heads and politicians (and crazy vigilante border patrollers) to spend a week or two in the parts of Mexico the immigrants are really fleeing from: stuff like the slummy parts of Oaxaca, or Juarez, or Nogales...poorer communities where it's extremely difficult to even subsist, let alone succeed. Any thoughts on such a program?
The idea has been kinda lingering in my mind a while, and I just like the idea of talking to some of these people after they see grinding poverty and the desperate people leaving Mexico firsthand.
Then, I discovered he was actually broadcasting from Cancun. Cancun is, for those uninformed, a city in Mexico with an economy supported primarily by rich Americans on vacation. It is to the rest of the nation what that one hotel in Dubai is to the rest of the middle east. So doing a story on illegal immigration there (very far from the whole problem) is a bit like doing a story on LA gang violence from beachfront property in Orange County.
Anyways, I think it'd be a good idea for all the talking-heads and politicians (and crazy vigilante border patrollers) to spend a week or two in the parts of Mexico the immigrants are really fleeing from: stuff like the slummy parts of Oaxaca, or Juarez, or Nogales...poorer communities where it's extremely difficult to even subsist, let alone succeed. Any thoughts on such a program?
The idea has been kinda lingering in my mind a while, and I just like the idea of talking to some of these people after they see grinding poverty and the desperate people leaving Mexico firsthand.