Freedom and Reason in the United States and the World
Alfred Brock February 25, 2025
The reason I am writing to you is that the people of the United States, Canada and even many of the people who remain in the afflicted nations, are unaware of the real and human pressures that are forcing people to emigrate from their countries and try to reach the United States.
The current ‘common sense’ view of the millions of people fleeing their homes is that they want to go the United States for an ‘easy’ life, to get rich quick and steal jobs. Other popular view points pushed on the public include referring to the immigrants as criminals and people with severe mental problems, violent and dangerous.
It turns out that the majority of the people making their way to the United States from Central and South America are literally being driven out by their governments directly, or by private companies and landowners desiring to increase their holdings and wealth. In some cases farming practices that included slash and burn and the application of heavy amounts of chemical poisons and fertilizers for the crops destroyed the land. In one notable case, the banana industry has, for more than a century, expanded their planting area while abandoning land they abandon when it is exhausted or has become infected with virus and other banana plant diseases.
In Guatemala, the government itself is charged with using its national airline to fly millions of emigrants to the United States. The charges are incredible – yet – where is the reporting? Where has the truth been told?
Only in certain, small areas. Now, for the first time, a complete set of these abuses is set forth in one book. The actual pressures represented here are far more daunting and painful. This book is intended to start the change in coverage and understanding.
Americans, quite plainly, are being lied to about what is going on right now. The people who are swept up in this storm – if they enter the United States, will have problems. If they are forced to go back – what do you think may happen?
Will those tragic stories be covered up by silence and untruth as well?
Here are the two books I have for you – same story – one in English and one in Spanish – found on Amazon in soft and hard cover as well as in Kindle :
(Prices are reasonable – and provide you with an opportunity to share the book with someone else in printed form – electronic version mentioned below as well)
Strangers Among You
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D32HK9SM
Extraños Entre Ustedes (Spanish Edition)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3GCTX5H
Immigration
Legal or Illegal
It is my personal opinion that there are only two prerequisites for being American :
1. The person is alive
2. The person is here
In our present circumstances, however, where a legal thought like a ‘Corporation’ is a person and has more rights than a human being, we have a problem.
I have written a book.
It is called ‘Strangers Among You’. I translated it into Spanish and that title is ‘Extraños Entre Ustedes’.
The story revolves around the fictional Martinez family.
They make their way from Costa Rica up through all the Central American countries and in each of those countries – including Costa Rica, they encounter just a few of the dangers that people trying to immigrate into the United States, but, also encounter or are witness to the dangers that the people living in those places exist with every day.
The injustices, violence, unfair practices of businesses or the governments.
Also available in electronic form at :
Strangers Among You
https://thewaynefocus.blogspot.com/2024/05/strangers-among-you.html
Extraños Entre Ustedes
https://thewaynefocus.blogspot.com/2024/05/extranos-entre-ustedes.html
Introduction to Strangers Among You -
This book talks about why migrants and immigrants are risking their lives to cross the border into the United States and become Americans. It is a plain, simple telling of the Martinez family as they make their way from the countryside of Costa Rica to Detroit, Michigan.
It is built, of course, upon the American dream and the American that exists in the United States of America. More than that, however, it details the very real reasons people have for leaving their country to go to the United States. Not enough people are aware that these people are leaving life and death situations. They are coming from places that cannot be gone back to without a great deal of fixing.
Of course - the work and fixing of correcting all that would be profitable for a great many people - but - right now too many people in the developed world are under the impression that millions of people fleeing their homes are doing it as an adventure and fun thing to do with their time. In fact, if they stay, they would live in misery and many face death for themselves and their loved ones. What they are doing is heroic. Just as heroic as what our own ancestors have done.
At this point in time people are struggling to reach the United States. They are striving with all their lives and abilities to come to these shores. They are travelling with their families over dangerous lands. They are dealing with treacherous people. They are escaping life threatening situations. They are hoping for a better life. They want to build a better life for themselves and their family. They are coming, some of them with nothing but their abilities and the clothes on their backs. They are being driven from their homelands and the places of their birth having been left with one blessed hope and future and that is to live in the United States of America. They desire to join their future with the American people and work hard and work together to build a nation this is strong and compassionate.
Many of the hardworking people never make it to our shores or cross our borders. Some give up their lives in the doing of this fabulous journey. Their efforts end in blameless death that is tragedy itself. They come with no dishonor hoping to have and to give what is the best of all human accomplishments - to be free, equal, to live in peace and to have an opportunity.
Many try to shut them out. Turning away from their own blessed truths and given fortunes provided to us by our union and pledges to liberty. They cannot be shut out because these strangers among us are us.
The question now, of course, is - what do we all do together?
En Espanol :
Este libro habla sobre por qué los migrantes e inmigrantes arriesgan sus vidas para cruzar la frontera hacia Estados Unidos y convertirse en estadounidenses. Es un relato sencillo y directo de la familia Martínez mientras se abren camino desde el campo de Costa Rica hasta Detroit, Michigan.
Por supuesto, está basado en el sueño americano y en la América que existe en los Estados Unidos de América. Sin embargo, detalla las razones muy reales que tienen las personas para abandonar su país y dirigirse a Estados Unidos. No hay suficiente conciencia de que estas personas están abandonando situaciones de vida o muerte. Vienen de lugares a los que no pueden regresar sin mucho esfuerzo y reparación.
Por supuesto, el trabajo y la corrección de todo eso serían rentables para mucha gente, pero actualmente demasiadas personas en el mundo desarrollado tienen la impresión de que millones de personas que huyen de sus hogares lo hacen como una aventura y una diversión. De hecho, si se quedaran, vivirían en la miseria y muchos enfrentarían la muerte para ellos y sus seres queridos. Lo que están haciendo es heroico, tan heroico como lo que hicieron nuestros propios ancestros.
En este momento, las personas están luchando por llegar a Estados Unidos. Están esforzándose con todas sus vidas y habilidades para llegar a estas costas. Viajan con sus familias por tierras peligrosas. Tratan con personas traicioneras. Escapan de situaciones que amenazan sus vidas. Esperan una vida mejor. Quieren construir una vida mejor para ellos y sus familias. Vienen, algunos de ellos, solo con sus habilidades y la ropa que llevan puesta. Son expulsados de sus tierras natales y de los lugares de su nacimiento, con una única esperanza y futuro bendecidos: vivir en los Estados Unidos de América. Desean unir su futuro con el pueblo americano y trabajar duro y juntos para construir una nación fuerte y compasiva.
Muchos de los trabajadores nunca llegan a nuestras costas ni cruzan nuestras fronteras. Algunos dan su vida en el transcurso de este fabuloso viaje. Sus esfuerzos terminan en una muerte sin culpa, que es una tragedia en sí misma. Vienen sin deshonra, con la esperanza de tener y dar lo mejor de todos los logros humanos: ser libre, igual, vivir en paz y tener una oportunidad.
Muchos intentan cerrarles el paso. Alejándose de sus propias verdades benditas y fortunas otorgadas a nosotros por nuestra unión y promesas de libertad. No pueden ser excluidos porque estos extraños entre nosotros somos nosotros mismos.
La pregunta ahora, por supuesto, es: ¿qué hacemos todos juntos?
Personal Notes :
I, Alfred Brock, grew up in New York.
Elmhurst, New York, to be exact.
When I was there we were famous as a community of diversity. We had at least one person from every nation on Earth living in Elmhurst.
We all got along together.
There are always problems in cities, however, in Elmhurst, there were always more solutions than problems. Choices available to make things better. Talent to put action into play.
When faces with racial or ethnic strife – the solution was bake sales, dinners, lunches, fairs, events, sports, activities, parties and general good manners.
I often wonder, when I visit other parts of the United States, what sort of place I am in. Where are the happy faces? Where is the work? Where is the optimism? Where is the vision for the future?
Often it is relegated to second or third place.
Money comes first for many Americans. Money, money, money.
Family often comes second. Sometimes a distant second as concerns about money swamp the senses and lead to despair.
Faith? More people do not go to their worship centers – churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, meeting places – than go to them these days.
A falling faith and trust in people and their fellow Americans has bled these powerful social forces of their attendance and growth. The wisdom of the ages is set aside as not worth pursuing, nor even knowing about, imaging or believing because it doesn’t fit in the bottom line.
Instead of fellow Americans our fellow Americans are being painted as our enemies. Our neighbors being told on national television that their own towns and cities and rural areas are terrible. That they need to be fixed. They are being told that everything is terrible and can’t be worked out.
Then the people responsible for that horrible propaganda reap their crop of wealth and ease while the rest of us, hypnotized by hate, don’t see our very own resources being drained away and taken from us without so much as a peep.
Americans are being taught to distrust and even hate their government. Not just one or other form or section of government – but the entire idea of representative government.
When was the last time you actually contacted any one of the many elected officials you have? Local, county, state or federal? The numbers are depressingly dismal.
Lobbyists, which are paid employees, sometimes self-employed, that go and visit and call and send letters and emails and faxes to your elected officials. Because you say nothing their voices often cancel out your needs, desires and instructions to your elected officials before they even hear them.
As for immigration – it should go without saying, but due to the lack of knowledge and information we actually get through the news, the United States is not the largest country in the world.
The United States is the fourth largest country in the world and only has a population of about three hundred and ten million.
India and China each have about one and half billion people.
There are eight billion and 200 million people on the Earth, alive, right now.
Nearly half of that number is poor – three billion and five hundred million people.
Out of that nearly half a billion are living, or dying, in extreme poverty.
Even though they may be earning money – that doesn’t mean they have access to clean water, adequate food, adequate housing, education and freedom.
That’s just not what is happening outside the United States.
As you read about the migrants – keep in mind that the United States has military bases in all of the countries mentioned. American businesses operate in all the countries. The ruling people, including the government and banks and industry – nearly all of them have extensive business dealings with American interests – government, business and other.
We are tied together – yet, Americans are being told that the people that create that wealth, who live there and struggle there, deserve to be tied down rather than free.
Is that fair? No.
Is it wise? No.
It is profitable? No.
Is it cruel? Yes.
How is it that these realities are never presented in print, on television or discussed on the radio – except in words of hatred and exclusion?
Continued behavior like this does not, clearly, make the United States, our states, our counties, cities, towns, villages and our homes safer.
There are abuses to the immigrants in the United States that have persisted from the 19th Century. In Flushing, New York, Manhattan, New York, Los Angeles, California – textile workers are still paid next to nothing, worked half the day and seven days a week.
In the fields around the United States we hear over and over again about the plight of the field workers in agriculture.
There is almost no reporting about the circumstances surrounding those issues.
I, when I was younger, desired, as I do today, five decades later, to work on a farm. I figured to own a farm I needed to learn how to work on one. So I went, when I was living in North Carolina, to go get a job on a farm as a farmhand. Even for a weekend, if it turned out the work paid that little.
I was refused again and again and again.
Finally one farmer asked me why I wanted to do that work and I told him.
I wanted to learn how to farm. He told me they don’t hire the field hands. They contracted the work through field bosses. They were all Mexicans and normally didn’t hire white people.
Uh, what?
I said, maybe I can learn how to do that and employ Americans and compete with them.
The farmer told me that was a good way to get killed.
Uh, what?
He said they would hire me if I went to them. If they found out what I was doing they’d probably have me beaten or worse.
Uh, what?
So, there ended that escapade in Eastern North Carolina where farmhand work pay remains depressed, farmers are strong armed and criminal elements control the labor pool.
Make no mistake, however, that is the same setup all across the United States.
By the way – most of the farmhands and their exploited families are in the United States legally under a work programmed designed just for them and to ensure they never escape, never mind ever achieving the Holy Grail of American citizenship.
They literally work many of the men and women to death and their children grow up in poverty and destitution in the center of what we have been told is the most powerful nation on Earth.
While we are discussing all this – most of the produce grown in the United States comes from very few areas. A couple of valleys in California, two or three countries in the southern tip of Texas and a shrinking area in Florida, produce most of the fruits and vegetables grown in the United States.
Increasingly more of that food is being imported from countries like Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala – even as people struggle to afford nutritive food for their families. In one country the banana fields are patrolled by private soldiers to protect them from the hungry people around that help grow and ship them. If they try to steal the food the soldiers do shoot and kill them.
We have so much to do in this nation. Why should be turn our eyes to the Southern Hemisphere?
Well, except for the fiction of the neverending, trillion dollar fence construction project along the entire southern border of the United States – there are no obstructions. We should all be able to move from place to place as we choose to. This used to be a very important part of the American experience, as the nation moved from boom to bust. That began to break up during the 1930’s during the Dust Bowl as farmers and bankers almost destroyed the most fertile lands on Earth by wasteful agricultural practices.
You know, back to North Carolina for a moment. I worked at a pharmaceutical company in Greenville, North Carolina and on the road to and from work I would see a farm. A little house, full vegetable garden, fruit trees, fruit bushes. It turned out the farmer let his Mexican helper use that land for himself while the farmer went back and forth between tobacco, cotton, corn, soybeans and leaving the field fallow. That Mexican farmer made more money off the plot of land in one year than the farmer did over the fiver year cycle he was trapped in. Of course, he didn’t really care because also had a job as an electrician at the pharmaceutical plant I worked at – which was illegal because he filed for Federal insurance, aid and crop payments – and got them every year. The farmer in fact, made more money from those outdated payment structures than he did from the crops – even if they failed completely – at which time it was like bonus time to offset not only real losses but potential losses.
Sharing has always been an American pastime.
I am only 61 years old but I have never seen a time in the United States where people were so close-fisted, angry and cheap.
It’s not the time for that. People are hungry and jobs are scarce. Good jobs are even harder to find. Most of them are boring jobs involved with counting, shipping or doing simple work, even at the factories.
Our stores are filled with imported goods cranked out by people being paid poor wages in countries on the brink of revolution and only kept in hand by keeping the people ignorant of their plight.
We have men like JP Morgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, forcing workers back to the office.
That may be okay for incredibly rich men like him. Especially since his control of technology seems to be limited to knowing where the microphone is – he not being concerned about how it operates, where it comes from, how it is hooked up and fits into the technology all around him.
The people being forced back to the office seem to be useful pieces of furniture – to ensure that charges for the real estate they are sitting in are bringing in the prerequisite profits just for their existence.
As we see the machinations of erstwhile dictators and tyrants trying to force Federal workers back to the office the question of what these so-called leaders of industry have been doing with technology.
I know for a fact that in one day, working out of my garage, remotely from work, I perform much more meaningful and impactful work in one day than Mr. Dimon does. There’s no competition.
I know of hundreds of thousands and probably millions of Americans, alone, whose ability to work with technology, improve returns, raise the quality of living, produce inventions and create a peaceful and productive society outpace, individually, all of these media faceplants.
Have you seen how many recalls Tesla cars have come under?
There is something desperately wrong in the United States of America and the world right now and it’s not because of people running from unlivable circumstances to places they believe are safe.
The problems have been caused and are being made worse by the very people that set in motion the ejection of millions, tens of millions in the Western Hemisphere and more in the Eastern Hemisphere, from their homes, towns, cities, nations and regions.
There is no reason for it.
In these two books, ‘Strangers Among You’ and ‘Extranos Entre Ustedes’ what you are learning about are just a few of the particular and peculiar pressures forcing families to flee.
Yes, some nations are expelling their prisoners and dangerous people from their jails and institutions but that is just one part of what is happening.
Look in El Salvador where the present dictator has turned the police forces into a national police force. They routinely raid entire villages and towns. Do you really think they are only looking for criminals? There is no way to control a force like that once it is put into use. They are going house to house, driving out the inhabitants, searching their homes and arresting people for what? Taking them where?
It’s a national tragedy.
Meanwhile the government has adopted Cryptocurrency as their national tender – it’s how they are doing business. They have built gigantic bitcoin ‘mining’ facilities – and power them by tapping the power of a local volcano.
It would be funny, outrageous or exciting if it were some sort of action movie – but it’s not a movie. It’s not entertainment. Farms, homes, businesses, factories, families – have been destroyed during this rampage.
It’s not the only one going on there.
In more than one of those countries there are ‘old’ families. They aren’t quite that old. During the late 1800’s and through the 20th century Americans went there and raised private armies or were helped by the government to oust or take over from the people who had settled there centuries ago. They became the fruit growers, the fruit merchants, the oil producers, land owners, military leaders and most importantly the bankers. They slowly and surely took over vast parts of the economy.
Eventually owning virtually everything. Taking land from people they openly referred to as peasants.
As farming petered out in many places the people turned to the sea.
Unfortunately – so did rich countries. Soon fleets of American and Chinese fishing boats came through and took up so many of the fish that the giant schools that had been there have almost completely vanished. Their methods of fishing scraped the bottom of the ocean and destroyed the places where the fish and other creatures lived and grew.
What is the reason these problems are not discussed on television or the radio? Sometimes they show up on the internet in small spurts, and here and there, though financially controlled by a few friends of Dimon and others like him, a story will bubble to the top, only to be lost and forgotten.
So here you have the story. A story to start from.
It is important that these issues be discussed, talked about, shouted about. Elected officials need to know what they are doing when they vote or choose inaction that hurts other people – no matter how far away they are.
They may refuse to listen but that doesn’t mean that our voices should be quiet. That doesn’t mean that our pens should only be used to doodle or our computers used to add up figures for Dimon’s Demons to use as they plunder the world.
We have a duty to others but also to ourselves.
Do you want to be an agent of all this destruction?
Sometimes I believe it is fear that stops people from looking at what is going on. Ultimately, someone must become aware that their inaction is causing negative action and negative outcomes that are calamitous.
I can’t get my mind around seeing millions of people showing up at the borders and then deciding that the best way to deal with them is to ignore them.
Even harder to comprehend – how could those who flee be blamed for the conditions and vicious actions that have caused them to flee?
How many families must be destroyed, how many children and seniors perish, how many dreams and hopes and abilities smashed to the ground before Americans turn to the work before them?
Where are the strident voices of the religious?
Where are the churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, places of worship and centers of thought?
The silence is abhorrent.
Please – read the books – buy them if you can and if you cannot then take them for free from the Blogger site. Go ahead and share them. It’s not like they are going to get you driven out of your own home and pushed into the streets with you family and a few goods to walk thousands of miles to beg for help – and then get turned back by the most advanced army in the history of the world.
Thanks for your attention.