working on non-fiction for a change...

Here's a sneak peek at a bit of non-fiction I'm working on that will be posted in full somewhere awesome, soon enough... I should probably edit out that f-bomb, but in this case it is very appropriate to add emphasis to the word "dangerous". Because, the crossing is genuinely and truly fucking dangerous.

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"...our demand doesn’t disappear just because the supply of – let’s face the facts – near-slave labor dries up. Who will pick our grapes? Who will build our roads? Who will bus our tables and slaughter our beef? Who will clean our houses, and landscape our yards? Where is this supposed glut of American citizens that want these jobs?

We haven’t wanted these jobs since 1942 on any kind of scale large enough to meet the demand for the cheep labor force. This won’t change just because the folks making the crossing are even more likely to be desperate criminals, due to the increased danger of the crossing and the higher profit that can be made as a result.

The crossing is really fucking dangerous already. People die of heat stroke. They get hit by cars in the night on poorly-lit roads. They drown in flooded rivers and streams. They get killed by unscrupulous coyotes. The mass rape and murder of women along our borders is fucking horrible, and we should all be ashamed at the number of unsolved, unreported, and undiscovered crimes upon women remain in border towns. Increasing the danger by clamping down on our borders is going to be about as safe and effective as the war on drugs has been at making the streets safe in our inner cities. "

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Still cleaning up the flow, and looking for good footnotes, but you get the idea of what I'll be talking about, right?