A hot, dry desert. A tense, contentious border. Angry youths throw rocks at government security forces. Shots are fired. A 14-year-old boy lies dead.
Sound like one of those all too familiar skirmishes along the Israeli-Gaza border? Not quite…
A U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed a 14-year-old Mexican boy near the Juarez-El Paso border during a rock-throwing incident Monday night, authorities said.
[…] The FBI, which is investigating the incident, said two Border Patrol agents had detained two people suspected of illegally crossing the border. The agents had the suspects on the ground and ordered other suspected illegal immigrants to stop. According to the statement, the group surrounded the agents and began to pelt them with stones.
One agent, who was not identified, fired his handgun, killing the victim, who was identified as Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca.
It was not immediately known if the boy was among the rock throwers.
Such confrontations are almost inevitable along a militarized border, as is the profound grief and resentment this sort of tragedy generates. Thus all the arguments for and against aside, the American public must understand that if immigration reform relies too heavily upon a border fence backed by force of arms, then we should be prepared for the escalating violent backlash such a policy will almost surely create.
To our north, the United States proudly shares the world’s longest undefended border, and one would hope that this example would also guide our aspirations to the south. But to achieve this goal our nation must rethink the entire immigration issue, focusing less on interdiction and more on the relentless economic imbalances that continue to draw undocumented immigrants across an ever more hostile border: the lack of opportunity at home and the demand for low-wage, low-skilled workers here in the U.S.
Labor is mobile; the jobs that many undocumented workers fill in agriculture, construction and the service sector are not. In this sense, the mass migration we’re witnessing represents classical capitalist economic theory at work… a theory that in its purest ideological form not only suggests that we should not attempt to staunch the flow of labor capital, but that we ultimately cannot.
At least, not without the Gazafication of the U.S.-Mexican border.
Of course it would be a mistake to overstate the parallels with the exponentially more tragic conflict unfolding daily between Israelis and Palestinians. Even behind an American-built fence, Juárez is no Gaza, and the drug cartels wreaking cross border violence are no Hamas.
But it would be a mistake to ignore the parallels as well, especially when our nation is making the moral decision to send our uniformed men and women to a border where they will inevitably be put in the position of shooting unarmed children.
“To our north, the United States proudly shares the world’s longest undefended border”
Teabaggers ignore guarding the northern border at their peril. When our dastardly evil commie-fascist plan for domination unfolds and the rust belt is speaking French and the NHL is in Seattle, they’ll realize the error of their ways.
When Dick’s starts putting gravy on the fries, you’ll know the end is near.
Gotta watch out for those frostbacks sneaking in over the border, bringing their “humour” and “music” to attack our culture from the inside.
Like headless said, Acorn has achieved its mission and 11,000,000 illegals have been registered to vote. The illegal brown horde will be headed to the polls this November. Now here comes the Canadian horde too! Ha, take that, you teabaggers! Eh?
When single-payer heath care sneaks across the northern border those teabaggers are gonna fucking shit!
The right wingers go on and on and on about brown skinned people “breaking the law” by coming here illegally to work shit jobs for shit pay.
However those who hire them are breaking the law too are they not? See Weissbach..
Tell you what – put them in the same detention pens with the brown skinned people they hire to line their pockets. They get to wave good bye to their hires as they’re deported and then when they forfeit their cheap labor profits plus a hefty added fine to think twice about their future behavior – they get to go home!
Oh and add their faces to a “wall of shame”. That ought to teach those “law breakers”!
Agreed with the post. Unfortunately, the folks who are pushing for this stance against Mexico (in many cases with threats of violence against US public officials from both parties who call for immigration reform) would seem to be all too happy to start a war with Mexico.
horsesass should buy blackwater and get into a border battle with the minutemen.
By and large it is not illegal immigration that is a big problem. On the whole that is an economic plus, and hurts few to no Americans.
The problem is criminals who are immigrating. The administration is actually doing a fair job against criminal immigrants, but the further measures being advocated don’t seem to really address this problem.
For more on how much of a problem border state immigrant crime really is, see this video that arrived on Eschaton today, by Sam Seder.
Shame on our Democrat President.
re 2:
That sounds a little pornographic. How do you know it’s not done secretly as we speak??
10 T
And shame on anyone who wants to further militarize our borders.
re 10: You are more of a partisan hack, while most of the comments in the threads are more analytical in nature.
You are more of a cheerleader than a member of a team.
@9..”By and large it is not illegal immigration that is a big problem. On the whole that is an economic plus, and hurts few to no Americans.”
Thats about the most clueless post I have seen on this site for a while(YLB garbage excluded).
When was the last time you saw a residential framing or roofing crew that spoke english?
Your post is spoken just like someone who sits in a cube all day doing mindless technical writing.
dipshit.
Who gave them a job?
“Even behind an American-built fence, Juárez is no Gaza, and the drug cartels wreaking cross border violence are no Hamas.”
Commonalities include beheadings, civilian murders, drugging and terrorizing women and children, indiscriminate use of RPGs and medium-heavy weapons.
Other than that- nothing in common, whatsoever.
14. Uh oh, Chongo!
A bit less clueless than, say, someone who dreams up an anecdote and tries to use their little fiction to prove a statistical point.
In the real world, “there is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have caused any significant damage to the wages of American workers.” Hey, check the graph.
Says the dipshit.
Who the hell would believe anyting printed in the New York Times? It’s leftist fishwrap.
Yeah, in fact I bet Eduardo Porter is Jayson Blair’s pen name.
18. Sheepdip
The NY TImes article cites six economists from three prestigious universities and one prestigious think tank.
On the other hand, there’s what you have to offer.
Dipsheep.
Let’s just say it: Mexico is a failed state. The government has lost control, if it ever had any in the last say, thirty years – makes you miss the PRI, doesn’t it? The military is on the take, the cops are on the take, and the civilian populace is in the middle. The inevitable conclusion is either a rock-hard domestic military dictatorship for about ten to twenty years to clean it up, or an American-led invasion and occupation under the auspices of the OAS that probably won’t.
Daddy,
Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure. Choose to have the wool pulled over your eyes all you want. I wouldn’t waste my time reading anything printed in that liberal buttwipe. So there! : D
The more we attempt to make our southern border resemble the Berlin Wall, the more likely it is that the Border Patrol officers will find themselves motivated to behave like Vopos.
@23 Then that the fuck are you doing here?
@21 There’s certainly a “failed state”…but before long it might be an open question as to which side of the border it’s located on.
@14 And…uh, what do you do?
If you’re so concerned about people who might be undocumented “furriners” working on construction sites, go ask the BIAW about it.
@15
how is that relevant to the point in question?
answer: its not.
@21: Exactly right.
I’d add as an exclamation point that 40% of Mexico’s federal budget comes from the sale of oil and gas. Output is crashing.
A major test of our humanity is coming. And I don’t have a warm feeling.
As to some of the other “They’re stealing our jobs!” whining…I’ll start taking that seriously when I can turn on Real Housewives of Orange County and see Vicki Gunvalson cleaning her own toilets.
Is Mexico becoming America’s Gaza? Hmm, we got credible teabagging wingnuts telling us that we’ve got ourselves a “radical Islamic Mexican Catholic movement” fucking with us down there, so there must be something to this Gaza thing after all.
Link to Crooks & Liars.
@15: Zzzzzzzzt! YLB FTW!
Illegal immigration is almost solely due to demand.
No demand, no illegals.
No racism or unconstitutional papers please laws needed!
Fuck those radical Islamic Mexican Catholics. I say we nuke the bitches before they get the bomb.
@30: We should make an example of her then. Put her in jail. Make her a poster child.
No excuse, she can afford to pay a real wage to a citizen or a legal immigrant.
@30: And BTW, do you actually watch that shit?
lock down the damn border and keep the bastards out. if it takes razor wire and mines, then so be it.
on top of that, harsh and long term jail time for anyone who hires them.
problem solved.
“But to achieve this goal our nation must rethink the entire immigration issue, focusing less on interdiction and more on the relentless economic imbalances that continue to draw undocumented immigrants across an ever more hostile border: the lack of opportunity at home and the demand for low-wage, low-skilled workers here in the U.S.”
This is the salient bit of this post. But the devil is in the details. The Mexican government is autonomous, in case you’ve forgotten. We can’t control their policies. We can influence them, to some degree, but that’s about it.
We can, and should, enforce immigration laws on the employer. But if we do prepare for an immediate jump in the cost of everything from that deck you were planning to add to the strawberries in the market.
We can, and should, enforce immigration laws on the immigrant themselves. I know of no nation in the world that allows unfettered immigration. Why should we suffer the chaos and economic dislocation of doing so?
Until the Mexican government becomes a functional legislating agent we must and should ‘militarize’ our border. Reality sucks, sometimes. But ignoring it for ideological convictions never works.
@21
Yep! And we tend to like it that way as it gives us cheap oil, cheap produce, cheap meth pot and cocaine, and friendly short brown people to cook our food, clean our houses and mow our lawns.
@36
Boots on the border and big fines for people that employ illegals will do the trick. We already know this. Both parties will stall and stall and will eventually do this. Bush sent some guard troops to the border and now Obama is following suit. It’s not a hard problem to solve, if you want too.
@35 Not very often…but it ain’t as perverted as nearly everything on Fox.
@37 You make some good points. There’s an uuuugly implication in all this that the standard of living many of us enjoy is depended on a new “slave” class: illegal workers brought in to do the shittiest and most undesirable jobs for illegally low wages, prevented by fear of being rounded up and sent back home or jailed if they make so much as a peep about getting the shaft. Like the blacks who once were actual property, and their offspring who until only a few years ago were kept in near-slavery via the KKK and Jim Crow, these folks are of course reviled by those who benefit the most from their toil. Not necessarily racism per se…go read The Grapes Of Wrath or talk with someone descended from the “Okies” who went to California after the Dust Bowl wiped them out…or white Appalachian sharecroppers. Any way you slice it, there’s a nasty, self-justifying human tendency to revile those upon whose misery one’s own good fortune may depend.
@31
Those folks don’t leave a lot of room for liberation theology friendly atheists who happen to be American citizen. Those fuckers probably wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me.
Love the radical Islamic Mexican Catholic movement crazy.
I think it’s important to note that video footage has surfaced that contradicts the officer’s account in the shooting: http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/.....tml?hpt=T2
But hey, if that doesn’t work, label the 14-year-old a “human smuggler” to justify shooting him.
At 41
I had a cup of coffee at a cafe the other day. 4 recently unemployed carpenters were at an adjoining table. During their conversation (sorry, should have said, my name is ——, and I am an eavesdropper on public conversations) one said that this was okay, he’d catch up on his fishing until unemployment ran out.
Contrast this with the 10 to 30 probably illegal immigrants at any Home Depot on any day.
Americans won’t do these ‘shitty’ jobs.
Is it slave labor when the person does the job cheerfully and with full consent?
Apparently many of you are not familiar with what is going on with our northern neighbors. Michael wrote: Yep! And we tend to like it that way as it gives us cheap oil, cheap produce, cheap meth pot and cocaine, and friendly short brown people to cook our food, clean our houses and mow our lawns.
Well we can substitute “friendly Eastern European white people” into that phrase and all else is true (okay yes, substitute minerals for produce too). The numbers are staggering.
@39
I agree.
“To our north, the United States proudly shares the world’s longest undefended border”
Why do we even need to defend it? After all, America is the homicide capital of the world. Why the fuck would anyone want to flee to our country, which is full of guns and Republicans? I mean, what’s the fucking attraction? I don’t get it. To me, guns and Republicans aren’t attractive at all.
My friend, Mr. Rabbit spewed:
They buy our shit, including vast swaths of shoreline on Hood Canal to build another golf resort with several hundred homes near Brinnon; or mine gold in the Okanagan for basically nothing in return to the US — just to cite some local examples.
We’re a bargain. And we’re basically defenseless with our “anything goes” property laws and foreign ownership. You’d know this better than me, being an attorney.
@45
A lot of the small-arms that the US ships all over the planet are made in eastern europe and Turkey.
Simple solution. Legalize all criminalized drugs.
Criminalize all approved drugs.
Legalized drugs kill between 300 thousand and 2 million people a year.
OD on heroin that causes death less than a thousand a year, mainly from too pure or too stepped on.
$30 to $50 billion pissed away on a “drug eradication” program.
That would be one hell of a better spend on finding “approved” drugs that kill over and over and over.
Plus, americans can produce any “illegal” drugs in a year and the money stays in America.
Fools.
BTW for everyone who thinks increased militarization of the US/Mexico border will stop illegal immigration, you do realize a majority of those who aren’t currently in the country legally entered on a valid visa?
The only way to stop illegal immigration 100% is to not let anyone set foot on US soil who isn’t a citizen or resident alien. We’d also have to inspect every cubic inch of every single aircraft, ship, or vehicle entering the country.
There’s probably another solution, and it may well be where we’re headed. Aside from a little muttering above about a few Canadians buying some real estate and running a mine or two (but It’s OK to have international energy companies fucking up the Gulf of Mexico, eh?) we don’t see teeming hordes fleeing Canada seeking a better life here in the US. This is probably because the Canadians think they’re getting a better deal in Canada than whey would down here.
So….just screw up things here in the US to the point where it sucks being here, or at least sucks worse than living in Mexico. Then, not only will you see the illegals hustle back across the border, but probably quite a few “brown” Americans will be taking advantage of their family ties south of the border as well.
@51
Yep!
And now that their visas aren’t valid we need to make sure that they can not be employed. Or that they get their status updated so that they can be employed. Beyond that I really don’t care what they do. I’m not part of the round them up and ship them out crowd. There’s no shortage of countries that follow this example. For me this isn’t so much about “stopping illegal immigration.”
Mexico is a failed state. Yes, Americas penchant for propping up banana republic despots, empire, drugs, guns, cheap labor, cheap oil, and not giving a shit about its own working class, played a huge role in making Mexico a failed state. We have a huge responsibly to fix our fuckups south of the border (and to fix up our working class).
But, none of the above changes the fact that we have a failed state on our southern border. Mexico will be going bankrupt shortly as its oil production falls off. Production peaked in 2004 and is at this point crashing. Oil exports are Mexico’s largest source of foreign capitol by a long shot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.....uction.PNG
Mexico is also fighting, what looks to me like, a civil war between a corrupt government and ex-military (US trained) units aligned with drug kingpins. The kingpins are holding territory and have some popular support. We’ll probably have a Mexican Mafia controlled country on our southern border in a year or two.
The last time they had civil war and a crashing economy in Mexico 10% (Might not be the right figure, but I think it’s right) of Mexico came to America. Back in Pancho Villa’s day we might have been able to handle that, we can’t today. So, yeah, given what I see going on on our southern border I’d like to see guard towers and horse patrols down there*.
*All the high tech whizmo crap that’s been proposed for the border is just a way for politicians to line their friends pockets while looking like they were doing something while really doing nothing. You can’t see much or hear anything while inside of a truck and everyone else can see and hear you. Horses can cover a lot of ground, you can see and hear what’s going on around you and you can be sneaky. Plus, Humvees cost around 65K and gas is $3 a gallon. Horses and hay are cheaper.