THE MONSTERS DEVOURING US

How can a man or woman, in this country illegally, working for a few bucks an hour, save up enough money for the thousands of dollars it will take to become citizens of the United States? This is just one of the twisted paragraphs in the Immigration Bill, which leads a person to wonder if our politicians have completely lost their minds.

They aren't talking about a handful of people, pitifully poor, who are pleading for help. They are talking about some 12 to 20 million people whom we are told are pitifully poor, coming into this country and taking American jobs, while demanding their right to be here.

I have been told that many of them have had to pay "coyotes" thousands of dollars to lead them across the border. If this is the case, how can they be called desperately poor? The desperate poor do not have thousands of dollars to spare. The desperately poor spend every penny they make on food and shelter and giving basic necessities to their children.

We have many jobless people in the United States, especially in the State of Michigan, which has had to contend with the huge layoffs by the Big Three auto companies. As the companies gear up to go global, Michigan workers are finding their salaries dropping in half or worse as they accept other jobs, or they have no jobs at all. Some have fled to other states, but even there, the pickin's are poor...as my mother would have said.

Now Bush wants to extend a Guest Worker Program in with this citizenship deal. This, he says, is to fill the jobs Americans don't want. You want to bet, George Bush? Can Americans apply for Guest Worker status? Why not give it a try and see how many desperately sliding- into- poor Americans might apply for the jobs?

My heart aches for any poor person worried about putting the next meal on the table, but 20 million newcomers is going a bit too far. I doubt if George Bush gives up a thing for these 20 million people....not his job, not his home, not an ounce of his worry. He may have an Illegal or two working on his Texas ranch. He may have a housemaid, a gardener, and barn help. I'll bet it pleases him, this millionaire, to pay them a pittance. And it must please him that other millionaires just like himself can enjoy the cheap maids, gardeners, and barn help. And the rich corporate bosses that he hobnobs with at various functions, how pleased he will be to see how they will welcome him.

In the meantime, the American worker is fraught with worry. If they do have jobs, they worry about replacement. Every time you make a telephone call to any company, if you ever do get past the computerized answers to reach a real person, it is someone with an accent, perhaps from India or God knows where. It is seldom an American, because why should American companies or huge corporations hire Americans. They want Americans to buy their goods, not serve as employees. Americans might ask for decent pay and that would cut the profits!

But, what happens when Americans become so poor, they can't buy the high-priced goods put out by these companies? What happens when Americans can no longer buy televisions, radios, telephones, etc? Who buys them then? Let them peddle those prices over in China or India. Let's see if they can afford it.

We remain the consumers. We have more junk around our homes than in city dumps, a majority of it made in foreign lands, where salaries are lower. Most of our homes are loaded with this junk. Familes have several TV sets, two or three cars, radios, telephones, video players, etc. Our children have every toy possible, with rooms filled with teddy bears and stuffed animals of all kinds. Oh, the profits we have given those huge corporations! They are so profitable they honor their CEO's with enough money to feed a Third World country for a year or longer!

We have created these huge corporations, have supported them with our consumerism, our spending habits. Now, they want to cut our throats, lower our salaries, bring in millions of cheaper employees. We, the American people, have created huge, profit-loving, ungrateful and disloyal conglomerates that rule our land. We have nurtured monsters that now threaten to devour us. And, if we do not waste away quickly enough to please them, these monsters, they will bring in 20 million others to whittle away our opportunities and step on our toes until we cry out in pain while admitting our status as mere peasants, unworthy of decent lives.

So, when one reads this Immigration Bill, crazy as it is, one must realize that its purpose is not a humanitarian effort to help the desperate poor, but an overt effort to turn the formerly proud and prosperous American into the status of the desperate poor. Our corporations have outgrown us, and now they want to move on to greater profits, while leaving Americans like so many spent bullets and fragments of weapons lying uselessly in a field of battle.

Keep your Illegal Immigrants, Mr. President. Keep your maids, your gardeners, your barn help that mucks out your stalls. You allowed them to continue to enter this country long after everyone has known what a problem they had become. You ignore our laws as though you are not a mere American citizen, but a dictator similar to others we have seen. You are several years too late in solving this problem and what you are suggesting is not a solution at all, but a slap in the face of every American worker, every American family, every American dream.