[T]e populace is by nature fickle; it easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to confirm them in that persuasion. Therefore one must urgently arrange matters so that when they not longer believe they can be made to believe by force".
The Prince, N. Machiavelli


In the summer of 2007 a young collaborator of the Ohio University paper The Post wrote a humiliating article about “alien mariachis” in Athens (the author lately explained that they were not supposed to be Mexicans) he used a purportedly funny tone to say that illegal immigrants were not welcome in this country. One friend of mine sent me an email attaching the article and after reading it I realized that this was the beginning of a massive attack on southern immigrants in the near future. I looked at other University campuses around the country and I found in the summer of 2007 other examples of cartoons and articles targeting the same enemy and stirring the same yellow press rhetoric. So I was convinced that this discrimination against immigrants was going to enact the new political border among people in the US where the line has already been drawn in the document ENDGAME, proposing a new attack on the US internal population by the same people who keep repeating "Vayan con Dios".
The official line between US and the Other, will not be drawn among races, gender or sexual preferences but between aliens and citizens (which is in fact another euphemism since most immigrants targeted are non-whites).

Drawing the line between citizens and non-citizens is at least an exercise of historical amnesia. This policy attempts to use facts to delete all arguments about the benevolence of globalization, this practice makes clear that population movements to the North are not desirable for globalization; it should be by now very obvious that globalization is about movements of capital and merchandise but not about the movement of civilians desperate to survive. The message is direct and present: dark people should remain working or starving very far away from the sight of the civilized region, since they represent a manifold threat to the first world normalized way of life. It is at the core of this realization that dark people are not only by far the majority of the world population but the most prolific as well. This fact gives white supremacists the justification to put an end to this "threatening scenario"
Due to the institutional civilized fear, mainstream people share, aliens are a threat in many areas such as the economy, national security, white race purity, historical memory, religious believes, national IQ and so on. Although these institutional ideas are repressed in the public sphere they remain alive and well in the private one and all the collective unconscious of mainstream America. These fears only need to be stirred by patriotism and pride to become a weapon.
The reaction after September 11 should not be taken lightly. Profiling and isolating the enemy is one of the basic tactics to start any repressive operation. But on the other hand attacking the dark, disenfranchised poor does not serve the best strategic interest of any poor person in any segment of the human rainbow. Machiavelli also advised here: there are two ways to win a war: attacking the enemy or creating a civil war among them.
In the second place, drawing the line in citizenship, also functions as an invitation for the dark skinned citizens of the US to become finally part of the great American family. The ripple effect of this pseudo incorporation strategy causes new divisions among “Mexicans”, “Guatemalans”, “Hondurans” etc. Between citizens and non-citizens. This atmosphere facilitates the artificial division between the assimilated and the illegal Latino, fracturing any strength within the oppressed community. From the turning of the XIX century to the nineteen thirties, government and its allies, the corporations, utilized this same strategy of fragmentation through its attack on labor unions. Using many strategies such as Taylorism, Fordism, the Great Depression, War, etc. they finally stopped the workers struggle by creating a higher standard of living in the US thanks to the prolific exploitation of the third world and a good dose of internal repression. In this sense we can observe how the last thirty years show a gradual movement of separation between ethnic groups. More and more Blacks and Latinos have been hired as guards, policeman, leaders, and informers of their own people. Divide and conquer goes the saying and this is exactly what occurred and is occurring now.
In the third place this situation is aggravated by the silence of common people, some good people, that would do something otherwise, but since they do not hear anything in the news or their normalized social interactions they finally do not even have the possibility of hearing about it. The knowledge or ignorance of the civil population regardingthe concentration camps coexisting with their “normal” life in Nazi Germany is a good illustration of this. Most of the average German citizens assure us they did not have any information about the mass extermination of Jews and other species in WWII. The question is why? It is strange, since, in reality, the transport trains and the incineration operations were impossible to conceal from the population entirely. They did not see and smell the bodies or they could not see and smell them because they were already invisible from the normal route of normal life?
This takes us to our last problem, the problem of human invisibility .The transparency of the undesirable which is the forth implication of this kind of immigration policy.
The undesirable (the poor, “the sick”, the mad person, the illegal, the transsexual, the dark man, etc.) are like the industrial parts of the city, hidden, contaminated and forgotten. These are the places we avoid rather than drive through because of the potential danger, the ugliness and the unbearable desolation. In fact this metaphorical relationship between the abject area of the city and the abject human being is also a real relation between the undesirables and the spaces they inhabit. They, we, I should say, are invisible because we belong to a world that is perceived as a burden to civilization. The official discourse has established the Western cultural standard as their yard stick against which everything else should be compared and judged. The other world is where they find craft, dance and sickness. Progress and evolution, two of the main Western ideological foundations are at the core of this picture.

Now, going a little bit back in Western History we can better situate the Holocaust as a massacre not just because most of the people killed were Jews but because of the very crime of mass murdering innocent people. It is the act not the target population that makes the Holocaust wrong. Reading it otherwise is not only an ideological trap but it means aligning us with the rationality of the mass murderers. It is an ideological reading, a mental trap. It is indeed a reading from the perspective of the oppressor not the oppressed, an official interpretation, since for even any average person the massacre of Jews, Gypsies, communists and homosexuals in Nazi Germany meant a crime against humanity as a whole that is the nature of the crime. In fact, rejecting the Holocaust means rejecting Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, Gaza Strip, Iraq, and all genocides for once and for all. The last camp must have been a Nazi camp. Nonetheless now we have Guantanamo, Extraordinary Renditions and all these repressive measures that put the blame on the victim and affect the whole world with a contagious schizophrenia.
At this moment, if we observe the domestic sphere we notice it is becoming ready for internal colonization. If we read the Military Commission Act of 2006, which fine-tuned the former legal destruction of Habeas Corpus after 9/11, we should remain alert.
3. ICE Raids are at the core of the leading elite project of Corporate America. They belong to a bio-political project. Born scientifically at the end of the XVIII Century with the work of Malthus and his fixation for reducing by starvation and neglect the marginal world population to let white Europe live. This is the momentum Foucault calls the beginning of bio-politics, which was the way the racist state of the XIX and XX century replaced the concept of sovereignty (power and right over the spaces) to bio-politics (The power of the state to hold direct control and manipulation of the subject’s body). The most radical example again in his view is Nazi Germany’s sterilization, vaccination, euthanasia and extermination programs. The German control of the body for Foucault is not just a case of study for Germany but for the very conception of the Western State in its contemporary form.
The main objectives of the ICE raids are economical and juridical at the perceptual level but racist at the strategic one. It is clear after we read from the “Office of Detention and Removal Strategic Plan the ENDGAME document that America’s leadership wants to modify U.S. demographics. In the short term by 2012 they will be using separation, confrontation and the incarceration of the civil population to achieve these goals. In Columbus time the border was drawn in terms of the soul, between the Spaniards with soul and the Indians without one. With the formation of the republic, their distinction was made in relation to the collective subject US, “We the people”. Now the difference was created between citizen and non-citizen: between people and non people. Rich male whites were people, Indians and blacks were not. Today since speaking of race is a politically incorrect discourse the citizenship divide is a handy alternative.
In this very moment, I perceive the real problem is the perpetuation of ICE raids as a normalized practice of human removal and at the same time the suppression of human compassion.
The fact that these escalating attacks are synchronized with the present financial crisis adds a complex dimension to the problem. The new Depression will multiply poverty and desperation for the unemployed. The climax will arise when unskilled citizens will not be able to satisfy their basic needs, the new poor and part of the population will blame the government, but the government will be protected because the poor undocumented illegal families will provide the perfect victim to blame for the problem.
Bio-power authority will have the opportunity to dispose these undocumented people according to their needs since there is no Habeas Corpus to protect these victims. The possible scenario for the disposal of these people should not be left to blind trust. Since there is a good chance (perhaps by involuntary confusion) that they will be classified as enemy combatants and their bodies jailed or disposed in case of Marshal Law.
The last ICE operation has been escalating and every new raid has been becoming the biggest in U.S. history. Since the beginning of the summer 2008 they have raided Idaho, Mississippi, California. In each raid 600 to 800 people have been detained, hand cuffed, marked with electronic tracing devices, etc. The government is arguing this is a good thing since it will give back jobs to the people who deserve them the most. So the topic of jobs is one of the hot issues today. The ideal new hatred paradigm will include: Whites, blacks and brown citizens, against small brown and black families of illegal aliens.
At the same time from the last bank consolidation there are only three main banks left in the U.S.: Chase Manhattan, Citi and the Bank of America, after the consolidation the government bailed out 700 billion dollars to bad debts, 85 billions to AIG as a subsidy, and the new 250 billion announced last week by George Bush to help some of those same banks. Only with this executive measures each American citizen owes more than $8.000.- today (CNN). The lesson to be learned here is that all profits are private and all losses are public.
So that is the situation we might face in the near future: Unemployment, inflation, homelessness, xenophobia, hunger, imprisonment, fear and confusion. We will also have a consolidated banking system and an extraordinary powerful army with the power to create earthquakes and viruses targeting specific DNA and a well-controlled press to say what is necessary according to the needs of the market.