Prosperous societies require cheap labor and always have. In the case of the USA, while legions of young people are chasing rainbows pursuing college degrees and 'startups' with other people's money, the unthinkable failure they all are running from is the idea that they might ever have to get their hands dirty doing some real work, which is best left to those invisible and anonymous 'others' who will.
What should be done? Look at your own lifestyle, and take a thought or two to who it was that had stitched those garments, cleaned those hotel rooms, mined that lithium (!), picked those crops, and washed those dishes for you, so you didn't have to, because you preferred not to even think about what, and who, it is that truly makes your own comforts and amenities possible at all.
The people you saw in the video above are sneaking into the U.S. without following the law. We've already got millions ready to do jobs that most of us wouldn't touch. But when millions more show up expecting work, housing and food (and cell phones) without going through the right channels, it just adds to our problems. Think about it, can we just stroll into another country, let’s say, Canada, without following their rules and not expect to be sent packing back to the U.S.?
My friend, you are reciting narratives. What I saw in the video was people with a camera pointed at them, by other people I don't have any particular reason to assume are acting in good faith. In the broader portrait of claims being made by one faction or another about immigration, is there really any reason to assume that what ANY of them has to say is in good faith? If not, the narratives they traffic in, and expect you to circulate for them, are meaningless.
Arguably yes, or no, only depending on how wide a lens we decide to look through. What we are witnessing with illegal immigration, whether in the USA or anywhere else in the world (where it is also commonplace, well-established and with deep historic roots), is the everyday conduct of an industrial enterprise: the transporting of cheap labor from one location to another.
On the other hand, I think we have to consider the effect of today's permanent and reliable presence of smart-phone cameras with instantaneous global access: point a camera at someone and they are wittingly or unwittingly then putting on a show, and a purely two-dimensional one. The end product is a 16x9 frame which excludes anything else going on, and can be presented as factual in itself when there is really never any reason to assume that we know what it is we're really seeing. How this CBS news team of middle-class career aspirants ever got this tip on where to go and who to expect to film, or what they were told about what their own resulting images could be spun to mean, or what their corporate higher-ups had in mind with authorizing the coverage of this particular story in the first place, or just how accurate or representative their cited statistics really are.... none of that shows up in that frame. We see what a handful of ignorant yuppies wanted us to see, when they didn't even know for themselves what it was they were seeing.
As usual, the everyday media recitation of packaged narratives using props and probably staged human extras, is not and never will be any adequate substitute for genuine knowledge, of this or any other topic.
Certainly entertaining though; this kind of provocateurism using high technology to reduce reality to a 16x9 frame usually is, because it's meant to be.
I'll include a favorite quote I have used for years as a kind of benchmark/reality-check on whether or not to regard media imagery as reliable:
'No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.'
Leonard Schapiro, 'The Communist Party of the Soviet Union', Vintage Books 1971, p477
In a 'free' society such as we like to think we enjoy, the only real difference with the kind of propaganda we are all inundated with on a nonstop basis (advertising being the most pervasive), is that more than one force or faction is competing to have you buy into their bullshit. But it's always about that uniform pattern versus that jarring dissonance, the overall subliminal message being:
"Don't get caught not thinking correctly, according to us."
This is two different and not necessarily equivalent inquiries, but I'll give it a go.
Do I think this was staged? Of course I do, even if only in the Shakespearean sense that all the world is a stage. Tens of thousands of very real migrants making the very real trek from South or Central America to the US-Mexico border are definitely undergoing something very un-theatrical, each with their own motives and goals which are probably as genuine as any human undertaking gets. But whoever or whatever is facilitating these mass exoduses must certainly have some further goals in mind, in terms of how the resulting images play on news broadcasts and social media, and how such mass displacement of humanity as a whole might play in international politics. In this sense, everyone undertaking such a journey has been recruited (probably quite unwittingly) as extras in a cinematic exercise of non-state power on a massive scale, the primary objective there being probably to show that such power exists outside the reach and grasp of any government, and that even to explore what forces and factions might actually be causing all this is probably beyond the scope of any one state's skills to ascertain, much less intervene against.
Curiously, few seem motivated to even venture a guess as to WHY anyone would set such a vast organizational enterprise in motion, one which must involve the assets and territories of multiple nations, and one which apparently moves the poorest of the poor in a direction (toward the USA) which offers neither themselves nor their creditor-transporters much prospect of any of them becoming less poor once they get here. So how is setting tens of thousands of souls on a path through such daunting obstacles as the Darien Gap or the Panamanian jungle or the closed borders of Nicaragua or the death-trains from one end of Mexico to the other, profitable to anyone?
Unless it makes one hell of a show, and the movement of people is less important than the larger gains to be found by proving that someone can?
If there are actually anything like the numbers of Chinese nationals as claimed here (and frankly, thirty-five thousand of them is hardly a drop in that particular bucket), then I'm prone to at least hypothesize that the Beijing state itself has sent them, possibly with the same goal of simply fomenting chaos and stoking domestic divisions within American politics as the Kremlin has found so favorable a methodology in recent years. Money itself to be collected as a kind of transport fee might not even have anything to do with it, when proving that China can dump a few of its citizens in our laps any time it wants to might serve some far more elaborate project in US-China relations. America is a country where the historic relevance of events is measured in four-year blocks at best, while it is plain that the historic vision of the Chinese state is more a matter of centuries, both in terms of what has come before and what may be yet to come.
So it isn't so much a question of WHETHER these crossings are staged, but why, and by whom, and to what end? The very fact that the American imagination is too stumped by geostrategic international intrigue to call it anything but a conspiracy theory has value all by itself, though we may not know of what nature or to whom.
As for the other half of the question, yes of course plenty of people are crossing in this manner. So many, in fact, and mostly under unimaginably dire constraints and at staggering personal risk, that it probably isn't all that hard to gather up a few, drive them to a selected spot, show them the hole in the fence, and instruct them to smile for the cameras waiting for them on the other side.
Why do that? Why do any of this? Just because American media audiences demand either an instant and easy explanation or a dismissive epithet such as 'conspiracy theory' to wave away things we don't want to be bothered with comprehending on a global and epochal scale, doesn't mean that anyone else is constrained by so little knowledge or such enthusiasm about keeping it that way.
Which means that we don't have a goddamn clue about what is really causing such mass migration, and consequently not even the remotest chance of stopping it or even slowing it down appreciably, until we decide to learn in detail what is really going on. I don't hold out any prospect that Americans will suddenly shed their revulsion toward history or their extremely limited and imperialistic views toward other peoples of the world, and so we're probably set to be played for fools at our own borders for generations to come.
(In case you hadn't noticed, we pretty much always had been. Two thousand miles of Mexican border plus another three separating us from Canada, almost all of it through remote wilderness, are the very archetype of 'open borders' and have never been otherwise. We're just being instructed to notice now, for the time being, and I'd be interested in knowing why that is too, and who benefits.)
Basically, what I keep trying to point out on this or any other trending topic, is that there are already two opposing narratives assigned to it: one for a 'conservative' audience predisposed to suspect and heap contempt on everything which violates their comfort zone without knowing anything about anything that does, and a more or less 'liberal' audience which is pre-indoctrinated to call everything outside their comfort zone 'fascism' and also never bother to know anything about it. The way to analyze news items for me is not about how credible or plausible the story sounds, but about which pre-determined narrative the story is required to serve. The stories themselves remain subordinate to the narrative: if you can actually isolate a fact or two from among all the hypnotic suggestions and ideological cues and broad uninformed generalizations they are buried under, well done, but this is the exception and not the rule.
Not exactly: it's more a question of whether the observer, in this case a CBS news team sent to cover a story, has any real idea of what it is they're seeing. From what I have observed of the excessive credulity and utter lack of investigative skill in the 'journalism' trade generally these days, I can't assume they had the least clue what these images really represent. They are meant to augment a narrative based on statistics, but they may, or they may not. It could just be that somebody had a tip on some Asian-looking people crossing a line on a map, and the rest of the 'story' is just filled in to support the narrative aimed at a target audience.
Prosperous societies require cheap labor and always have. In the case of the USA, while legions of young people are chasing rainbows pursuing college degrees and 'startups' with other people's money, the unthinkable failure they all are running from is the idea that they might ever have to get their hands dirty doing some real work, which is best left to those invisible and anonymous 'others' who will.
What should be done? Look at your own lifestyle, and take a thought or two to who it was that had stitched those garments, cleaned those hotel rooms, mined that lithium (!), picked those crops, and washed those dishes for you, so you didn't have to, because you preferred not to even think about what, and who, it is that truly makes your own comforts and amenities possible at all.
The people you saw in the video above are sneaking into the U.S. without following the law. We've already got millions ready to do jobs that most of us wouldn't touch. But when millions more show up expecting work, housing and food (and cell phones) without going through the right channels, it just adds to our problems. Think about it, can we just stroll into another country, let’s say, Canada, without following their rules and not expect to be sent packing back to the U.S.?
My friend, you are reciting narratives. What I saw in the video was people with a camera pointed at them, by other people I don't have any particular reason to assume are acting in good faith. In the broader portrait of claims being made by one faction or another about immigration, is there really any reason to assume that what ANY of them has to say is in good faith? If not, the narratives they traffic in, and expect you to circulate for them, are meaningless.
Isn’t that a completely separate topic?
Arguably yes, or no, only depending on how wide a lens we decide to look through. What we are witnessing with illegal immigration, whether in the USA or anywhere else in the world (where it is also commonplace, well-established and with deep historic roots), is the everyday conduct of an industrial enterprise: the transporting of cheap labor from one location to another.
On the other hand, I think we have to consider the effect of today's permanent and reliable presence of smart-phone cameras with instantaneous global access: point a camera at someone and they are wittingly or unwittingly then putting on a show, and a purely two-dimensional one. The end product is a 16x9 frame which excludes anything else going on, and can be presented as factual in itself when there is really never any reason to assume that we know what it is we're really seeing. How this CBS news team of middle-class career aspirants ever got this tip on where to go and who to expect to film, or what they were told about what their own resulting images could be spun to mean, or what their corporate higher-ups had in mind with authorizing the coverage of this particular story in the first place, or just how accurate or representative their cited statistics really are.... none of that shows up in that frame. We see what a handful of ignorant yuppies wanted us to see, when they didn't even know for themselves what it was they were seeing.
As usual, the everyday media recitation of packaged narratives using props and probably staged human extras, is not and never will be any adequate substitute for genuine knowledge, of this or any other topic.
Certainly entertaining though; this kind of provocateurism using high technology to reduce reality to a 16x9 frame usually is, because it's meant to be.
I'll include a favorite quote I have used for years as a kind of benchmark/reality-check on whether or not to regard media imagery as reliable:
'No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.'
Leonard Schapiro, 'The Communist Party of the Soviet Union', Vintage Books 1971, p477
In a 'free' society such as we like to think we enjoy, the only real difference with the kind of propaganda we are all inundated with on a nonstop basis (advertising being the most pervasive), is that more than one force or faction is competing to have you buy into their bullshit. But it's always about that uniform pattern versus that jarring dissonance, the overall subliminal message being:
"Don't get caught not thinking correctly, according to us."
Do you think this was staged, and no one is crossing into the country in this manner?
This is two different and not necessarily equivalent inquiries, but I'll give it a go.
Do I think this was staged? Of course I do, even if only in the Shakespearean sense that all the world is a stage. Tens of thousands of very real migrants making the very real trek from South or Central America to the US-Mexico border are definitely undergoing something very un-theatrical, each with their own motives and goals which are probably as genuine as any human undertaking gets. But whoever or whatever is facilitating these mass exoduses must certainly have some further goals in mind, in terms of how the resulting images play on news broadcasts and social media, and how such mass displacement of humanity as a whole might play in international politics. In this sense, everyone undertaking such a journey has been recruited (probably quite unwittingly) as extras in a cinematic exercise of non-state power on a massive scale, the primary objective there being probably to show that such power exists outside the reach and grasp of any government, and that even to explore what forces and factions might actually be causing all this is probably beyond the scope of any one state's skills to ascertain, much less intervene against.
Curiously, few seem motivated to even venture a guess as to WHY anyone would set such a vast organizational enterprise in motion, one which must involve the assets and territories of multiple nations, and one which apparently moves the poorest of the poor in a direction (toward the USA) which offers neither themselves nor their creditor-transporters much prospect of any of them becoming less poor once they get here. So how is setting tens of thousands of souls on a path through such daunting obstacles as the Darien Gap or the Panamanian jungle or the closed borders of Nicaragua or the death-trains from one end of Mexico to the other, profitable to anyone?
Unless it makes one hell of a show, and the movement of people is less important than the larger gains to be found by proving that someone can?
If there are actually anything like the numbers of Chinese nationals as claimed here (and frankly, thirty-five thousand of them is hardly a drop in that particular bucket), then I'm prone to at least hypothesize that the Beijing state itself has sent them, possibly with the same goal of simply fomenting chaos and stoking domestic divisions within American politics as the Kremlin has found so favorable a methodology in recent years. Money itself to be collected as a kind of transport fee might not even have anything to do with it, when proving that China can dump a few of its citizens in our laps any time it wants to might serve some far more elaborate project in US-China relations. America is a country where the historic relevance of events is measured in four-year blocks at best, while it is plain that the historic vision of the Chinese state is more a matter of centuries, both in terms of what has come before and what may be yet to come.
So it isn't so much a question of WHETHER these crossings are staged, but why, and by whom, and to what end? The very fact that the American imagination is too stumped by geostrategic international intrigue to call it anything but a conspiracy theory has value all by itself, though we may not know of what nature or to whom.
As for the other half of the question, yes of course plenty of people are crossing in this manner. So many, in fact, and mostly under unimaginably dire constraints and at staggering personal risk, that it probably isn't all that hard to gather up a few, drive them to a selected spot, show them the hole in the fence, and instruct them to smile for the cameras waiting for them on the other side.
Why do that? Why do any of this? Just because American media audiences demand either an instant and easy explanation or a dismissive epithet such as 'conspiracy theory' to wave away things we don't want to be bothered with comprehending on a global and epochal scale, doesn't mean that anyone else is constrained by so little knowledge or such enthusiasm about keeping it that way.
Which means that we don't have a goddamn clue about what is really causing such mass migration, and consequently not even the remotest chance of stopping it or even slowing it down appreciably, until we decide to learn in detail what is really going on. I don't hold out any prospect that Americans will suddenly shed their revulsion toward history or their extremely limited and imperialistic views toward other peoples of the world, and so we're probably set to be played for fools at our own borders for generations to come.
(In case you hadn't noticed, we pretty much always had been. Two thousand miles of Mexican border plus another three separating us from Canada, almost all of it through remote wilderness, are the very archetype of 'open borders' and have never been otherwise. We're just being instructed to notice now, for the time being, and I'd be interested in knowing why that is too, and who benefits.)
It sounds as if you don’t think this is actually happening.
Basically, what I keep trying to point out on this or any other trending topic, is that there are already two opposing narratives assigned to it: one for a 'conservative' audience predisposed to suspect and heap contempt on everything which violates their comfort zone without knowing anything about anything that does, and a more or less 'liberal' audience which is pre-indoctrinated to call everything outside their comfort zone 'fascism' and also never bother to know anything about it. The way to analyze news items for me is not about how credible or plausible the story sounds, but about which pre-determined narrative the story is required to serve. The stories themselves remain subordinate to the narrative: if you can actually isolate a fact or two from among all the hypnotic suggestions and ideological cues and broad uninformed generalizations they are buried under, well done, but this is the exception and not the rule.
Not exactly: it's more a question of whether the observer, in this case a CBS news team sent to cover a story, has any real idea of what it is they're seeing. From what I have observed of the excessive credulity and utter lack of investigative skill in the 'journalism' trade generally these days, I can't assume they had the least clue what these images really represent. They are meant to augment a narrative based on statistics, but they may, or they may not. It could just be that somebody had a tip on some Asian-looking people crossing a line on a map, and the rest of the 'story' is just filled in to support the narrative aimed at a target audience.