I had forgotten one of my own classic dicta about how emotionally invested a lot of our "immigrants" -- legal and otherwise -- are in the politics of which ever Beloved Homeland caused them to leave it.
[...] it cannot be sufficiently stressed that these immigrant communities retain extremely strong cultural and linguistic ties to their former countries, and certainly to their own local community. There is in many of these communities a powerful drive to form Enclaves and to remain isolated culturally from the rest of local America. These isolated foreign subcultures are -- due to the adherence to their own particular language and cultural norms, and the gossip and scandals that circulate within -- essentially huge intelligence apparats, and there is no question that within these communities there are those who manipulate the foreign cultural weltgeist to their own political ends, whether directly for the advancement as special-interest of that particular foreign subculture, or to polarize that particular foreign subculture against their personal enemies, or to essentially alert the whole foreign subculture to collect information [...]
Well, that's a bit over-long and a bit over-involved, but let's just say that every time some military officer in Botswanaland picks some lint out of his navel, I get chased down the street by the Tonton Macoutes, evidently on the suspicion that I know something about something.
Of course, I never can figure out who the hell are this-week's foreign crazies who are screaming at me until a day or two later, when I see something in the paper that tends to offer a plausible explanation.
As for Honduras, regardless of who the vote-counters declare to be victor, they've got problems of their own, such as their immense problem with Child Gangs versus Police Death Squads.
Here in the States, we don't have police death squads, right? But we definitely have Honduran gangsters here. And all things considered, notably where they come from, I don't suppose I can blame them for not wanting to be there, but rather to be here.
Yet I am not one of the folks who likes to let my bleeding-heart liberalism get in the way of practicality. If the child gangs of Honduras are an outrage and a horror, let them be an outrage and a horror in Honduras, not in Eastern Montgomery County, Maryland... which is where I am unfortunately required to live.
But what is going on in Honduras?
"President Maduro was elected because he promised our people a 'Zero Tolerance' crime policy --- meaning the eradication of gangs and other criminal elements. Alas, this strategy has failed. The police have misinterpreted the spirit and corrupted the letter of this mandate. Gangs as a whole have not been eradicated but many of their members are being exterminated. Apparently, since there are no rehabilitation centers for delinquent youths, the easiest way to neutralize them is to eliminate them. What is immensely sad, I believe, is that Honduran society has turned a blind eye toward violence. Extrajudicial executions have become as common as bread and butter. Ironically, exterminated or not, the gangs still control the streets and whole neighborhoods in their grip. Nothing has really changed." (Peña, Billy, 2004, Tiempo)
During the recent economic meltdown, the construction industry effectively shut down, with the exception of a few major capital projects which were so close to completion that it made no sense to stop, or public works projects which were already funded and "shovel ready".
The vast majority of non-degreed adult immigrants in the region -- especially those who are illegally present in the US -- worked in construction. Effectively there is 100-percent unemployment in this population. Those who most recently arrived are those who suffer the most and indeed a fair number of those appear to have returned to their homelands, taking with them everything they can carry.
Yet there is another population here which deserves mention and some credit: the US-born and US-raised children of immigrant parents.
For long years I have pressed for actual enforcement of immigration laws, and for long years very little has been done. The only thing that could ever cause people to leave, to better yet to never come, has occurred in the form of an economic calamity which has left about 15-percent of all American citizens unemployed. Shutting down the "jobs magnet" means there isn't a lot of incentive for foreigners to sneak into the country... unless of course they are either on the run from the law in their homeland, or on the run from gangs in their homeland, and in many cases being on the run from one means you are also on the run from the other. See the references above and link to the Tontons Macoutes.
Yet in these long years, the babes-in-arms of the "refugees" have grown up, and many of them have acquired citizenship status, or having been born here, always were citizens. And those who have jobs are keeping them, and have become the breadwinners for their families. The parents who could send them to Catholic school back during the construction boom are no doubt glad of their investments... but a lot of the jobs filled by the young bilinguals are jobs as counter clerks. They don't get paid much, not enough to support their families.
Back in the Beloved Homelands that the parents fled "for a better life" here in the States, jobs often were obtained and held only through variations on either the "patronage system" where people paid kickbacks and bribes all over the place and to practically everyone they ever encountered, or jobs were obtained and held by incapacitating other applicants to the positions. Someone's trying to get the same job as you? Well, if you can whack off their hand with a machete, they're not going to be holding a shovel. This sort of literally cut-throat competition inevitably led to a system of patronage, where the "caudillos" (literally, those who cut off the tail of the bull after a bullfight) and their henchmen could promote workplace safety at gunpoint if necessary.
Here in the States, a far descendant of that system is embedded in our legal codes, in our laws against workplace discrimination, in our very culture. Beating someone because they're applying for the same job is generally thought to be beneath any standards of decency... unless the job applied for is with a criminal gang.
The children of immigrants are frequently "bi-cultural", but in most of this nation's history, the children of immigrants were very quick to mostly abandon most of the culture of their parents' origin nations. After all, in almost all cases, America was the destination of choice, preferable to the origin culture, and it was widely understood that it was the laws and the culture of America which made it such a desirable destination.
In many cultures, there's a saying equivalent to "Don't bring old dirt into a new house".
That saying should be the guideline for all immigration to the USA, and for many years, it was the guideline.
For example, after the Second World War, you didn't see a whole lot of Russian Jewish emigrants espousing Communism. You didn't see a lot of West German emigrants espousing Fascism, you didn't see a lot of Japanese emigrants espousing Shinto Imperialism. And even if the parents were silly enough to do such a thing, the children ignored their parents. After all, the children were Americans and America was where they lived and where they intended to remain. The old country ways didn't work so well, or they would be there, not here, right?
So the question remains: what, if anything, has changed?
Do the American children of the Latin-American "immigrants" (legal or otherwise) remember "don't bring old dirt into a new house"? Will they simply get on with being plain old Americans in America? Or will they cling to their identity of being foreigners?
Look at it this way: for a long long time, and even in the modern day, the German government did its level best to promote a sense of "german-ness" in Americans of Germanic ethnicity. And we Americans of Germanic ethnicity saw this for what it was: a transparent attempt to divide loyalties. Had it worked, the Second World War might have been a bit less-easily won, and in fact, it wasn't until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that public opinion turned -- against even Nazis --sufficiently to support militarism against Germany. The US government and public policy was still hindered by the way they had treated German-Americans during the first World War, and after that abusiveness, the post-war German government had continued to try to exploit that.
Yet we German-Americans generally knew where our loyalties should be: with our homeland, the United States. We're not Germans. We're Americans.
I can only hope that the Americans whose families came from Central America will feel the same way.
But hopes are not realities.
How are they behaving, what evidence do they give us of their actual loyalties, these US-born children of "immigrants"?
With whom do they ally? With their fellow Americans, or with foreign gangsters who just happen to resemble these new Americans?
Time will tell, and We Shall See.
More to come?
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