Banks’ Article Uses Legit Environmental Concerns to Spawn
Prejudice
The cover photo accompanying Leo W. Banks’ sensationalist opinion
article (“Trashing Arizona,” April 2) indicates the garbage is much
deeper than the author’s comprehension of the issue.
Banks describes legitimate environmental concern stemming from our
broken and punitive immigration system, and then bastardizes the issue
with his inflammatory, vigilante perspective on migrants.
He has no concern (and patronizingly dismisses those who do) for the
grinding poverty, political repression and trade policies that drive
people to leave their families, risk rape and death in the desert, and
discard their remaining possessions before being crammed into a
coyote’s van. “The hardship is mostly self-imposed,” he callously
states.
He uses provocative words with scant context, leaving it to readers’
fears and prejudices to fill in the blanks about this invasion of
superstitious, cholera-infected, drug smuggling, pornography-reading,
buffelgrass-sowing, desert-tortoise-eating illegal aliens. “We know the
Arabs are coming,” he warns. His blood boils when the trash indicates
migrants have been reading up on their legal rights in the United
States.
He chides environmentalists for silence on the issue, contending
they’re beholden to “open-borders liberals” for donations. I prefer to
think that the Sierra Club refuses to be hijacked by a xenophobic, “us
vs. them” agenda.
I would have expected something better from a publication that
promotes itself as the “alternative to bland daily journalism in the
Sonoran Desert.”
Keith Schaeffer
Don’t Worry About Trash; Worry About the Border Wall
You are correct, Mr. Banks: Our beautiful and fragile desert will be
scarred “into the 22nd century”—by the 307 miles of border
wall.
Last year, during the July monsoons, there was serious flooding in
downtown Nogales. I believe the flooding was traced directly to the
construction of the border wall. The wall blocks wildlife travel
corridors. I have seen video of a mother mountain lion pacing back and
forth on one side of the wall, trying to get to her cub on the other
side.
In our beautiful Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, more than 50
acres of endangered masked bobwhite quail habitat were destroyed by the
construction of the 7-mile Sasabe wall, according to the refuge
manager.
When you come across trash in the desert, we will pick it up. There
will be no long-term effect. I am sorry that cannot be said for the
border wall.
Barbara Hook
Banks Should Volunteer for No More Deaths—No
Foolin’
I hoped the April 2 cover article was an April fool’s joke, but
sadly, no. Leo W. Banks managed to surpass even Tom Danehy in the
category of “Most Idiotic Sensationalist Dribble in Print This Week.”
To Mr. Banks: Yet another ill-thought article about the border? Have
you had writer’s block for three years?
Clearly, Mr. Banks’ pressing concern is not the environment,
but rather, the brown menace. Obviously, if Banks were concerned about
the environment, he would realize that the most brutal destruction in
borderlands areas is caused by the border wall, with Border Patrol
vehicle traffic coming in second to the bulldozers. And what about all
damage to local flora when Border Patrol officers routinely intimidate
detained migrants by pushing them into cactus?
Clearly, if Mr. Banks is truly concerned about the environment, he’s
just not thinking creatively enough. What about organizing a
Hoover-ville of nouveau homeless, WPA-style, to form a Trash Brigade?
That’s some job creation! (I still miss FDR, even though I was born in
the ’70s.) Or better yet: Get Safeway and Bashas’ to donate all their
plastic bags, forcing consumers to use the inevitable reusable bags.
You could create a pulley system of trash bags … and hire some Border
Patrol schmuck to stand there, emptying the bags at the end of the
line.
Or, how about this: Mr. Banks, why don’t you come and volunteer with
No More Deaths? We pick up plenty of trash while we are out hiking the
migrant trails with gallons of water. Of course, according to the
courts, that’s technically “litter,” but what the heck: One man’s
litter is another man’s life.
Teresa Simone
And We’ll End With an Insane Comparison!
I am writing to
applaud the brilliant and resourceful solution Leo W. Banks proposes in
“Trashing Arizona”: Who better to clean up the filthy trash heaps in
the deserts than the selfish and negligent criminals who created them?
Not only would this help beautify our land, but penal labor is a
time-honored tactic to instill responsibility and work ethic. Just
think of the tremendous work done by Jews and other immigrant invaders
in the labor camps of Nazi Germany; think of all the sparkling mines
and plantations that thrived through the enslavement of indigenous
tribes in the Americas.
But why hog penal migrant labor here on the
border? Illegal immigrants could be rounded up into chain gangs to
repay the rest of society. They could dig gardens at public elementary
schools where their kids are educated. They could clean hospital rooms
where they abuse our public health-care system.
As Banks asks, before
immigrants are “pushed back into Mexico … shouldn’t we put them to
work?” Yes, we should—with work visas and paychecks, not forced
labor.
Matt Rolland
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2009.
Leo Banks hit it right on the nose. Environmental organizations are running scared of offending deep-pocketed liberal patrons. Their silence is paid for with the continuing flow of money.
People are escaping “rape and death” to flee “grinding poverty and political repression” and America is at fault for trying to protect public and private lands from the resulting destruction?
Many of the environmentalists and liberals I know seem not to want to be around Mexicans in person. They’d rather champion Hispanic rights from their distant, effete Anglo circles and avoid acknowledging that illegal immigration, in addition to creating a myriad of problems for America, amounts to out-sourced slavery.
Insane comparison, eh? It’s insane to compare (even in passing) Nazi Germany’s “labor camps” for Jews and others with Leo Banks’s proposal to extract forced labor from detained migrants in the desert–which some Border Patrol agents, according to Banks, are already doing?
Virtually every detainee in the desert is medically compromised in some way. Many are hospitalizable. Instead of removing them immediately from the hot sun that’s been slowly killing them for days or weeks, Banks and some BP agents want to “put them to work” under that same sun? It’s insane to compare that with the Nazi attitude to the undesirables of Germany?
Yes, insane. The Banks policy can surely be tempered with mercy. We know how watchful the Border Patrol is about unmet medical needs in its detention centers. It can exercise the same care in granting humanitarian exceptions to the Banks policy.
Yes, insane. The Nazi Party’s real goal, after all, was to spill as much Jewish blood as possible, not the comparatively modest goal of cleansing Germany and Europe of the “foreign” and “harmful” element of its population. They never obfuscated their hatred by rendering their victims illegal and all their actions criminal by definition. And they never indulged in sick cynical talk about the salutary effects of “Arbeit” (work).
You are right in emphasizing the comparisons are extreme. We are by no means living in an oppressive, police state like Nazi Germany. My point, however, is whether or not the principle of non-voluntary labor is acceptable. I think the suggestion that Banks’ proposal could be ‘tempered by mercy’ misses the point; if labor is forced on people, regardless of their legal status or criminal history, there is something dangerously wrong. We live in a country built on the principle of free contract, and Banks’ proposal belittles this value, even if his proposal was tongue-in-cheek.
To give Banks’ proposal merit, we should instead ask what type of practical compensation (monetary or non-monetary) could be offered to illegal immigrants in exchange for cleaning up the trash.
For the record, I did not choose the headline. That was the ‘objective’ work of the editorial staff at Tucson Weekly.