This is a guest post by Eyeblast Tv's friend Nick D'Orazio of Bulletpeople.com. To see Bullet People's videos visit their channel on Eyeblast. When we conservatives complain as we ought to about the shameful state of illegal immigration let’s be sure to pick the right target. It is not the illegal immigrants themselves who are the most responsible. Washington created this mess. The roots of the problem are explained in “Why Braceros?“.  This 19 minute film made for the Council of California Growers in 1959 explains that for “stoop labor” crops there had been a perennial shortage of manpower at harvest time. The solution was the Bracero program initiated by the U.S. and Mexico that allowed temporary workers to enter the country to do the work. John McCain says that American’s won’t pick lettuce in Yuma. That’s an odd claim that asks us to believe that the law of supply and demand does not apply in this situation. But the film makes it clear that the real issue is that if we can’t get cheap Mexican labor then the growers will simply move to Mexico. We either bring cheap labor or we lose those crops forever domestically. (Apparently the state of journalism today is such that, although illegal immigration has been a major issue for years, you need to watch a PR piece produced during the Eisenhower era to learn this simple fact.) When the Bracero program was suspended in 1964 many former temporary workers simply crossed the border into the U.S. for good. It was at this point that Washington began its now long-standing policy of willful ignorance: they took no action against the employers who welcomed the returning Braceros. The growers of course preferred paying them the low wages that would not attract American workers. The stage was thus set for 45 years of border problems.

Who are the bad guys here? In the YouTube video above, a U.S. citizen who is familiar with the realities of illegal immigrants says it is a simple matter of conditioning: if you cross the border illegally for a job, even if you are deported, you will still be better off with the money you have saved or sent home than if you had not risked the border crossing. This is common knowledge in Mexico. As we take for granted the benefits of a college education, they know the enormous earning power of the man who finds a job in the U.S. An honest family man who will not lower himself to cross the border knows that his neighbor who risks the dangerous crossing into the U.S. will send home money that will improve greatly his family’s standard of living. They will buy a better house. Their children will be better provided for. To this admittedly emotional argument conservatives say, as Sonny Bono once famously said, “What’s to talk about? It’s illegal.” One YouTube commenter on the video above wrote: rjsmitty69: “So , I should rob a bank because I want money and when I get caught I will scream don’t put me away because it will break up my family. I just want a better life for my family.” It is a strong argument but it ignores the part Washington has played in this psychodrama we have visited on our southern neighbors. What if Taylor Farms of California paid you to rob the bank, the security guards watched you rob it but did nothing, and you and Taylor got to split the money after paying a small fine? If you had witnessed this going on for 45 years I bet your opinion of robbing banks would change. “I don’t care, they are breaking the law” conservatives say. This is an impasse that conservatives and progressives reach quickly. The conservative is dumbfounded that his opponent simply doesn’t understand that no amount of personal need or ultimate good can justify breaking the law. The progressive in turn argues that the human misery caused by obeying the law justifies making an exception to it. But let’s put aside who is right and wrong on this issue briefly. Instead consider how much greater a dilemma this situation poses for the honest Mexican father than it poses for us as we discuss this calmly in the abstract. For him it is not abstract. It is he who must, if he stands by his honesty, watch his family wither as his neighbor’s family thrives. Many great thinkers have wondered what the word “illegal” means when the  society you live in fails to protect your interests. No less a conservative giant than C.S. Lewis wrote “No one, I hope, thinks Dr. Johnson a barbarian. Yet he maintained that if, under a peculiarity of Scottish law, the murderer of a man’s father escapes, the man might reasonably say, ‘I am amongst barbarians, who… refuse to do justice… I am therefore in a state of nature… I will stab the murderer of my father….’ When the State cannot or will not protect, ‘nature’ is come again and the right of self-protection reverts to the individual.” The honest father in Mexico does not need an Oxford education to be aware of this philosophical dilemma. He only needs to have grown up in a failed state while witnessing 45 years of his border-crossing compatriots rewarded by the land of limitless bounty to the north. Be glad that in this country we are not presented with such a difficult decision. Please don’t begrudge the Mexican father who decides that because being legal means his family will suffer, he chooses to enter illegally. Especially when our largest growers will hire him, our social services organizations by directive will not ask him his status, and our politicians on both sides of the aisle will look the other way while he provides cheap labor and future voters. Besides, do you really have a problem with a group of individuals who (except for the criminals among them) exhibit strong family values, a cheerful and robust Christianity, an indefatigable work ethic, and a strong enthusiasm for free enterprise? Shouldn’t you instead aim your anger at your representatives who have created a situation that forces a man to choose between obeying the law and doing what will help his family? Historian Victor Davis Hanson, whose experiences as a California grape farmer make him particularly entitled to comment, has written convicingly on how to resolve the problem of illegal immigration. Note that he’s not directing his fire at the illegals themselves. When you rail against illegal immigration, please direct your justified anger at the right people. When we keep yelling at the illegal immigrants themselves it’s like yelling at the lab rats. Start yelling at the crass politicians who for the sake of cheap labor and cheap votes have set the rules for this 45 year experiment.