Oh, crap. Bush is giving a big speech on immigration tonight, and Drudge reports that he's sending the National Guard to the border. I predict future generations will see this as a step on the road to a total police state on an order of magnitude similar to the effect of 9/11. We're all about to become a lot more suspicious to law enforcement.
Because that's the only way this will work: keeping people from crossing the borders of this country will never work. We can't even keep inanimate objects like drugs out. Only now that there's a big military crackdown, the price for getting into the country is rising even more - and the human smugglers will have an even bigger profit motivation to bring people across the border in even worse conditions. All this will ensure is that the people who end up getting across will be even more destitute and desperate, thereby exacerbating the problems illegal immigrants have already been causing our society.
Scarier yet, however, is the precedent this will set for a monitoring of society on a scale we've never dreamed. Suddenly, finding auslaender will be a priority - and that means all of us will be under further scrutiny, even if we're upstanding citizens.
- Expect more random traffic stops as law enforcement tries to cast a wide net.
- Expect cops giving everybody a careful eye, even when you're doing nothing wrong - but especially if you're doing something out of the ordinary. Suddenly, individuality and standing out from the crowd becomes a real hassle.
- Expect random demands to present your papers to officers. And I predict there will be even more hassles if immigration arrests and resulting asset forfeitures are linked directly to funding these operations and the participating agencies and local police departments.
- Expect more crime as the marginalized immigrants become even more desperate and convinced the law has no value whatsoever, while the prioritization of catching illegals crowds out resources for legitimate crime fighting.
- Expect industries heavily depending on illegal immigrant labor to either get shut down completely or form agreements on the down low with government officials, forming de facto cartels and loweing competition.
- Expect thousands of mistaken identity cases. I predict the enforcement initiative will expressly deny rights to non-citizens and any citizens under suspicion of being illegal.
- Expect new appeals for national pride.
- Expect detention camps for the crowds of "untouchables" who will overwhelm an already crowded prison system.
- Expect the prison industrial complex to experience a wash of new fear money as the government tries to keep up with the arrests.
- Finally, expect these activities to be integrated into the "War on Terror" and eventually used against citizens as we become acclimated to living in a police state.
The goal of anti-immigration policy, it seems, is to make this an undesirable country to which to immigrate, to say nothing of the experience of us natives. By giving law enforcement and the military new roles in the monitoring and management of the population, government will get a new, dynamic leg in the door leading to authoritarianism. Forget about non-Americans who want to live here for just one second, and think - is this the America we Americans want to live in?
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