A sucker born every minute

Saturdays are usually very slow, but when I checked some stats (ok… I was bored), I was intrigued that I had several hits coming from the same source:

I sort of vaguely recalled the name “Tom O’Malley”, and thought I might have written something about somebody by that name at some point… and I had.  Several —  “The Myth of the Gringo Immigrant” , a subsequent follow-up on that post, the first in May, the second in June… 2006.  “Tom O’Malley” (who never existed) was supposedly a executive at the Mexico City offices at Southwestern Bell Telephone Company who was giving the skinny on the Mexican immigration system.  The same e-mail was showing up all over the U.S. right-wing web (which I used to read regularly, seeing it as something of a better guide to misunderstanding and misinformation about Latin America than most sources).  According to “Tom O’Malley,” to apply for his Fm-3, he had to submit (horrors of horrors!), his birth certificate and several other documents most of which were not then, and are not now, required:  a high school transcript, college certification, etc. (which maybe his employer required, but not the Mexican government) and… my favorite, “A letter from The ST. Louis Chief of Police indicating I had no arrest record in the US and no outstanding warrants and was “a citizen in good standing.”

A version of the same letter, including the sentence about the St. Louis Chief of Police, had to write a recommendation appeared in an article (under a different name) in a white supremacist magazine in June, 2009 (the link is to my comments, not to the magazine). Interestingly enough, this one came out almost a full year after there were substantial changes to Mexican immigration law that made both of the complaints in these emails moot anyway.  And, the white supremacist magazine was probably an outlier…from a publication of out and out liars.

But, when I looked at where these hits were coming from, I can’t say I was bemused (more like confused) to see the exact same original “Tom O’Malley” e-mail is again making the rounds… completely unchanged, in the last week.   This in spite of the radical liberalization of Mexican immigration law in August 2008, and the visa system was revamped on the first of May of this year.

I wrote a couple of comments on these sites, all of which seem to supportive of more restrictive U.S. immigration laws.  One site administrator (who was quite gracious when I had to send an email because of a posting problem) “defended” the post, but was complaining about non-immigration issues (specifically, some third-party’s problems in setting up a business of some sort), based on the always popular specious rationale that other people do something unacceptable, therefore MY unacceptable actions are not unjust.  Or, as someone might put it, “the lesser people do it,” and being superior, we do it too, because we’re better.

I don’t follow the logic of that either.

Like the phony Zetas attack dam story earlier this week, I’m assuming these are fueled by a desire to justify an anti-Mexican political position in an election year.   I don’t expect political propaganda to be always fair and balanced, appeal to logic, or even be rational.  But, if one is going to reuse and recycle garbage, one should at least clean it up first.