Open letter to Jeff Sessions: an encore

Esta entrada ha sido elaborada en Inglés para beneficio de aquellos seguidores de esta bitácora que me han pedido que trate en Inglés ciertos temas que son de interés para ellos, aunque puede ser también leída en Español con la ayuda del traductor de Google que puede ser invocado para la traducción completa de páginas Web de un idioma a otro.

Five years have gone by since I wrote an open letter addressed to you, Messr. Jeff Sessions, published in this blog “Mi Bitacora Diaria” on June 14th 2013, under the heading An Open Letter to US Senator Jeff Sessions.

Back then, your complaints against undocumented immigration into the USA were being heard loud and clear throughout the world. And a challenge was issued to you: to use your position in the US Senate to enforce throught legislative action the mass deportation of the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants currently living in the USA. I will quote myself as follows:

I understand that one of your main complaints about the 11 million or so undocumented aliens currently in the USA is that once legalized they will exacerbate the US population growth and will compete with US citizens for jobs which should be going to US citizens. To this I respond to you as follows:

Go ahead and deport all those 11 million undocumented immigrants sending them back to their countries (Mexico, mostly)! Send us back our nannies, our gardeners, our farm laborers, our iron works craftsmen, our nurses, our construction workers, our janitors, our carpenters, our plumbers, our artisans, our mariachis, our hotel maids, our car mechanics, our waitresses, our painters, our electricians, our chambermaids, and so forth! We need them right here in Mexico creating wealth and prosperity for Mexico, we don’t need them in the USA creating wealth and prosperity for North America! Go ahead, send them back! I dare you to do it, as a matter of fact I dare the US Congress as a whole to do it! The sooner the better. Personally, I do not care the least bit on the crack in the US economy the massive deportation of those hard-working individuals might bring. The economic consequences in your country of such a massive deportation is YOUR problem, not Mexico’s problem. I do not care if YOUR economy stagnates and dwindles, however I do care if the economy of Mexico continues to stagnate because of that gargantuan drain of hard working people who under the delusion of the so-called American dream end up being deported eventually with their kids taken away from them and their families broken apart. For far too long, Mexico has filled the hole that the end of slavery left in the USA since 1865, and the time is right to put an end to this exploitation. You can start to fill the gap by resorting to criminals who are serving prolonged jail sentences in the US criminal justice system, forcing your thugs and convicted felons to earn their daily living by making them work in hard labor such as picking watermelons and lettuces in the agricultural fields of California (back-breaking work which, by the way, Senators as Dianne Feinstein acknowledge and accept is currently being done by Mexican migrant workers). So, at least, on this important issue, returning valuable hard working Mexicans to Mexico, I believe you and I fully agree. But don’t just keep on threatening to do so, expelling undocumented Mexicans and shutting down forever and completely the US-Mexico border for all the undocumented immigration; just do it! Talk is cheap, very cheap, it’s just empty gas. Furthermore, if it is true (as some segments in the USA such as labor unions claim) that undocumented immigrants take good paying jobs away from American citizens, then expelling every single undocumented immigrant from the USA should THEORETICALLY bring the US unemployment (currently hovering at 7.6 per cent) all the way down to zero! Isn’t this true? Of all people in the USA, you, Senator Sessions, should know it! Just think about it! Zero unemployment in the USA! And all thanks to the US Congress! Wouldn’t that be something? Go ahead! Try this big social experiment (just as the Russians tried back ever since 1917 a big economic experiment, which by the way had to be dumped in 1991 just as the US Congress had to dump the Volstead Act given its abysmal failure; but you can’t blame the Russians for at least trying)! Reach for the big stick and clear the USA of all undocumented immigration, you can even call it the “war on illegal immigration” (just as President Nixon declared his “war on drugs” back in 1971, a war which by the way hasn’t being going well in the four decades that have gone by)! Just picture it, the unemployed citizens of Alabama thanking you, Senator Jeff Sessions, for reducing unemployment in the state of Alabama all the way down to zero, something that has never been seen in modern US history! The whole world is watching! Carpe diem, Senator Sessions, carpe diem.

Well, to make a long story short, nothing happened in all the years that ensued after that open letter addressed to you was published. Things remained the same and remain the same, in spite of a very hostile President Trump who despises undocumented workers even though he has cynically resorted in the past to the same practice he now so vehemently condemns. I believe the English word used to describe these contradictory actions is hypocrisy. Am I right, Messr. Jeff Sessions?

However, there is one big difference between 2013 and 2018. Five years ago you were just a member of the legislative branch of government, and as such you had no power to enforce US immigration laws already in the books. All you could do was try to pass through Congress some kind of immigration reform like the one that would limit the availability of legal visas for permanent legal residence in the USA, and demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement do its job in expelling as fast as possible all undocumented immigrants now living in the USA. No immigration reform was ever enacted during the time period you acted as Senator, and no massive deportations ever took place. The failure to pass a tougher immigration law was blamed by Republicans on the true fact that Republicans did not have a majority in both houses of Congress, which is no longer the case. Republicans now control the presidency, the Senate and the House, since November 2016. For the first time since 2007, Republicans began to control both the executive and legislative branches of government. And still no immigration reform since then. The time for blaming the Democrats for such a failure is long gone. Republicans can only blame themselves.

But even more important, and this applies directly to YOU (yes, Mister Jeff Sessions, YOU!) is that you are no longer just the US Senator you were back in 2013. You are now the US Attorney General, the Chief US Prosecutor in the USA. Finally, destiny itself placed you in a position inside the executive branch of the federal government enabling you to actually do some things! And not just any position, the top position only below the US President himself. The main enforcer of the law!

If you had been honest and true to  your convictions, if you had followed and obeyed the guidelines given to you by your boss President Donald Trump himself, it is about time that we should have seen some major shakeups in the way US immigration laws are enforced in the USA. For starters, ICE should have already begun the procedures of mass deportations that were to be expected with you as the chief enforcer of the law. By now, a major portion of the USA’s agricultural business should have been devastated after the deportation of hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrant farm workers back to Mexico or Central America with no one in the USA ready to take their place in such grueling back breaking jobs, especially at a time when a very low unemployment int the USA makes such kind of hard work highly undesirable for legal US citizens and residents. By now the harvest season for 2018 is almost over, and had the agricultural farm business in California been devastated because of a major loss of undocumented farm workers, pulling down the drain the state economy, by now California would be expected to be seceding from the USA, on its way to becoming an independent nation free to admit all the foreign work force it needs in order to keep its agricultural economy flourishing. So far, such a thing has not happened, and it can be surmised that with the exception of a very few ICE raids shutting down a few farms in California done mostly to produce some headlines, California as well as the rest of the USA have not suffered due to a mass deportation of undocumented farm workers simply because such a thing has not taken place.

Also, by now, if ICE acting under your direct strict orders had done its job, deporting back to Mexico tens of thousands of Mexican workers such as nannies, gardeners, farm laborers, iron works craftsmen, nurses, construction workers, janitors, carpenters, plumbers, artisans, mariachis, hotel maids, car mechanics, waitresses, painters, electricians, chambermaids, and so forth, by now they would be in Mexico creating wealth and prosperity for Mexico instead of creating wealth and prosperity for the USA. So far, this has not happened either.

Regarding Mexican undocumented workers whose contribution the US government still refuses to recognize, I will quote the same challenge I issued to you back then when you were just a US Senator:

We need them right here in Mexico creating wealth and prosperity for Mexico, we don’t need them in the USA creating wealth and prosperity for North America! Go ahead, send them back! I dare you to do it, as a matter of fact I dare the US Congress as a whole to do it! The sooner the better.

It is a matter of fact that many of the undocumented Mexican migrant workers that the US government and the US Congress both despise so much are actually skilled workers sought by other countries for legal employment. I will cite a recent example that appeared in the Mexican news media, in which Alloheim Senioren-Residenzen through the Federal Agency for Employment in Germany is interested in hiring Mexican nurses, and unlike the very cynical US government which denies these workers even temporary labor visas the German government is offering five-year contracts with legal work visas in Germany, with the contracts beginning January 19 2019, plus free training in the German language (six hours a day, from May to September) plus economic help and benefits to help them establish themselves in Germany. And closer to home,even Canada shows much more civility towards Mexican laborers than the US government in its Guest Worker Program! What a difference in comparison to what your government has to offer them, Messr. Sessions!

In the endless and useless squabbles taking place at the Republican-dominated US Congress -locked up -in a nearly vegetative state- regarding all immigration related issues, legal and illegal, there is something which is not being discussed at all: employer sanctions. And why is this not part of the agenda, considering that in the hiring of all undocumented workers in the US, the employer of undocumented aliens is a more than willing accomplice in the breaking of the law? For a very simple reason: employer sanctions are already in the books. They were approved way back in the Reagan era. But the truth of the matter is that employer sanctions are not being applied by ICE except in a very few headline news-grabbing cases. This was supposed to change when you became US Attorney General. It is precisely one of the things within your purview. Have you ever heard of  E-verify? If after serving time as Senator, you don’t have the slightest clue of what E-verify is and how it can be used to reduce illegal immigration considerably, I would have to guess that you’re dumber than I thought. By now, if you had done your job as Chief US Prosecutor, tens of thousands of US employers of undocumented aliens should either be in court facing millions of dollars in fines and jail time, or locked up for good serving jail time with all of their properties confiscated by Uncle Sam. But this is not happening, and not because the law forbids employer sanctions from being applied. So, why are employer sanctions not being applied? Have you secretly and verbally issued any orders to ICE for not enforcing employer sanctions? Do you realize, Messr. Sessions, that the top official ultimately accountable and responsible for this DERELICTION OF DUTY (borrowing a term used by the military) is yourself? My! So you were the one who was going to enforce the law if you were given such an opportunity? Ha! Please tell me another joke! Instead of pushing ICE to carry out the job for which it was really created, i.e. expelling all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants from the USA “so fast your head will spin”, the new sheriff in town has only been very good at ordering the implementation of such asinine policies like separating kids from their parents under the guise of “zero tolerance”, a major miscalculation that backfired when its implementation quickly drew comparisons between the Trump administration and the Nazi regime, drawing sharp condemnations from the rest of the world. You cannot get any dumber than this.

Let’s face it. You have failed miserably in the task you were entrusted to do. You have failed your President. Even worse, you have brought shame to your office. Of the 11 million or so undocumented aliens in the USA when Donald Trump took office, not even one per cent has been deported, and for all practical purposes it remains the same, after holding steady for eight consecutive years. Destiny gave you the power and the opportunity to make good on your anti-immigrant stance and creed, and you blew it. You could be held accountable for the civil equivalent of dereliction of duty, but your legal defense could argue that you were just plain dumb, and since the legal system does not punish anyone for  being dumb, you could be proclaimed innocent. But your failure to follow up on your own anti-immigrant threats remains the same.

The bottom line is this:

YOU, Messr. Jeff Sessions, Chief Prosecutor of the US government, have failed miserably in carrying out the mass deportations promised by candidate Donald Trump to his devoted followers.

YOU, Messr. Jeff Sessions, Chief Prosecutor of the US government, have failed miserably in the enforcement of employer sanctions as ordered by law.

YOU, Messr. Jeff Sessions, are not indispensable. As a matter of fact, given your dismal failure in the implementation of President Trump’s anti-immigrant directives, you are not even desirable as Chief Prosecutor of the USA. You’ve had your chance, and you blew it. It’s time to step aside and let others do the work you couldn’t do or didn’t want to do or perhaps even refused to do. Let others shelve the reviled policy of separating immigrant children from their parents, so they can go ahead and push ICE –willing or not- to carry out pronto the mass deportations promised two years ago by candidate Trump that will rid the USA forever of its 11 million or so (undesirable?) undocumented immigrants, adding to that figure those 800 thousand or so DACA recipients (remember, it was Donald Trump who terminated the DACA program because he also wants the DACA youngsters deported so fast your head will spin!), plus anybody else who might fit President Trump’s fancy.

And by the way, if the US government sends back to Mexico all the current DACA recipients, believe it or not Mexico will be more than grateful. You see, Messr. Sessions, many of them already have a college education, some even have Master and Ph.D. degrees earned at Ivy League universities, they are fully 100% bilingual, they have never broken any law and thus can be considered law abiding citizens. And best of all, Mexico did not have to spend a single cent in order for them to become educated professionals, Mexico will get all their talents for free! Yeah, send them back! Mexico is fully aware that there is no power without brain power. If the US doesn't want them, Mexico can certainly use these people and their talents and knowledge to create wealth in Mexico instead of creating wealth in the USA. Perhaps the only drawback is that many of them will return to Mexico with an enormous resentment towards the country that rejected and deported them, and sooner or later that resentment could surface.

There is only one honorable thing left for you to do. You, Messr. Jeff Sessions, should hand over your resignation ASAP to President Trump expressing your regrets and apologies for sitting on your ass while doing nothing useful to enforce the duties and obligations required from “the new sheriff in town”, and let President Trump fill the vacancy you leave behind with someone else more willing to enforce US immigration laws already on the books, someone like Pat Buchanan, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, David Duke, or the like.

C'mon, Messr. Sessions! Submit your resignation. Please? Your boss doesn't love you anyway! And by now, it is more than obvious that you despise each other. However, it must be insisted that your resignation should not be based on your mutual hatred of each other. It should be based solely on the fact of having failed utterly in the deportation of the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants, something you almost swore to do after being given the power to do so. Baloney!

Perhaps the best you can do at this point in time is hit retirement, go back to Alabama, buy a rocking chair and a banjo, and enjoy retirement while you watch your undocumented Mexican nanny take care of your grandchildren, while your undocumented Mexican gardener takes care of your lawn, while your undocumented Mexican plumber fixes your drainage sewer, while your undocumented Mexican nurse helps you around and reminds you of taking your scheduled prescription drugs. Just like many of your countrymen are doing right now! As Ol' Blue Eyes once said, that's life!

Before concluding, I might add that Mexico is already talking major steps to dry up the supply of undocumented Mexican workers which many USA employers got used to. For starters, Mexico is now leaning towards the socialist left after Mexican voters decided on July 2018 to kick Peña Nieto’s corrupt PRI political party out of office, likewise closing the doors on the right-wing conservative (and pro-USA pro-Republican party) PAN party, handing over the Mexican presidency to Andrés Manuel López Obrador who represents the socialist left; and all this is taking place right in the USA own backyard! What would Ronald Reagan think about this? You see, many Mexicans voters finally got fed up with the decades old tradition of relying on neighboring USA as an escape valve to poverty and unemployment in Mexico, and decided it was time for a change deleting both the PRI and the PAN from the list of viable political options. The hope is that under a new administration in Mexico targeting a decades old corrupted way of doing business economic conditions in Mexico will improve in the long run to such an extent that eventually US employers of undocumented Mexican workers will have to look somewhere else in order to find their source of cheap labor, perhaps some poor Asian country or some poor African country, for which they will have to shell out a lot of money in order to fly those guest workers from around the world all the way to the USA, at a time when the USA appears to be unprepared for the coming changes. All these factors seem to suggest to some analysts that the USA government, especially ICE, may not be very willing to deport and return to Mexico all the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Mexican farm laborers, iron works craftsmen, nurses, construction workers, janitors, carpenters, plumbers, artisans, mariachis, hotel maids, car mechanics, waitresses, painters, electricians, chambermaids, and so forth now living and working inside the USA. But if the US government wants to send them all back to Mexico (even at the expense of crashing the US economy), a mass deportation that so far hasn’t even started, all those hard working Mexican men and women will be more than welcome back in a Mexico which is awaiting their return and their expected contribution to the creation of wealth in Mexico instead of the USA, just as it should have been decades ago.

One more thing. After fading out into oblivion, please, DO NOT COME TO MEXICO AT ALL, Messr. Jeff Sessions; certainly not to Cancun, not to Puerto Vallarta, not to Acapulco, not to Mazatlan, not to Baja, not to the Mayan peninsula, not to any part of Mexico. PERIOD! You see, Messr. Sessions, you are as welcome in Mexico with the same enthusiasm as you are willing to see Mexican visitors and tourists roaming around in the USA. We Mexicans do not want bad neighbors spoiling our appetites down here in Mexico, and by golly you’re a hell of a spoiler! Yuch!