Or perhaps just wanting to make a buck.
Not that I have anything against immigrants. On the contrary. All my grandparents were immigrants. And our newest recruits are coming here for exactly the same reasons. To better themselves. And their families. To make new lives in a place they deem more hopeful and promising. Nothing at all wrong with that.
The average immigrant is no doubt a lot more admirable than your average American. After all, they’ve examined their lives and not only found something lacking, they got off their dead asses and did something about it. Packed a few belongings and a little money – probably damned little – crossed who knows how many borders, endured lots of adventures – mostly of the unpleasant sort – met lots of strange people, who mostly took advantage of them, and ended up in a strange country with strange customs and a strange language. And that was just getting to the starting line.
Next came the crummy jobs and low wages; living as cheaply as possible in order to save. To send money home or to bring over other family members. All the while keeping one eye open for “La Migra” and being exploited along the way – they are, after all, here illegally with little or no recourse to the law. Totally admirable. And if I could swap ‘em one for one with a few million native-born Americans, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. (I do believe I might start with “tea-partiers” and those who voted twice for George W. Bush.)
But the important word in “illegal immigrant” is not immigrant, but illegal. It’s not their fault for wanting to come here – and succeeding. It’s our fault for allowing it to happen. And make no mistake, we – the collective we, i.e., our government (the guys – and it’s mostly guys – we elected) and the powers that be – did allow it. Any nation that lets more than 12 million illegal immigrants sneak across its borders was not just being a mite careless, it was knowingly inattentive. It turned the proverbial “blind eye” to the problem.
Stopping illegal immigration, or at least slowing it to a trickle, would have been easy. They came here for jobs. Prevent ‘em from working and most would go home, or not attempt to get here in the first place. (To prove the point, over a million have left since 2008; in other words, when our economy headed south, so did 8% of our illegal population.) But important economic interests wanted those immigrants. Wanted them badly. And better illegal than legal; “obey and stay” is a potent management tool. Cheap and docile labor – what’s not to like if the aim be improving the bottom line.
But it gets even better. The influx kept uppity working-class Americans in line. Kiss off unionization and the things unions fight for: reduced hours, worker’s rights, vacations, grievance procedures; dare I mention health care? Keep those on the lower half of the economic ladder fearful of new-comers willing to work cheaper (and probably harder) and half your labor problems disappear. Managing fearful workers is easier, and a lot more pleasant. And did I mention cheaper?
Oh, there’s a whole lot of talk about how immigration, both legal and illegal, makes everybody better off. Increases GDP, blah, blah, blah. A rising tide lifts all boats, blah, blah, blah. It might even be true; expert opinion remains mixed. But true or untrue isn’t the important point. What is, is that turning a blind eye to illegal immigration creates winners and losers. And Americans occupying our lower economic strata are the losers; with least well-off Americans the biggest losers of all.
Along with American businesses, and those who invest in them, the middle class also won. At a time of rising expectations but stagnating incomes, keeping things cheap with low-wage labor helped make ends meet. It allowed a partial return to those dimly-remembered, halcyon days of affordable domestic help. Child-care, cleaning services, gardeners, repair-folk, not to mention keeping all those minimum wage service jobs competitive and, well, at minimum wage. A wage, least we forget, that decreased by about 40% in purchasing power over the last generation. All helping to keep aspiring two wage-earner, middle class families economically viable.
At least until now. With fear, economic fear, stalking the land, all those little, back-of-the-mind, middle-class worries have been moving frontward. And becoming not so little. Losing your job, your house, having your kids drop out of college, moving – God forbid! – down the economic ladder. Toss in hungry college-educated, professional legal immigrants being brought in by American corporations from places like India, and the export of American white-collar jobs to . . . places like India, and it’s not surprising that immigration is no longer a back-burner issue (think “Arizona”).
We have had an enduring anti-immigrant tradition throughout our history, and it usually peaks whenever high rates of immigration intersect with hard economic times. When it comes to immigrants we have been equal opportunity haters. Take your pick: Germans, Irish, Italians, Slavs, etc. Americans, “native” Americans, have hated ‘em all in turn. And that’s just the Europeans (recall, or re-watch, the Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, movie “Gangs of New York” for the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic, mostly pre-Civil War, version). It’s a tradition that becomes even more xenophobic and racist as immigrant skin color darkens. But it needn’t be.
A nation, any nation, has a right, no, a downright obligation, to protect it’s borders. If it can’t. Or it wouldn’t. It fails a basic test. To believe that the strongest nation in the world, arguably the strongest nation that’s ever been, a nation that spends more on defense than all other nations combined, can’t control immigration is laughable. And everyone knows it (hence, part of the anger). So it’s time to end the farce and face up. Not by building bigger walls (but build ‘em if you must), but by removing the incentive that continually draws illegals across our borders – that they will be able to find jobs.
Whatever it takes. Fine businesses and corporations who hire illegals – fine ‘em heavily (how about $100,000 per illegal per year). Imprison personnel department employees who fail to adequately check, and executives who flaunt the law. Institute an National Identity Card (the idea that this will somehow deprive us of our freedom in an era of facebook, Google, shopping discount cards, required driver license ID, etc. is just plain silly) and a mandatory Social Security check. We don’t have to be harsh to illegal immigrants. Simply make it damn difficult to work, to go to school, to get aid. The harshness can be reserved for those Americans who flaunt the law.
Will things end up costing more? Sure. But perhaps they should. Perhaps a willingness to take on society’s difficult, dirty, back-breaking, physically-enfeebling, mind-numbing jobs deserves a premium wage. Perhaps someone willing to do a job most of us wouldn’t, or physically couldn’t, should be accordingly rewarded. Is sitting on ones fat ass, staring at a computer screen, so much more intrinsically valuable than picking our crops, packaging our food, caring for our elderly, or our young? How did we come to so denigrate hard work as to think it worth only about seven bucks an hour (a single mother with a child, earning a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, makes only enough to keep her at the Federal poverty threshold)?
And keep in mind that the last century has not been very kind to multi-ethnic societies. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires disappeared after the First World War; the British, French, Dutch, etc. Empires followed soon after the Second. And we’ve recently watched the break up of the USSR and Yugoslavia. Don’t look now, but we’re almost the only large multi-ethnic society left. Let’s be honest, 200 years of open US immigration succeeded as well as it did because we were able to form a “condominium of whites,” periodically opening the coalition to subsume each European ethnic group in turn. All in opposition to . . . being brutally frank, the non-whites among us. When “tea baggers” scream about wanting their country back it’s their “white America” they want. Alas for them, that nation is gone forever. And good riddance to it.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a point. Assimilation of minorities into our body politic takes time; the more culturally and racially dissimilar, the more time. It would behoove us to move slow – certainly slower than we have over the last generation. If nothing else, our exercise of imperial hubris in Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught us that small differences can become major gulfs when societies undergo stress. We’re no exception. Our current political situation may simply be a foretaste of what’s to come.
So for whatever reason, economic fairness, keeping American jobs for Americans, slowing the pace of cultural transformation, calming fears – both irrational and rational, or simply maintaining the rule of law, we need to end the current mess. We need to remove the incentive and shift the exodus into reverse. And soon.
Al
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