Journal #15

After reading "Border Patrol State", my biggest qualm with it is first of all that the Border Patrol is setting up checkpoints so far from the border.  95 miles away is ludicrous. The likelihood they actually catch someone that far from the border is slim.  It is also unbelievable that they stop people based on their color.  In Arizona, Latinos and Native Americans make up about 35% of the population.  If they detain and/or search every "brown" person, they would be doing so to about every third car.  And then there was the incident of Michael Elmer who shot a man in the back and hid his body yet was acquitted of murder on a self-defense claim.  Hearing about these kind of things happening in my own back yard, as I'm sure there are instances of such things in Texas as well, almost makes me ashamed of our government.  Its true that these are illegal immigrants, but they are still people and deserve to be treated as people.  If an officer shot an American citizen in the back, hid his body and then admitted to it in court he would be in jail for a long, long time.  By letting this man walk we are dehumanizing our Latino neighbors.  

I really like when Silko calls the situation of borde crossing as "the great human migration".  Describing  it as a force of nature that cannot and should not be stopped.  The anecdote at the end about the Indians riding in and on the train provided very good imagery to that idea of a force of nature.