The corporatist Republicans (“amnesty!”) are fighting with the racist Republicans (“fence!”), and it provides an opportunity for progressives to step forward with a clear solution to the immigration problem facing America.
Both the corporatists and the racists are fond of the mantra, “There are some jobs Americans won’t do.” It’s a lie.
Americans will do virtually any job if they’re paid a decent wage. This isn’t about immigration – it’s about economics. Industry and agriculture won’t collapse without illegal labor, but the middle class is being crushed by it.
The reason why thirty years ago United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW) founder Caesar Chávez fought against illegal immigration, and the UFW turned in illegals during his tenure as president, was because Chávez, like progressives since the 1870s, understood the simple reality that labor rises and falls in price as a function of availability.
Working Americans have always known this simple equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages.
Progressives fought – and many lost their lives in the battle – to limit the pool of “labor hours” available to the Robber Barons from the 1870s through the 1930s and thus created the modern middle class. They limited labor-hours by pushing for the 50-hour week and the 10-hour day (and then later the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day). They limited labor-hours by pushing for laws against child labor (which competed with adult labor). They limited labor-hours by working for passage of the 1935 Wagner Act that provided for union shops.
And they limited labor-hours by supporting laws that would regulate immigration into the United States to a small enough flow that it wouldn’t dilute the unionized labor pool. “The first laws creating a quota for immigrants were passed in the 1920s, in response to a sense that the country could no longer absorb large numbers of unskilled workers, despite pleas by big business that it wanted the new workers.”
Do a little math. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 7.6 million unemployed Americans right now. Another 1.5 million Americans are no longer counted because they’ve become “long term” or “discouraged” unemployed workers. And although various groups have different ways of measuring it, most agree that at least another five to ten million Americans are either working part-time when they want to work full-time, or are “underemployed,” doing jobs below their level of training, education, or experience. That’s between eight and twenty million un- and under-employed Americans, many unable to find above-poverty-level work.
At the same time, there are between seven and fifteen million working illegal immigrants diluting our labor pool.
If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to confront and fix their corrupt ways.
Meanwhile, the millions of American citizens who came to this nation as legal immigrants, who waited in line for years, who did the hard work to become citizens, are feeling insulted, humiliated, and conned.
Shouldn’t we be compassionate? Of course.
But there is nothing compassionate about driving down the wages of any nation’s middle class. It’s the most cynical, self-serving, greedy, and sociopathic behavior you’ll see from our “conservatives.”
There is nothing compassionate about being the national enabler of a dysfunctional oligarchy like Mexico. An illegal workforce in the U.S. sending an estimated $17 billion to Mexico every year – second only in national income to that country’s oil revenues – supports an antidemocratic, anti-worker, hyperconservative administration there that gleefully ships out of that nation the “troublesome” Mexican citizens – those lowest on the economic food-chain and thus most likely to present “labor unrest” – to the USA. Mexico (and other “sending nations”) need not deal with their own social and economic problems so long as we’re willing to solve them for them – at the expense of our middle class. Democracy in Central and South America be damned – there are profits to be made for Wal-Mart!
Similarly, there is nothing compassionate about handing higher profits (through a larger and thus cheaper work force) to the CEOs of America’s largest corporations and our now-experiencing-record-profits construction and agriculture industries.
What about caring for people in need? Isn’t that the universal religious/ethical value? Of course.
You know perhaps we should just adopt the same immigration policies that Mexico currently has on the books....they DO NOT allow unlimited immigration into Mexico from ANY country and if you are found illegally in mexico you will first be arrested and then deported!
NO! I am NOT insensitive to the many great Mexican people we have in the U.S. and all the other great nations of the world either; but ANY country cannot absorb an unlimited amount of people into their economy and be able to survive........it's just NOT sound government!
So watch this week as the U.S. sees the many, many people out on the streets marching with their signs to cause the Congress of the U.S. to adopt an immigration plan that will enable ALL of them to legally become citizens of the U.S.; but WHY must we do that when most of them came here illegally, while those who waited their turns and became "LEGAL" citizens the old-fashioned way are snubbed???
The whole world is watching!
