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Epilogue: My Prescription: Swallow Hard and Say, “¡Bienvenidos!”
- University of Arizona Press
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America must stop making the same mistakes on our southern border. Overdue is a simple and logical policy change: it is time to welcome our Mexican brothers and sisters to cross the border. De facto, national borders are archaic, centuries-old artifacts. Yet de jure, they are relevant economic, political, social, and cultural barriers to needed human integration. In an efficiently operating free-market system, the flow of capital, goods, and labor must be regulated for quality control, but otherwise unimpeded. The counterproductive rants of the paranoid nativist dinosaurs paralyzing the U.S. political agenda continue to infect American policy. Those unemployed, bitter, Biblethumping , gun-toting white guys Barack Obama (an ultimate border crosser) identified during the 2008 presidential campaign must either get over their fear and hate of the Other or get out of the path of reality . Migration fueled by economic need prevails over fear and hate. And such migration self-regulates. When the economy stumbled in late 2008, many unemployed Mexicans unable to find work in the north returned home, retracing their steps south and back across the border. It’s time to transcend national borders and breeze past them with dismissal. In the Internet-driven virtual world, where so many of us spend so much of our work and play time, we build new tribal relationships with those in our specific subcultures of interest. These tribes know no physical geography or statehood or border guards—they’re barely policed. Back in the long-ago twentieth century, most of our important relationships were face-to-face. We enjoyed three-martini lunches and sometimes got soused instead of a signed contract. We met for conferences , not conference calls. We went out on dates instead of trying cybersex. Virtual versus physical: one’s not necessarily better than the other under all circumstances. They are different experiences with different goals and results. Just as the borders in the Internet world are easy Epilogue My Prescription: Swallow Hard and Say, “¡Bienvenidos!” Epilogue 199 to cross, so should be the lines that separate us as nations, especially the line separating the United States and Mexico. The beauty of the borderlands is that the distant has come home, the Other has become us. Calexico is the Lower East Side is the Silicon Valley (Bangalore by the Bay) is Miami (with its Little Havana more Havana than Habana). Twenty-first-century nomads, making use of the Internet and the jet, accelerate the Mixmaster of the proverbial melting pot, creating the world’s Calexicos. If AIDS can spread from one flight attendant (if it really did) to the rest of the world, if the crack epidemic can grow out of the demand for cocaine from Wall Street bonus–fat thrill seekers, so do our American culture and value system make a viral spread worldwide. But it is a two-way street. Patrick J. Buchanan, the perennial pundit, conservative Republican presidential candidate, and Nixon speechwriter, told me that he believes “the America we grew up in until 1965 was a nation with an ethnocultural core. Ours was Western European and Christian. That did not mean everyone in the country was a Christian nor everyone in the country could trace his ancestors to Europe or the West. But that was basically the core of the country, and it’s one of the things that really held us together. Now I see the masses of immigration coming from the third world—and huge numbers illegally—as presenting a tremendously more difficult problem of assimilation.” Assimilation to what? What are Mr. Buchanan and his followers so afraid of? That our values will be diluted or, worse, overwhelmed and ruined? What is it exactly about those pre–civil rights and pre–voting rights days of the early 1960s that they lament losing? Our America only grows stronger with exposure to the Other: their ideas, their labor, their entrepreneurial talents (and of course their cuisine!). Our America belongs to the world, and the world is welcome to it. ¡Bienvenidos! Our inclusive and egalitarian American values make us strong. Our legal system protects us; that’s all the assimilation we need demand from immigrants: that they obey the laws of our land. What about the worries of the Buchanans of the world that the values of the Others negatively infect us? First of all, it’s a little late in the game, Brother Buchanan. Walk into your favorite Walmart and read the label. This is an old story: too much of the...