by *

As of June 10, the U.S. Congress was deep into heated debate over immigration policy. Lawmakers are considering spending billions of dollars of your money to tighten down on illegal immigration. The debate seems to be over how much money and how much crack down we can expect.

I note that in all the debate, the only immigration discussed is human immigration—that is, the perceived “problem” of humans crossing borders. No one seems to have a problem with money crossing orders, for instance. Money moves electronically and transcends all geographical borders. In this sense, money has more rights than humans do.

No one is protesting corporations crossing borders either. Corporations are global citizens, residing in numerous nations simultaneously, never stopped nor questioned at any border crossing. It would seem that corporations have more rights than humans too.

Then you’ve got jobs. Jobs travel across borders on a regular basis without any protest. U.S. Jobs go to Mexico; Mexican jobs go to China; Chinese jobs go to India; Indian jobs go to Cambodia. Thousands of former manufacturing jobs that started in the U.S. Have more frequent flier miles than the unemployed workers who used to have those jobs.

Jobs have more rights than humans.

In fact, it would appear that nothing gets regulated at borders except human beings. If only humans had the rights that money, corporations, and jobs possess, humans could cross borders unmolested also.

Borders. What are “borders” anyway? What we’re talking about is an artificial line that some asshole drew on a map, right? I mean, there’s a line around the so-called State of Ohio, but that line doesn’t exist in real life. There’s no chalk-line traced around any geographic or political territory; the lines are only on maps. If we chose, really, we could adjust a border a foot this way or a foot that way and chances are, nobody would know. Or, on the U.S. southern border, we could unilaterally adjust the border hundreds and hundreds of miles in one direction.

That’s what the U.S. did when it invaded and stole several states’ worth of territory from Mexico—the arable land, and left the hungry people on the other side of the border. A line on a map drawn by some asshole. In the case of Mexico, it’s a line to separate the hungry people from the arable land and produce stolen from them a couple centuries ago.

Hungry people trying to get where the surplus of food exists—that’s a problem. So we’re going to spend, as a nation, more money to keep the hungry people on the Mexican side than it would cost to give those hungry people a bowl of soup and a blanket and a gift basket.

So, considering that, what would happen if we simply erased all the lines that some asshole drew on the map? If we did that, all humans would be as free as money and corporations and jobs. Everybody could go wherever they wanted to go.

Holy fuck.

*This may or may not have been written by Sean Swain, but since September 2012, the Fascist Buffoons of Intimidation have used the Ohio Department of Retribution and Corruption as a sock-puppet to orchestrate a terror campaign against Sean Swain for his beliefs and his writings. So, until Anonymous melts down the government’s databases or until the oppressed and enslaved rise up to topple the international system of capital, Sean Swain cannot have his name associated with any published work whether he wrote it or not. In a free country, this footnote would not be necessary.