So I see news stories and blog reports linked here and there; worry about the mass detention and expulsion of illegal immigrants in the US is really a matter of concern to the Trump administration generally. This is according to more centrist bloggers and to the usual sources in the National Establishment Media organs (hmm … I nearly typed ‘nastional’, as in ‘nasty’ in that sentence. Must be my subconscious at it again…) That the prospect of body-armored and masked agents of ICE rounding up illegal immigrants and visa-overstayers, bundling them off to a sort of American gulag before returning them to the third-world hell-holes from whence they came is somehow very distressing to most Americans and will result in diminishing support for Trump and all his MAGA works and ways, according to such reports. Well, I suppose that if one is sitting in a very sheltered bubble, well-shielded against certain contingencies of fortune, it might look like that would be the case.

I am reminded of a bumper sticker which my daughter and I spotted, last week on a car ahead of is, in a very upscale suburb in north San Antonio. The sticker read “Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Racists.” On a very new and well-maintained Lexus SUV. In a part of town, where the City of San Antonio bus system had built (at considerable public expense) an elaborate bus station. This bus station was apparently intended to feed commuters from a well-heeled neighborhood by bus into more urban parts, thereby to make a stab at making the city into some green, fifteen-minute commuter city, I guess. Instead, the bus station mainly serves as a transit station, bringing domestic help to their jobs in the well-heeled outer-ring and very posh suburb.

Essentially, the driver of the Lexus with that bumper sticker appears to be OK with maintaining criminal illegals, sex-traffickers, drug dealers, people-smugglers, and identity-thieves in the US as long as they stay in the ickier parts of town, and don’t impinge in any way on her (I presume it was a female driver – it looked like it, from what I could see through the Lexus’ tinted windows) neighborhood or adversely affect her way of life. Nice. Just the week previous, ICE and the local PD busted a Tren de Aragua cell in a part of town that I’d venture to guess the driver of an expensive car would never be caught dead in.

The heart of the matter is that the tide of illegal immigrants in the US is one which likely only washes through those locations which well-meaning people like the driver of that Lexus, the writer of a recent NY Times sob story, or any of their comfortable friends wouldn’t frequent on a bet. It is not their schools, hospitals and workplaces swamped with illegal immigrants who must be catered to. It probably isn’t their school aged offspring exposed to diseases which haven’t commonly been seen by American doctors in eighty or a hundred years. It’s not their neighborhoods being ruined by twenty or thirty illegal immigrants crammed into a single two-bed-one-bath house, their trucking or construction businesses consistently underbid by competitors paying their hired illegal workers cash under the table. They’re not directly affected by crime committed by illegals; crimes often downplayed by local and national news media organs, and civic authorities. It’s not their credit being wrecked by an illegal immigrant fraudulently using a black-market-purchased social security number. They probably are spending a bit more on car insurance, because of accidents caused by uninsured, unlicensed (or fraudulently licensed) drivers, but like the driver of that late-model Lexus, likely they can afford to pay more.

All this has been going on for years, in the places that the comfortably-situated do not know or care about. So of course, massive, coordinated raids by ICE and illegal migrants being arrested and deported en masse is deeply unsettling … but only to them. Everyone else, especially those who have been personally affected – are very pleased with immigration laws being enforced.
Discuss as you wish – have you a personal story to tell about an interaction with an illegal alien?