I wrote this in 2012 about DREAMers. 

The ancient peoples of what is now called Mexico rightly revered the life-giving corn that their many civilizations and great empires were built upon.  The appreciation of this bounty is still part of the cultural and spiritual identity of their present day ancestors.

The United States of America has evolved in to one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world.  The peoples who have lived in Mexico innately recognize how important corn has been to help power the economy of the United States.  Once established this power has naturally sought to keep growing and has leveraged its political influence to protect and promote its own life force.  This success in the political realm in the form of monetary support from the government has led to even greater strength beyond what is necessary for economic survival.

One can follow the natural evolution of this type of power becoming sufficiently manifested in the political realm whereby it eventually is considered to be alive.  This is how we can as a society arrive at a place where we can accept the mass consensual delusion to define as a person a corporate entity.  The concept in our legal jurisprudence of the corporate fiction seems to be expediently overlooked.

This “free-trade” subsidized corn has achieved dominance in our neighbor’s marketplace. It appears we have shown our appreciation of this treasure born in their homeland by dumping artificially cheap corn in to their environment.  Unable to successfully compete against one of the entire ecosystem’s strongest powers in the manipulated marketplace, our neighbor is motivated to seek out a different part of the ecosystem containing better opportunities.

This is the invisible hand of the market in action. This economic reality is consistently ignored in our country when attempting to explain the migration of peoples across territories.  Our neighbors come to this ecosystem striving to inhabit a niche where they can create a viable livelihood.  This means performing the more difficult jobs that our populace is no longer willing to do.  These migrating peoples definitely cross political boundaries, but it is worth considering in the moral analysis that these lines are another convenient fiction that we have created.

We allow our neighbors to absorb our cultural genetic material while they are investing their own sweat equity in our economic success.  Then when our own economy is struggling, we regretfully inform them that they are no longer welcome and that their services will no longer required.  Does not this person whom we forcibly return to a now foreign environment run the risk of being rejected and alienated by their original ecosystem who no longer recognizes them?

So can we get honest with ourselves?  The hand is not invisible – it is right there in front of our faces.

We dumped artificially inexpensive corn on our neighbors.  This sufficiently disrupted their livelihoods that they made an economic decision to emigrate to a land with greater opportunity. After advantageously extracting the value of their labor arbitrage due to their undocumented status, we are more comfortable granting personhood to the corporations that helped create their economic migration in the first place in preference to those emigrants who came here because of it. And then our final politically expedient solution is to return them to their original homeland where their burden is no longer our responsibility.

We have access to guidance from a sacred story of an agricultural market crash and of its effect on migration.  The story is of a people who crossed political, religious and cultural boundaries to obtain food for their livelihood and for people in their homeland.  These people eventually migrated their entire tribe to this new land leaving behind the home they chose to flee as economic refugees.  These spiritual predecessors became assimilated and then exploited and mistreated and eventually rose up out of their oppression. Their liberation and redemption is a story that is continually unfolding today through their spiritual inheritors.

Is not the legacy of this story, which is part of our country’s fabric that we are to take care of the stranger in our strange land and welcome him as our honored guest?  Is not the moral imperative even greater when this neighbor came here through the economic force of our own collective hands?  Do we not have a shared responsibility to allow our neighbors living with us in this land to have access to their full cultural American identity regardless of their political status?  These people who live here and believe in this great country are our neighbors no longer.  They are now part of our family and we should fully admit them in to our nation.  We should work together to prolong their stay permanently, allowing and supporting their full contribution to and participation in this great American dream.