Procrastination will be my downfall. I missed the 7:06AM train and opted to take a quick power nap in a little shady corner because the public parking area was full and to be honest I was too lazy to park on the other side of the block.

I was walking on the north bound side of the station where an US border control officer was questioning an individual woman of Chinese decent. I know that there is an increased presence, but seeing that image right in my back yard is an uncomfortable feeling. Once I got to the other side I saw that the officer had handcuffed a Mexican man. I asked the guy standing next to me why he was handcuffed? He said that he didn’t have any form of identification, so the officer took him away. I was able to snap a Picture.

What bothers me is this. There are over 12 million undocumented workers who mostly just want to survive and live the dream like so many generations before us, and because they are flying under the radar they are getting abused, in many cases treated less than a human, and discriminated against. Sounds quite familiar?

The whole illegal immigration issue is complicated, but it’s mostly driven by fear, control, and economic conditions, I’ll briefly touch on each point.

People fear that they will lose their job and in some cases that is very true, but instead of blaming a group people look towards the policy makers that set the rules on how companies should conduct day to day business. Also do what you can to improve your education. The general populace fears that their way of life will be stripped away. They fear that the language spoken will be something other than English. Underlying those feelings they fear that their particular way of life will be somehow changed. Let’s face it folks those fears are mostly unfounded. Illegal immigrants have been here for decades doing work that I don’t want to do. They have contributed to this county, although I consider having them documented would increase the tax base. I will also concede finically they are a burden to the tax payer.

Let’s touch on control. People from Europe have been coming to the states for decades where is the outcry from that? Let’s look at the wet foot dry foot policy that lets Cubans in who touch foot on land but sends Haitian packing back home? The bottom line is the government which is supposedly represented by us only want people in that can contribute the most to this economy and can be assimilated the easiest, the same can be said for corporations as well for the most part.

People are moving around the world at an increasing rate. As globalization occurs the lines of communication are broken down. It is easier to move to another country although America has taken a step back in that regard. With all that being said, business have a need for unskilled cheap labor as well as highly skilled labor. In that insistent need to create more value, wealth and our insatiable demand for lower prices. Those forces are very strong to lure people over here.

Maybe this is a simplistic view, but one of the life lessons is you can’t fight change. Guess what? There are some deep fundamentals that are happening here. Instead of fighting against change, which is what we are doing now why not embrace it? Let’s have a way of documenting our brothers and sisters. Let’s increase the amount of worker permits we allow each year. Yes we should keep our borders secure, for the 0.0000001 who want to traffic drugs cause harm. The laws in place now are not working, and at best poorly enforced. We need a total change in policy and public thinking to account for this change.