By Paul Weiser
This happened to me: addressing an older teen-ager or low twenty-something I asked him, politely, to move his truck. Maybe I was too polite, but his look of blank incomprehension was so freighted with fear there could be no doubt he'd missed the boat completely.
Given the other choice was the obvious ("Move your dam' truck!"), I tried increased subtlety: "The cops usually come through here around midnight, and your truck has expired paper license plates. If you park it over there," pointing, "with the back end hidden, they might miss it." Which the kid understood perfectly, thanked me, and hastened to comply.
The same kind of thing routinely happens with Mexicans (read, illegal immigrants). Their mode is dumb incomprehension when it's something they might not want to understand, but intelligent application of their 75- word English vocabulary when it's to their advantage. And about half those 75 words are terms of abuse if that will get them something they want. The first English word illegals learn, it seems, is "racist!" as an all-purpose response to being caught.
What we have here is wilful refusal to communicate, founded on rotten education (in Mexico as well as the US - too many, if not most, are functionally illiterate in all languages including their own, and the American underclass vocabulary matches the Mexican in its impoverishment). The requirement that legitimate candidates for US citizenship learn English is not a foolish whim: partly- or mostly-real incomprehension is deadly dangerous in emergencies.
But it's also very useful to coyotes, fixers and other exploitive low-lifes who rob the uneducated, dumb, and resentful by providing limited and lying access to what they could get themselves - even in Mexico - if they knew how to ask. This, not illegals dying in the desert, is the real tragedy.
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