Posse Comitatus and Migrants

Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the self-appointed national immigration czar, largely because Congress is unwilling and unable to fashion a humane immigration policy. One could say that it was up to people like Sheriff Arpaio to fill the vacuum. Unfortunately, he is the wrong person! Finally, the U.S. Justice Dept. is considering a civil rights probe of Mr. Arpaio's official conduct, especially as it affects undocumented Mexican nationals crossing the Arizona portion of the Mexican-U.S. boarder.

Any discussion on U.S. immigration policy must include its impact upon the category of people it intends to oversee and whether they are afforded fairness and respect. The United States has a sorry history of racial exclusion, what has often constituted "cruel and unusual treatment" of people seeking entry. By the way, I have never met an "illegal" human being! The same is true for "alien". Labels such as "immigrant" and "immigration", have become tainted. I prefer to use "migrant" and "migration" in hopes of establishing a neutral framework for discussion.

Humans have populated the planet through migration. It comes with being bipedal. Around the world today, millions are migrants of one form or another. And all the legal prohibitions and walls can not discourage them. Walls as border demarcations, in fact all walls, reveals man's inability to coexist with other human beings. And walls always fail. Consider the Great Wall of China; the Mongols simply skirted it. The Maginot Line of W.W.II was a colossal construction and a complete absurdity ; German troops went around it on their way to Paris. The Berlin Wall was ineffective. The Israeli Wall in the Palestinian West Bank will destroy any possibility for peaceful coexistence. It symbolizes the brutality of Israeli occupation and its crimes against humanity. The Bantus tan boundaries in South Africa failed. The Mexico-U.S. wall belies the founding principles of the American state; and it too will fail in eliminating or reducing migration. Even "electronic walls" and the Internet volunteer posse comitatus, the couch-potato vigilantes, can not prevent or even slow down migration. One would have hoped that U.S. administrations, with their Ivy League educated elites, would have learned from history.

The nemesis of migration is the concept of nation states framed by arbitrary and irrational boundaries. The Mexican-U.S. boarder is one of the World's most problematic barriers, although there are many more.

What is now western continental United States was largely, formerly the possession of Mexico. Mexico had won independence from Spain in 1821 in a revolutionary war. Texas broke off from Mexico in 1836, and became the "Lone Star Republic". The expansionist president James Polk played a major roll in acquiring Mexican territory. U.S. troops marched on Mexico City. Many in Congress wanted to incorporate all of Mexico, but settled on half and paid Mexico $15 million, for reasons, most likely, to deflect international criticism.

Racism raised its head and provided a means whereby Mexicans could be treated as subhumans. Howard Zinn in A Peoples History of the United StatesA(1980), quotes an influential Unitarian minister in the Transcendental era, Theodore Parker, "a wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, and character". He believed that the Mexicans must give way as the indigenous U.S. population had!

History has come full circle in regards to employment opportunities for Mexican migrants,a kind of Reparations, and a repossession of territory of sorts, a Reconquista!

The United States has systematically destroyed the Mexican economy and its politics. The Partio Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) could not have dominated Mexican politics for most of the twentieth century without American oversight and direct interventions of one sort or another. As a rhetorical question to support these allegations-- to which country did former Mexican president Salazar flee to avoid prosecution after the PRI lost power?

Heavily subsidized U.S. corn flooded the Mexican market which drove peasant corn farmers off the land because they could not compete with the artificially cheap U.S. corn. They became migrants! They and many others look to the United States in hopes of bettering economic futures.

The demand for young, strong, entrepreneurial undocumented "essential" workers lures migrants to the U.S. workforce. For reasons of insufficient numbers of U.S.-born workers and their unwillingness to engage in various occupations, Mexicans play a vital roll in the American economy. It could be argued that the so-called immigration problem is largely a "blowback" consequence of Manifest Destiny and itS applications.

Some facts and considerations:
1) About eleven million undocumented Mexican hold out in the States. California has the highest percentage, with Texas and Florida following.
2) Overall, many undocumented residents are not Mexican, but visa overstays from various countries.
3) Undocumented Mexican nationals do not cost more in government services than they contribute to the economy. They contribute significant monies to Social Security without the likelihood of ever drawing benefits.
4) Major causes of the immigration dilemma are impracticable quota and labor certification requirements. And these matters are probably rooted in predispositions toward a particular group.

Enter Sheriff Arpaio, with his tablets of commandments. He does not need a mountain upon which to pronounce his divine mandate. Mass media and neon signs will suffice. What is important about Arpaio is that he is the best case for open borders, or, at a minimum, humane immigration reform.

Joe Arpaio (b 1932)became Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff in 1992, and has easily won reelections. He has enlarged the posse comitatus both in scoop and numbers. His is an all volunteer posse which performs many tasks that deputized officers do and much they have never done. His modus operandi could qualify as theatrical and ideological. He publishes mugshots of booked inmates; he signs autographs; he believes in harsh punishment of inmates; he feeds them "surplus", outdated food; he provides only two meals a day; he has reduced the per-unit meal cost from 90-cents to 30; He has banned coffee, salt and pepper and all weightlifting equipment. Since 2005, he has mandatory, two-week English classes for non-English-speaking inmates; the in-house radio station plays opera, classical music and Frank Sinatra. More egregiously, soon after assuming office, Arpaio reinstituted chain gangs and expanded the practice to include women and children. To prevent the stealing of white jail underware, he fashioned pink underwear for inmates. Subsequently, the garments were matched with pink handcuffs.

Perhaps his most infamous innovation was the establishment of a "Tent City" jail. Supposedly, it came into being because of an overcrowded county jail. But, in reality, Arpaio does not believe overcrowding inmates in any way violates their human rights. Tents are cheap to install and maintain. With desert all around, his tent cities are forever expandable. For his encampment, he constructed a neon sign that reads, "vacancy". The sight experiences summer temperatures above 110F. Sheriff Arpaio has his own TV show, "Smile! You're Under Arrest!" There is more--the deaths of inmates, the continuing and increasing litigation, charges of racial profiling and, interestingly, Arpaio, because of his concentration on hunting down undocumented Mexicans, has a mammoth back file of unresolved non-immigration criminal cases.

To further highlight the border crisis, consider the appointment of Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security. ("homeland security"was a slogan in Nazi Germany, by the way.)She was former Arizona governor and state attorney general. Like, Apraio, she is of Italian heritage. She appears to have condoned some of Arpaio's anti-immigration conduct while she was governor; but, has distanced herself from him since national media and Washington has focused attention on the Sheriff.

Why would President Obama, an advocate of change, appoint someone from Arizona, with its deplorable record on immigration, to head an agency that oversees such issues? I would prefer Gore Vidal to head the agency. As a compromise, I could go with Chalmers Johnson.

My solution to the manufactured, self-inflicted Mexican-U.S. border crisis is to simply eliminate the boundary as a means of excluding people and adopt an Open Border policy!

My outraged conservative friends(former now!)upon hearing of this suggestion, claim that the U.S. would be flooded with Mexican nationals(they use other labels). I reply that with the U.S. economic depression at hand, many undocumented migrants are considering repatriation. Even before the economic collapse, Mexican migration had leveled off, became static.

As I write, President Obama is considering deploying National Guard troops along the border in response to an escalating Mexican drug war. The Pentagon is ready to "help" Mexico with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance along the border! How the militarization will impact migrant border crossings is unpredictable; but, surely it could increase suffering and death.

One thing is known: it's time for Arpaio and his posse comitatus to ride off into the Arizona sunset.