Progressive World Review

While the problems with the economy have taken center stage, illegal immigration remains a hot bed issue for many, invoking passionate reactions from those who are determined to stem the tide of undocumented aliens crossing the border. Predictably, this issue elicits the typical xenophobic responses,

• The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise would die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day.
• Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals.
• There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines, which plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of methamphetamines that day, by 80%.
• Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases, to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals.
• Eight American children would not suffer the horror as victims of sex crimes.

As if these types of crimes are committed solely, or even primarily, by illegal aliens. On the contrary, the evidence suggests the opposite is true, that aliens, documented or otherwise, are in fact more law abiding than U.S. citizens,

There have been dozens of national studies examining immigration and crime, and they all come to the same conclusion: immigrants are more law-abiding than citizens. A 2007 study by the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) found that immigrants, whether legal or illegal, are substantially less likely to commit crimes or to be incarcerated than U.S. citizens.

 I don’t know that Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist is in reality, a racist, but the article posted on his home page intended
to contradict that accusation leaves me unconvinced. The article argues that hisstepdaughter’s marriage to a Mexican-American and the fact that his grandchildren are half Mexican demonstrate his commitment to multiculturalism,

He expresses strong and seemingly sincere support for multiculturalism, noting that one of his stepdaughters is married to a Mexican-American man and two of his grandchildren are half-Mexican. He points out that the Minuteman Project itself is a multiracial and multiethnic group with African-Americans and Hispanics in positions of leadership.

The flaw in this argument is that who his stepdaughter marries and has children with is out of his control. Besides, racism is rarely, and please excuse the pun, a black and white issue. Who hasn’t heard some variation of the utterly racist remark, I’m not a racist, there’s good ones and then there’s the niggers. In any case, his website makes the same kind of arguments correlating illegal aliens to crime as previously noted.

That’s not to say there aren’t any legitimate concerns regarding the unregulated influx of people coming into this country. At least, these concerns don’t appear to be motivated by hate and fear. In difference to common wisdom that undocumented aliens take only the jobs that Americans don’t want, there maybe some evidence that unskilled American laborers are in fact harmed by people crossing the border illegally,

Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches, seeing in them a new kind of civil rights movement. They’ve supported calls to legalize many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Many have delighted in the fissures opening up on the right, where nativists are pitted against laissez-faire business interests hungry for cheap labor. Yet there are fault lines on the left as well, with a small but notable number of progressive commentators warning that by championing rights for illegal immigrants and expanded legal immigration, liberals are working against the interests of low-skilled American workers. “I’m instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote last month. “But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration … [W]hile immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico.”

 But even if you agree that undocumented aliens are a problem, no one seems to have any realistic way stopping it, much less returning the millions of undocumented aliens already here. The proposed border wall would be laughable if it weren’t such a colossal waste of money, not to mention the environmental damage that it would cause.

So what can or should be done? In order to answer that question you have to understand what the real purpose of our immigration policy has always been, and that purpose was never to keep people out of this country. Rather, it has always been for purpose of exploitation, to provide a cheap source of labor. Consider this, why was it, for so many years, not illegal to hire undocumented workers? And while it is against the law now, it is rarely enforced. If you’re going to take a law and order approach to the problem, wouldn’t this be the logical place to start? Wouldn’t you want to take away the incentive for coming here in the first place by eliminating the jobs? What about the Americans that are hiring them? Undocumented aliens are by definition, not Americans and not actually subject to our laws but the employers that hire them certainly are. So whether from a legal or a moral prospective, it would seem that it’s the employers that are at the center of the problem.

The reason undocumented aliens threaten American jobs is because they are willing to work for less money and the reason for that is largely because they are, in fact, undocumented. If the playing field were leveled there wouldn’t be any incentive to hire people from other countries to begin with. This is why I advocate an open border policy, take away the ability to exploit these people and you take away the reason to hire them. Of course there are other reasons that Mexicans, for example, are willing to work for lower wages, the lack of decent jobs in their own country for one. But these issues are much better addressed in the open rather than trying to deal with them in an underground economy. Enforcing minimum wage and work place safety laws would be much easier if the people these laws were meant to protect needn’t fear deportation for complaining about violations.

And finally, the best way Americans can protect their jobs is to join and support unions. This is a double edged sword; by supporting unions in this country as well as those abroad we can raise our own living standard as well as for workers in other countries thereby eliminating the ability for employers to play us against each other. Forty or Fifty years ago union membership was more than double what it is today. And while that’s not the only difference between then and now, it is a large part of the reason that people like to call that period in time the good old days. Back then a blue collar worker had a reasonable shot at achieving middle-class status but that opportunity has been slowly eroded away.

–Paul Wilden

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