AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE: IN DEMOCRACY, THE PEOPLE RULE

Appellate judges often consider, when determining if they should reexamine a case, how the situation looks, "in the best possible light" for one side or the other. In a democracy, the people are the court of ultimate appeal. Given recent upheaval, both social and legislative, we might imagine empaneling a people's tribunal to ponder the plea of Immigrants for basic rights. The defendants would be those, whether nationalism or legalism or fascism was their rallying cry, who believe that either current statutes or an even harsher approach to border control is the best policy.

Defendant's contentions, "cast in the most favorable light" to their point of view, most often will appear to a logical and progressive democrat as vile insanity. Of course, that's with a small "d," inasmuch as the big "D" Democrats are as likely to be nativist nabobs as are the politicos who follow George Bush. Viewed in any less "favorable light," a more plausible view, U.S. regulations governing the status of immigrants seem a plot against common citizens here, and common people everywhere.
So what approach to migration would best serve the interests of wage earners and small vendors and professionals and poor folks and other representatives of the great amorphous category of average folks? A grotesque incident from my own roustabout past speaks evocatively to this question. This incident will ring true because it transpires every minute in America, every second somewhere on the planet. The only rational response to this tale, and to the issue of human movement which it represents, is a policy of letting people wander where they will, so long as they obey the laws that local communities pass, pay the taxes that local communities levy, and otherwise show themsleves to be the exemplary citizens that most wanderers in fact prove themselves to be.

AN ILLUSTRATIVE ANECDOTE

Who would have thought that delivering pizzas might graphically illustrate contemporary immigration dilemmas, where dreams of human improvement crash against the jagged facts of opportunistic exploitation? Trying to make a lving as a progressive journalist and commentator has led down some bizarre pathways. The following incident occurred just over three years ago, during a period as a night driver for what I termed "the best pie in Atlanta," thereby ameliorating the sting of this stint, in which I cleared around $8.00/hour before I paid for my own gas.
I walked in four minutes late for my shift, and a surreal situation was unfolding. My compadre from Yucatan, Luis, lay on the floor like a corpse, between the prep-station and the ceaselessly churning ovens. He wasn't dead, however, because dead people don't tremble and keen with pain.
"What happened?"
"Don't ask!" Dan, who made decent money making music, but had delivered pizza so long he couldn't stop, jutted his chin toward the back, where Tommy, the owner's friend, was gesturing and shouting into the phone.
Dan and I helped Luis into the back of Dan's creaking old Nissan, much more appropriate as a pizza-vehicle than my gas-guzzling F-150, and off they flew to the emergency room. I wondered if anyone at the hospital would speak Spanish. I wondered about insurance. I pondered again whether Luis was 'legal' and how this unanticipated mayhem would affect his life.
I got most of the story from Tommy and some of the rest from the bloody mess in the kitchen. "He stupid!" Neither bluster, nor an accent thicker than Meditterranean style crust, hid his fear. He stank of it, the sweat soaking his shirt and dripping from his forehead.

"He was stupid, Jimmy; he just stupid." Tommy continued to perspire, wiping the polished stainless worktable and explaining how Luis had ground the middle finger on his right hand into raw meat and severed it from the crushed bone at the second knuckle. I found the detritus in the trash, wondering if something salvageable were there still, but it looked like tiny road kill, a snack for a hungry crow. The blood on the counter where Luis had been cleaning a dough-turning machine had looked like an industrial artist's take on Rorschach. What the design revealed to me, though, was a map of North Amerrica, from which something like a dull axe had severed Mexico and the isthmus, so that they dripped over the edge.

Tommy emigrated to the U.S. from Southern Europe forty years ago. He couldn't be referring to Luis's relocation as 'stupid.' Tommy too had taken a while getting his paperwork in order, so that couldn't be what he referred to either. And Tommy still worked relentlessly to support his own version of the American dream, as did Luis, who held two other jobs in addition to working 35 hours a week in the kitchen here. They both appeared fatigued constantly. Luis lived with nine other guys, in a two bedroom apartment, where I had dropped him off half a dozen times after we closed together. The facts of poverty, drudgery, and five-dollars-per-hour-work-wherever-he-turned, these didn't constitute 'stupidity' to Tommy. Yet a man's middle finger---supposedly the easiest part of the body to lose, however grotesque Luis's pain---now mixed with the garbage destined for the dumpster. And my supervisor had to account for this in a way that didn't make him sick to death.
I discovered later that Luis had been unable to dislodge all of the caked dough from the dough device's blades. It operated by placing knife edges in the shape of double-helixes in conjunction with each other. These shredded and kneaded the dough to the perfect pitch for pizza. When Luis indicated to Tommy, the owner's pal who ran the show most of the time, the tenacity with which the old dough clung to the cutting edges, Tommy had said in his tortured Spanish, "it gotta be clean."
So Luis turned it on and, using a long spoon, tried to work a rag in between the blades. Predictably, this jammed things up. When he attempted to push the cloth further in and dislodge the blockage, the blades caught his finger and nearly took his hand off. Dan said the screams stayed with him at night for a week.

"I told him not to be an idiot," Dan explained when he and Luis returned from the hosptial. "He just pointed to Tommy and shrugged." And, undoubtedly, my campesino friend smiled his obsequious smile that said, 'it's my job, what else can I do?'
I'd seen that smile before. He tried to smile like that, minus a finger, with nothing stronger than Tylenol for pain, when he picked up a broom to sweep that night. Only when he almost passed out did I take the broom away from him, my macho stronger than his pride this one time. So strong was his macho urge, to let him show what he could do in spite of everything, that he risked sending himself into shock.

In spite of everything standing in his way, this man and millions like him come here for a better life. The Hispanic population of Georgia has risen nearly 150% since 1990. Many other states in the rust-belt-of-Dixie duplicate such numbers. These men and women, our cousins every one, haven't the leverage to bargain for even the most basic rights. They are "illegal," as if this categorization could keep them from bleeding, keep them from hungering, keep them from wanting to live stronger and better than starving slowly South of the border. In spite of these truths, my closer cousins from Europe snarl and sneer at their plight and imagine that further brutality can evaporate the social dilemma they represent.
I didn't deliver pizzas for long after this, but I still buy them. The last time I went in to pick one up, Luis grinned at me, as he turned dough and sauce into a nascent pie, ready for the oven. He wore a sheer rubber glove on his right hand, that hung limp at the middle finger.

What a miracle of the human spirit. We stood there and beamed at each other until Mike, the owner, became decidedly uncomfortable. What I thought then is what I think now. "I want this fellow on my team. I refuse to countenance a system that makes him invalid, that diminishes his rights in relation to mine." Luis blushed a bit and turned back to the sixteen inch pan he was dressing for a "Vegetarian Special." And I retrieved my "black olives and mushrooms, to go," and left.
Who knows the perfect answer to issues of immigration? Especially when considered in combination with workers' rights, and issues of industrial safety? Nonetheless, the point is as clear as the reflection in mirror top pizza parlor work tables, that the hypocrisy and brutality of the current system of sanctions and payoffs does not serve the interests of me or my children, nor the men and women who work beside me, whose speech I still struggle to understand but who beckon to my heart for contact, for friendship, for a decent break.

A RATIONAL APPROACH VERSUS VICIOUS STUPIDITY

The arguments in favor are numerous, almost innumerable; they range from the political to the economic to the social to the moral. Three points, however, should be dispositive to people who want any chance to create a human future. The initial notion is that we cannot significantly attenuate the ebb and flow of the human tide. The next point is that an expansive acceptance of migration has to be in the best interest of regular people. The final argument is that the attempt to stop it guarantees that war will occur.

Not only is the United States a "nation of immigrants," every land on the planet consists of opportunistic interlopers: the Swedes in Lithuania; untold hordes of 'barbarians' that the wall utterly failed to keep out of China; every homo sapiens in this hemisphere, which, but for our gamboling ways would still have the puma, the jaguar, the alligator, and the grizzly bear atop the food chain; and on and on and on. Exodus is not a book in the Bible by accident. To think otherwise, whatever one's moral take on consigning fellow travelers and children of God to a lesser station than an accidental resident of an arbitrary nation, is, at the very best, in "the most favorable light," insanely idiotic.

Some erstwhile intelligent and progressive commentators debate, fretfully, whether immigrants add a few pennies or subtract a few dollars from the purses of the wage earners who, one way or another, constitute a substantial majority of our populace and the vast majority of the occupants of our fair 'Spaceship Earth.' Their workerlike ability to crunch numbers notwithstanding, they utterly miss the fundamental political economic point that, without a social equalization of the world's workers, the laboring masses of humanity will suffer an absolute, and, ultimately, an irreversible decline that can only signal catastrophe for the species. We either rise or fall together, and any policy which precludes people from traveling whither they will has to sabotage efforts at improvement everywhere. If slaves can escape, the plantation will seize to function.

Anyone not brain dead can see that war induces migration. What is not as simple to spot is that attempts to prohibit and inhibit emigres from choosing where to go has, without exception, been a precursor to all primary instances of human carnage. The aforementioned slaves, utilizing the Underground Railroad, join a coterie of Jewish refugees, Armenians in flight from butchery, Hmong peoples and Laotians impinging on the territory of Vietnam, Iranian conscripts chained together and prodded to the front at the points of bayonets, and so on and so on and so on. We can only avoid the responsibility to provide succor and welcome if we consign our children to a charnal pit of human fury that could well end our brief tenure as stewards of this earth.
That these issues are more complex than a brief, and purposely rhetorical, analysis goes without saying. But I would offer this challenge to any critics of this little missive. They should meet me in a fair forum, and we'll see who can make the stronger case. The exact particulars of a rational immigration policy may be a matter of some legitimate debate. That anything other than a generally open attitude toward human relocation is either workable or beneficial is, again in "the light most favorable" to the buffoons who advance such nonsense, utterly absurd.