The Illegal Immigration Problem Solved in Five Minutes!

The following video, despite its simple presentation, is a very smart, informative and dryly humorous look at the immigration debate in the United States. It is pretty long, around 15 minutes, but worth watching in its entirety.



The video does a good job illustrating the hypocrisy of immigrants scapegoating more recent immigrants for societal problems and also describes the immigration "debate" as one driven by xenophobia.

Daisy, the older cat, claims the powerful class uses two strategies to mobilize support for their interests.
1) They capitalize on people's fears and insecurities.
2) They unify people against a common enemy, the more defenseless the enemy the better.

Obviously this video is an oversimplification of the issues and and very biased towards one side of the debate, however that does not mean the information is not accurate or the message isn't valid. It also looks at the debate in a different way, and one line in particular stood out to me.

"We act like the laws that sort immigrants into legal or illegal types dropped out of the sky, directly from God. Of course not, laws are made and enforced by the dominant group in a society, generally to benefit themselves."

"You can attack people by making them illegal, you demonize them, you attribute every social ill you can think of to their presence."

It is true that we make the laws, so by changing the laws we can change the problem. I think that, at its essence, this is what immigration reform is all about. It is not about opening the floodgates to everybody and sacrificing security, as opponents sometimes imply, it is about understanding that the current problem is too convoluted to be solved, so going at it in a different way is a better option than maintaining the status quo.