Take Me To Mexicotown!

[from 7/14/10]

Let’s talk about immigration reform!

Why the heck not? Everyone else is talking about it! Obama is talking about it. Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin are talking about it. John McCain is talking about it. They’re talking about it on the corner by Home Depot.

But, NO! On closer inspection, no one is talking about what matters. As always it is up to ME, © Dr. Wes Browning, to get down to the heart, or the corazon, of the immigration issue. Namely, 1) how do we profit from it for now? and 2) when do we throw in the towel?

As always, please, PLEASE, do NOT hurt the “humor” columnist!

All right. By “we” I mean of course us, the non-immigrants, as opposed to them, the Mexicans and the Arabs (I’m being inclusive here so, for example, I'm counting Blacks as part of “we” unless they’re Jamaicans = French Mexicans.) We are already profiting from immigration.

If it weren’t for immigration, we’d find out that individual Russet potatoes, properly grown and raised by individual proper born grown and raised Americans, would cost more than individual US dollars, and broccoli would be $20 a pound. We couldn’t therefore afford to eat, so we’d be a starving Third World Country, so the Mexicans would stop coming here, and go to Belgium instead, problem solved, at our loss.

But we need to find better ways to exploit immigrants. I am going to go way out on a limb here and heartily recommend something we’ve already done. I’m recommending Mexicotown!

Every large city should have a Mexicotown! They’ve had one in New York for years; they built it for Puerto Rican Mexicans. They have one in Los Angeles; they call it “LA”. They have one in Detroit, specially designed for Arab Mexicans.

Here in Seattle we believe in diversity and multiversity and inversity and reversity and all those fine versity-things, so just like we let all kinds of Chinese in our Chinatown, even Kamchatkans, so we should open up our Mexicotown to all kinds of Mexicans from the get go, even Lebanese Mexicans.

The advantages of having a Mexicotown are multitudinous. It would be a tourist magnet. Who wants to come here to see people like us? They have Starbucks everywhere for that. It might take awhile, but eventually I’d expect to be able to find a decent burrito in Seattle, if we had a Mexicotown.

It would make living in Laurelhurst more bearable (a place to get away from Laurelhurst).

Now let's get to the other really important question: When do we give up?

I think the answer should be "soon." I say we suck this Mexicotown idea dry until that cash cow goes belly up, then we admit to ourselves that this whole Anglo culture business is a bit of a fraud (what culture?) and pack it.

I'm not necessarily saying we go back to England, Ireland, or Africa, or wherever we came from. I'm saying we quit Christianity for Catholicism, and learn to speak Mexican.

There's nothing special about Anglo culture that makes it one damn bit better than anyone elses culture. We all know deep down inside that the real reason we're dragging our feet on the whole immigration issue is we don't want to face that fact squarely and stop denying it.

Stop thinking that if the United States became Hispanic we couldn't have a manned space program, because you can't do a manned space program in Spanish. Hello? We don't have a manned space program in English.

Stop thinking if we all had to learn Spanish in school it would stop us getting into Yale. If you didn't need to know fifteen pronunciations for the spelling "-ough", you wouldn't need to go to Yale.

Stop thinking that without English we couldn’t follow Craig Ferguson or understand Ludacris. We don’t do those things now.

Whereas, in Spanish we’d get ten times the soap operas!