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What Is The Plan of Newly-Arrived Illegal Immigrants?
Can some journalist please interview some of the recently arrived illegal immigrants — OK, I’ll accept it even if the journalist chooses to call them “migrants” or “newcomers” — what, exactly, did they think was going to happen once they illegally entered the United States? What was their specific plan?
In a hearing in which illegal immigrants were complaining about the quality and quantity of the goods and services that were being given to them at no charge to the immigrants, a New York City Councilwoman (a Republican, is that allowed in New York City?), asked some questions about what more the illegal immigrants expected. The councilwoman appears to be asking out of frustration that the city couldn’t do more. So her thinking seems to be, “The taxpayers should take care of whoever shows up. It’s tragic we can’t afford to. But it did cause me to wonder, what exactly do the immigrants think is going to happen when they arrive?” What is their plan? Do they really expect someone else to take care of their every need or want? And for how long? Do they have any concrete plans to become self-sustaining?
“At the shelter, the food, my kids cannot eat the food at the shelter,” said one woman. “They give us two months to stay at the shelter and then you have to go out again with your luggages [sic] and your kids and find another place. It’s very difficult.”
The immigrant expected it to be easy? Until figuratively five minutes ago, did any immigrant anywhere expect an easy time? Immigration has been hard any time, anywhere. Did she expect that when she just showed up without permission in a new country, somebody there was just going to magically take care of not just her needs, but also her wants, for an indefinite length of time? Did she not expect to have to find her own place to live? To find a way to earn money to buy food for her children?
When I was a child, my family lived in a foreign country for a year while my father taught as a visiting professor at a university. So yes, he had a job. But my parents still had to put in an enormous amount of planning to ensure we had a place to live and that my brother and I had schooling arranged. It was still very hard, especially on my mother. My brother and I (ages 5 and 7, who caught onto the local language faster than my mother did) had to help our mother navigate the markets and other necessities of local daily life. The markets were nothing like the stores my mother was used to in California. We had to figure them out. We had to navigate foreign (for us) customs and expectations with our landlord and our neighbors. We had to figure out how to get around the city. Even with the university’s support of my father in his teaching position, we could not have just showed up and expected someone magically to take care of everything.
When my ancestors arrived in the United States in the 19th century from central Europe and from Ireland, they had relatives with whom they had corresponded and thus knew would take them in for a while, but that they’d have to quickly find employment and their own places to live.
When we lived in southern California more than 25 years ago, we had a non-trivial number of illegal immigrants around. But at that time the illegal immigrants came knowing they had to arrange their own housing, and find some (generally under the table) way to earn money so they could eat. To afford housing they lived ten or twelve people to a one-bedroom apartment, which created lots of local problems. But at least they didn’t start off assuming somebody else was going to take care of them. And they were studiously trying to stay out of sight.
I acknowledge that I am more of a planner than most people. I don’t take a trip without a pretty solid and detailed plan. If I’m flying, I know where I’m staying — with a guaranteed reservation, and know how I’m getting from the airport to the lodging. If I’m driving, I know where I’m going to stop overnight — and have made reservations, and where there will be long gaps in the drive with no gasoline or rest rooms. I’m likely to plan even where, at least approximately, I’m going to stop for lunch. I’ve probably planned ahead at least my first day at the destination – what activities I intend to do, how I’m going to get to them, and what I expect to happen when I get there.
So maybe I don’t appreciate that people can go off on significant adventures with no plan whatsoever. But who, with thinking capacities beyond a six-year-old, just shows up in a foreign country and expects to walk on Easy Street paved with gold using the energy and money of the people of the destination country?
Many of us express annoyance at the explicit and implicit invitations by President Biden for foreigners to just come, and we have generalized complaints about the willingness of government agencies and other organizations to provide help to people who enter the country illegally. We hear illegal immigrants express generalized plans to travel to certain cities. But what exactly are the details of the immigrants’ plan? Specifics. How do they expect to earn money? When do they expect to do that? How do they expect to find housing? When? They know they need to eat. Continuously. How do they expect to do that? Do they really cross the border expecting that “someone” in the U.S.A. will take care of their every need and even want, and make it easy on them?
One gets the impression the recent illegal arrivals seem to think they don’t need to make any plans or arrangements. They just have to show up and they’ll be taken care of. Who and what is giving them that impression?
What do the current immigrants who enter the United States illegally think they are going to be doing the day after their arrival? A week later? A month later? Three months later? A year later?
This is separate from the slaves that are being trafficked who know there is a pimp to whom they are obliged. Senator Ted Cruz describes those as the girls who claim to be heading to their “tio” (uncle). Slaves rely on their pimps.
And not the terrorists, foreign revolution agents, gang members, and others who enter with overt ill intent.
And we know that the pleas of, “they are terrorized individuals fleeing persecution in their home country, so of course they have no plan other than escape” are almost universally false.
I’m asking about the regular people, the ones their advocates are saying we should welcome with open arms.
Maybe some people expect their “coyotes” to take care of them, which the coyotes do not, abandoning their charges as soon as they enter the United States.
But, there are plenty of people who enter the United States illegally on their own volition. I would think they ought to have some plan for life in the United States before they enter. What are the details of their plans and expectations? Can someone ask them?
Published in Immigration
Nobody emphasizes this enough. Ninety percent of them are lying. Basically, you have to be under one-way political, or religious persecution. So, for example, nobody from Somalia would qualify. I mean that’s what gets me. They are supposed to go to an actual port of entry and not lie about asylum.
These people are insane.
What needs to happen is, everybody in these countries that is involved in organized crime needs to be assassinated or shape things up like the guy in El Salvador. They need to be taught math, English, and Spanish in their own country. We like to generate inflation so we can’t be letting in uneducated immigrants that depress wages.
Really excellent post, Full Size Tabby.
The U.S.A. is giving them that impression. But even if it didn’t, they might still come, just because it’s near. I think these people simply don’t make plans, or weigh options, or project futures.
The following doesn’t prove anything, since it didn’t yield anything, but I decided to look up the Spanish for “improvident,” then do an Internet search for it. Do these migrants’ own cultures call them that? Well…I can’t tell! The word by the way is not in my University of Chicago dictionary, and online sources are uncertain to put it mildly. The Spanish word may be impróvido, or improvisor. Hand those to a search engine, it smoothly assumes you meant something else! And if you click the show-results-only-for literal link, the hits themselves are still off-topic. About things in Italian, or Latin. I tried inmigrantes impróvidos and that too swung me wide of anything in, near, or from Mexico.
I do not think that search engines are playing a wicked game here…although they could be. I prefer to think the engines’ employees got – as journalists seem to get – very spotty educations, are poorly read and ill-experienced, have never seen the word “improvident” before, and program lots of shortcuts that guarantee something gets flung back, regardless of its pertinence. Who’s gonna know? Maybe there was a time when a search engine took a deep breath, read the entire Internet, then delivered its findings. I suspect all such online utilities now work from the very limited feedstock that the purplehairs think is adequate.
But another possibility is that the source material really is scarce. It may truly be the case that in the migrants’ home countries, nobody judges them or even discusses them. That is consistent with my idea that those are cultures where nobody, not even the smart people, think ahead.
And stop at the first country reached upon fleeing your oppressive country and not waiting until you reach Uncle Sugar, right?
Yep.
They are totally abusing the legal category of “parole”, too. It’s millions right now. It used to be dozens annually before Biden.
It seems that at least some of them don’t think New York is feeding them well enough, or something, and do actually go back where they came from.
I think it is the State Dept along with NGO’s . Paid handsomely by the Government , to advertise our lavish safety net train and all the inn’s and out’s of hooking your caboose to that train .
Our Government is literally building expectations and entitlement into these people before they come .
“Improvident” straddles a couple of meanings. “Prodigal” gives the sense of spending more than one has or can reliably expect to get, and “impetuous” carries the sense of not having a plan. The dictionaries and translation programs seem to emphasize the financial aspect.
Interesting question from @johnh – is having a detailed plan a concept foreign to people in some cultures?
I’m pretty sure it’s been declared to be “white supremacy” by now.
The plan? To live on the dole.
And They come Here and raise Their flag. Their flag is at home, on Their car, everywhere.
These horse’s asses flee, flee Their country, but still want to show “pride” for it.
It’s an invasion.
For non-Latin cultures, I wouldn’t overstate the “detailed” part of any “plan.” I never heard much family lore, and what I did hear was boring, but I think my ancestors’ immigration – from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, in 1921 – was much like your ancestors’ from elsewhere in Europe in the preceding century. Arrive, burden relatives for a very short while, move on. In my family’s case, not very far. They got on the boat in Trieste, they got off it in New York City, and wherever they went next, it was no farther than the subway would take them! Nevertheless, there they prospered.
This may be more impressive than whatever is going on with Mexicans, Central Americans, et al. Their story has of course yet to be written, but I am going to guess it’ll never have a chapter titled The Night I Got Bussed To Nantucket. And if it does, it’ll be totally stupid. There is so little about Mexico or its culture – as opposed to, say, Slovenia or its culture – to convince me this is an adaptable civilization. It survives. No argument there. Yet it barely thrives, even on its own land. It may be unteachable.
I might mention here that in Latin America in the print-media era I never read a Spanish-language article about far-flung explorers, and I recall reading just one in the Portuguese-language press. (About Brazilians marooned in Boston.) In the Internet era, I hear lots of Mexican-radio stories of migrants – they are always called just that, never IMmigrants or Emigrants – and not one is a success story. These people are omni-needy. Needy is what they are, and neediness is what they do. Mexicans, and maybe not just those who get jobs behind microphones, are totally unembarrassed about this.
Preach it, brother. The notion that all (non-white) societies are equal and admirable is just a lie.
I’m reminded again of a clip I saw where some college professor or something, was being interviewed and said that obviously American culture isn’t the best in the world, because it’s not diverse enough etc, and so many people don’t thrive here… She claimed that Scandinavian cultures are better, and had nothing to say when it was pointed out that Scandinavian societies are MORE white – LESS diverse – than the US.
But that doesn’t explain all illegal immigrants object to the type of food they’re being given. This goes back to 2007 or earlier when the first Syrian? refugees in Italy rioted over getting only Italian food.
Well, really, you have to accommodate your guests’ tastes. Anything less would be uncivilized.
Heh. I actually took out that complaining about the menu for three squares a day of free food is uncivilized.
There you go.
I was listening to the Chris Plant show one day, and a guy called in from Puerto Rico. He completely disdained his own heritage just like this. Chris let him go on for 15 minutes. It was really interesting. Letting in all of these uneducated people from south of the border is national suicide. Personally, I think we should help them learn better, English and Spanish and teach them math in their own countries and then assassinate everybody that’s involved in organized crime. You can’t help them anymore than that. Even if you got the organized crime situation under control, all of those countries are organized into economic cartels. It’s not ideal.
A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
–Antoine de St-Exupery
What is being required of these illegal immigrants?
I can’t say what the deal with all illegal aliens is, but I fear the Chinese aliens of military age could be a strike force ready to create internal havoc just as China invades Taiwan . . .
Their plan?
sow chaos.
ask for what you want, take what you don’t get, sell what they give you, complain that it’s not enough.
rise and repeat.
I hear quite a few vacancies will be opening up in the next pandemic. (Sigh) It’s not exactly a plan, but then they are trying to get people to “double up” in Boston. Appropriate place for the “quartering” of illegals. It’s the 1770s all over again.
Shelter in place.
Grow roots.