Posted on August 29, 2007

by

Daniel Clark

Elvira Arellano says that "comprehensive immigration reform" is needed to prevent the breakup of families like her own. Arellano is an "immigration rights activist," which is what the media call an illegal alien who had been arrested for using a fraudulent Social Security number. When she was deported, she opted to leave her 8 year-old American-born son, Saul, behind in the states, although she could just as easily have taken him with her back to Mexico. As scripted, her fellow activists are now demanding that she be allowed to return, supposedly for the sake of reuniting with her child.

Strange, but last time we heard about a small Latin American boy who was in the U.S., and separated from his parent, the liberal-approved solution was to return Elian Gonzalez to Cuba at gunpoint. It was not to have his father remain here with him, and it was certainly not to allow Elian to stay in America with a surrogate family, as Saul is now doing. In order to understand the purpose of this double-standard, it is important to consider the media's treatment of the nations involved in these respective incidents.

Cuba and Mexico are both impoverished countries, but during the Elian episode, the media informed us that Cuba's poverty was good. They told us that children are better off growing up in Cuba than in the United States, because of our decadent American culture. A boy's life in Cuba, we were led to believe, was just like a never-ending Our Gang comedy, but without the fat kid. At that time, poverty meant simplicity and virtue.

That being the case, it was the very fact of America's prosperity that made it a corruptive influence. Uncle Sam played the role of the devil on Elian's shoulder, tempting him with DisneyWorld, Coca-Cola, and various other products of successful and therefore sinister corporations. Fidel Castro gladly played along with this theme, by commissioning a statue of a Cuban schoolboy discarding a Superman action figure.

The media openly showed contempt for the Cuban expatriates in Little Havana, who had been so ungrateful for all of their "free" government services they'd left behind. To have abandoned the People's Island Paradise to come to this den of iniquity, they must have been either twisted by greed, or else just plain crazy. About Elian's mother, who died while trying to escape with him to Miami, ABC reporter Jim Avila besottedly wondered, "Why did she do it? What was she escaping?"

There have been no such questions about Elvira Arellano. That's because Mexico's poverty, unlike Cuba's, is bad. Not only is it understood why someone would break our immigration laws in order to get out of Mexico, but it's expected and even condoned. Whereas America has nothing of value to offer Cubans, it is a panacea to Mexicans, and one to which they are entitled. The way a liberal sees it, Mexicans must be poor because Americans are wealthy; therefore, we owe them.

More often than not, discussions about illegal immigration start from the premise that the illegal aliens themselves are entirely blameless, as if their violating our immigration laws resulted from an involuntary muscular action. Indeed, the surest way to have your opinion dismissed is by refusing to admit that you, too, would become an illegal alien, if only you had the chance. For them to sneak across our borders and commit identity fraud is seen as if it were just as natural as bees being drawn to nectar.

It logically follows that Cubans would likewise be instinctively driven toward American soil, which should make them equally deserving of compassion from those who call themselves "pro-immigrant." For every liberal activist who is now protesting the contrived "breakup" of Saul and his mother, there ought to be throngs of them taking to the streets every time we send a boatload of Cubans back to the totalitarian prison state they had defied death to escape.

The reason why that doesn't happen is because it would represent a defeat for Castro in his "Battle of Ideas," and would thus serve America's purposes. It does not help America, on the other hand, to pursue an anti-assimilation open borders policy that threatens to Balkanize our society. Therein lies the one constant in American liberals' treatment of the Arellanos and the Gonzalezes. They want to give amnesty to illegal aliens because that result is diametrically opposed to our national interest, and they want to turn away victims of Castro's persecution for the same reason.

Return to Shinbone

 The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press 

 Mailbag . Issue Index . Politimals