Illegal Americans

By Susana G. Baumann

George Lopez, the Mexican American comedian, is launching a new show called “It’s not me, it’s you.” As he explains in the prep scenes, -and I’m paraphrasing- we live in a society where we are used to finger pointing, looking for responsibilities and blaming on other people’s actions but never looking at our own behavior.

A few weeks ago, the national debate over the term “illegal” referring to “illegal immigrants” has taken a new level.

A new level of stupidity, I would add.

Debating about the term “illegal” might bring the beloved and sought out spotlight to journalists who love to masturbate with words. But this discussion is as useless for those who “carry” the label as it is for the legal system.

Moreover, Americans are not really divided between those who defend and abide by the law and those who don’t. Most people are somehow lenient about the grey areas of many laws and might even agree that most “Illegal” immigrants are hard-working people who are here for good reasons.

And then, of course, there are the others. The Brewers and the Arpaios, the MacDonnells and even the Rubios, and the many that bully, insult, and keep a self-righteous position about how “their families” came to this country legally.

I pity them because they have taken possession of a territory, a land, a philosophy of life, values and even an ideal that was born and meant to be shared, and they had trashed it to convert it in a trophy. We have what you can’t have, it’s ours and we will guard it.

They live in a country, as we all do, where immigrants, legal or illegal, do the many jobs that are menial, low-paid, disgusting, exhausting, working in conditions that most Americans would qualify as unacceptable and even degrading. They clean our bathrooms, farm our groceries, kill and process our meats, cook our meals, drive our children to schools, sew our clothes, and much, much more.

So from now on, I propose that we call those who eat at the restaurants immigrants work for, enjoy the landscaping they do for our yards, use the public bathrooms they clean, walk the streets and drive their cars on the roads they repair, rent them our properties with excessive profitability, hire them to work for cash under the table, accept their fake green-cards or social security cards to overwork them in 16-hour shifts under the sun, and all the other unlawful actions Americans carry on to take advantage of a cheap labor force, those should be called “illegal Americans.”

If we were law abiding citizens, no “illegal” immigrant should find a way to stay in this country. But of course, it’s not about us, it’s about them.