This morning while cruising the blogosphere I stumbled on a comment in which a fellow declared he sided with conservatives on the immigration issue. He is, he said, against illegal immigration. I inferred he thinks liberals are for illegal immigration.
Not that I’d noticed. There may be some immigration activists promoting open U.S. borders, but liberals on the whole are more focused on globalization and the exploitation of workers worldwide, and loosening U.S. border restrictions won’t have an impact on that problem, I don’t believe. In our current political climate, and at a time when U.S. manufacturing jobs are dwindling, flooding the U.S. job market with undocumented (and cheap, and exploitable) workers could erode pay and working conditions for native-born workers. This is not where American liberals want to go.
I suspect lots of righties assume liberals are “for” illegal immigration, or at least aren’t as against it as they are. IMO this is symptomatic of the dumbing down of American political discourse; it’s assumed that every issue has only two opposing and absolute sides, and if conservatives claim one side, liberals will take the other side out of sheer perversity. This is one of the many reasons we can’t talk to righties.
Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are in favor of securing the borders and reducing, if not eliminating, the number of people entering America illegally. The disagreements are over how best to do that, and what to do about the undocumented immigrants already here (amnesty, deportation, or other).
One way to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants is to take away their incentive to immigrate here. And the incentive for most is the promise of a job. Yet Spencer S. Hsu and Kari Lydersen tell us in today’s Washington Post that the Bush Administration hasn’t been all that vigilant about cracking down on hiring undocumented workers.
The Bush administration, which is vowing to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal workers, virtually abandoned such employer sanctions before it began pushing to overhaul U.S. immigration laws last year, government statistics show.
Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.
In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.
I’m not even going to start on how national security might be compromised if undocumented people from anywhere can show up here and get work.
The government’s steady retreat from workplace enforcement in the 20 years since it became illegal to hire undocumented workers is the result of fierce political pressure from business lobbies, immigrant rights groups and members of Congress, according to law enforcement veterans. Punishing employers also was de-emphasized as the government recognized that it lacks the tools to do the job well, and as the Department of Homeland Security shifted resources to combat terrorism.
OK, so maybe I will say something about compromising national security. Isn’t border security an important part of national security? Oh, wait, I forgot … we’ve got to put all of our resources into Iraq because we started a war there for no logical reason. Never mind.
The administration says it is learning from past failures,
Yeah, and I’m Long John Silver.
and switching to a strategy of building more criminal cases, instead of relying on ineffective administrative fines or pinprick raids against individual businesses by outnumbered agents. …
This is droll —
Still, in light of the government’s record, experts on all sides of the debate are skeptical that the administration will be able to remove the job magnet that attracts illegal immigrants.
Translation: This is the Bush Administration we’re talkin’ about, folks, so don’t expect them to do anything competent.
“The claims of this administration and its commitment to interior enforcement of immigration laws are laughable,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group that favors tougher workplace enforcement, among other measures. “The administration only discovered immigration enforcement over the past few months, five years into its existence, and only then because they realized that a pro-enforcement pose was necessary to get their amnesty plan approved.”
Hsu and Lydersen note that while the Bushies and congressional Republicans talk about getting tough at the borders, “about 40 percent of the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States entered the country legally on visas and simply stayed.” They also describe Clinton administration crackdowns on undocumented people working in Georgia onion fields and midwestern meatpacking plants. The immigration raids drew the ire of farmers and meatpackers when onions remain unharvested and meatpacking plants shut down.
Politicians in both parties have bought into Bush’s “guest worker” program that would allow documented temporary workers into the country to do jobs “Americans won’t do.” But unless there are very strict limits put on such a program, if it becomes reality expect employers to clamor for guest workers to take jobs Americans are doing now, and still would do, but not for slave wages and medieval working conditions.
Today Bob Herbert wrote about some meatpacking jobs that native-born Americans are doing:
Life inside the Smithfield plant can border on the otherworldly. To get a sense of what conditions are like on the killing floor, where 32,000 hogs are slaughtered each day, listen to the comments of a former Smithfield worker, Edward Morrison, whose job required him to flip 200- and 300-pound hog carcasses, hour after hour:
“Going to work on the kill floor was like walking into the pit of hell. They have these fire chambers, big fires going, and this fierce boiling water solution. That’s all part of the process that the carcasses have to go through after they’re killed. It’s so hot in there. And it’s dark and noisy, with the supervisors screaming, and that de-hair machine is so loud. Some people can’t take it.
“I would go home at night and my body would be all locked up because I was dehydrated. All your fluids would just sweat out of you on your shift. I don’t think the company cared. Their thing was just get that hog out the door by any means necessary.”
Frankly, I think that if Smithfield can find native-born Americans to work in the pit of hell, it’s hard to imagine what sort of job no American would do. And if some jobs are so onerous or ill paid that Americans won’t take them, what is our moral justification for importing “guest workers” to take them?
The Smithfield plant workers have been trying to unionize for years, but the NLRB determined that the owners had not allowed the workers to hold fair elections. Recently, Herbert said, Smithfield agreed to abide by NLRB rules. Maybe Smithfield figures it eventually it will bust the union with “guest workers.”
I do prefer documented guest workers to undocumented illegal workers. But care must be taken that the guest workers are not exploited and abused and that they aren’t being used as a means to bust unions or lower wages.
Further, “guest worker” programs in Europe have not exactly worked well. The “temporary” workers were not as temporary as originally intended, yet they were given no means to assimilate into the “host” nation. From an editorial in The New Republic, April 17 issue:
… the workers, while remaining in those European countries, never became of them. Consider Germany, for instance, where more than two million Muslims of Turkish origin–whose families came as guest workers four decades ago–live today. They live in Germany not as Germans, but in a strange sort of nationless limbo–afforded certain benefits of citizenship (such as health care) but denied the privilege of actually being citizens. Which, of course, denies them any incentive to assimilate to their new country. The prospect of such a thing happening in the United States with Mexican guest workers is only too real.
Colin Nickerson wrote for the Boston Globe (April 19),
For decades, there were no efforts to integrate the newcomers. They were entitled to social benefits, but not citizenship. Their children could attend schools, but little effort was made to give them language skills. Far from a melting pot, Europe in the post-World War II era became the realm of ”parallel societies,” in which native and immigrant populations occupied the same countries but shared little common ground.
Now, the presence of millions of largely unassimilated newcomers, coupled with terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, has triggered furious debates in Europe over national identity and the future of immigration.
Europeans thought the guest worker programs would provide needed labor without having to assimilate non-European workers. It didn’t work that way, and the non-assimilated ethnic minorities are creating huge social problems — the same kind of problems that righties fear from illegal immigrants.
(Isn’t it interesting how being tough and mean often creates the very problems the toughness and meanness are supposed to eliminate?)
The European experience shows us that “temporary” workers are not always temporary. And if the programs discourage assimilation and block the “guests” from ever seeking citizenship — well, don’t expect a good outcome.
Last April Taylor Marsh wrote,
I believe in a guest worker plan that includes fines, paying taxes, learning English, background checks, then waiting in line behind those who are already waiting for their chance, but eventually offering a path to citizenship. I just don’t believe in the hobgoblin that is those big bad illegal immigrants. It’s ridiculous.
But guest worker programs don’t answer the problem, which is stemming the tide of illegal immigrants who continue to flood into this country for jobs.
And this takes us back to cracking down on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Making it more difficult to hire illegal immigrants would do a lot more to reduce illegal immigration than all the fences and Minutemen you can scrape together. Unfortunately, the Bushies seem unable — or unwilling — to do this.
Sorta kinda related — Avedon is guest blogging at Liberal Oasis; read what she says about “Those Awful Liberal Ideas.”
Thank you for saying so well what I have been trying to say about this issue for ages…
Given the protests we have already seen from illegal immigrants I wonder how long after they are given amnesty before they start making demands?American women, who are doing the same jobs as men but are receiving a fraction of the pay now will be sent to the back of the line once again so illegal workers demands can be met…..When it comes to the new pecking order in the workforce it will be men first, then immigrants and last in line will be women once again. There is nothing like being move from second class citizen to third …
There’s one other leg of the equation that no one wants to talk about: how illegality itself drives wages down. Employers are free to blackmail workers into tolerating low pay and unsafe conditions when the workers can easily be threatened with deportation (or worse). This can’t happen if people are legally in the country. So making the situation more threatening to undocumented workers doesn’t actually help keep working conditions high for American workers.
To help stem to flow of illegal immigrants, start buying Fair Trade organic coffee. Sure, it won’t be a cure to the problem but any help to the local economy will make jobs available in their country so they won’t have to seek jobs in this country. Besides, if you enjoy a good cup of coffee, you will be pleased with the taste of organic coffee.
I have trouble understanding why our elected officials refuse to make employer accountability the centerpiece of legislation aimed at reducing illegal immigration. There is so much rhetoric citing “the rule of law” and “border enforcement”, yet employers are breaking the law everytime they hire an illegal alien. It would be interesting if instead of spending billions on drones and a fence, we poured these resources into investigating and convicting business managers and owners who commit a crime each time they hire illegal aliens. I guess this is just the type of hypocrisy we are forced to endure in our system of government.
“flooding the U.S. job market with illegal (and cheap, and exploitable) workers could erode pay and working conditions for native-born workers. This is not where American liberals want to go.”
OTOH:
1. Two weeks after Katrina, Harry Reid supported the illegal aliens who were taking rebuilding jobs from American hurricane victims:
http://lonewacko.com/blog/archives/003871.html
2. Right after the Big WalMart Raid of 2003, Nancy Pelosi – speaking in Mexico – accused her “own” government of conducting “terrorizing raids”:
lonewacko.com/blog/archives/000819.html
3. Dick Durbin supports foreign citizens who are in this country illegally marching in our streets, making demands and making a show of force.
lonewacko.com/blog/archives/004978.html
4. Twenty-two Democrats in the California Senate threw their support behind the May 1 illegal immigration marches:
lonewacko.com/blog/archives/004998.html
Many Democrats do not support illegal immigration. However, as those examples – and the countless others I could provide – show, the leaders of the Democratic Party are very strong supporters of illegal immigration.
immigration is humanity’s way of sharing resources. emigration results from the depletion of resources.
The biggest donor to Bushco? The American Chamber of commerce .
oops!…and the rest of the story…how are the resources to be devided…by the rule of gold, or the golden rule.
then there’s that goldenest of rules….
food will get us through times of no gold
better than gold will get us through times of
no food.
just say grow, and ‘howdy neighbor’.
Jamie – how ironic – I remember when we used to advertise “Buy American” in order to protect American jobs. Now we need to “Buy Mexican” in order to protect American jobs.
TLB — you fail to make a distinction between “illegal immigrants” and “illegal immigration,” thus distorting the Democrats’ position (you must be a rightie). As I said in the post,
None of the four examples you cite are about Democrats calling for open borders. They are all about what to do with illegal immigrants already here. Most Dems support some form of amnesty over deportation for such workers, which is pretty much President Bush’s position, although I understand he avoids using the word “amnesty.” One at a time:
1. Harry Reid was discussing the fact that illegal immigrants who were already living and working in the Gulf Coast area before Katrina and who were left indigent by Katrina were not seeking help from FEMA or other government services
2. Nancy Pelosi was referring to the fact that INS raids are conducted in a way that is cruel and even terrifying to the illegal workers but which is kinder and gentler to the employers. She is saying it should be the other way around; the wrath of government should fall heaviest on employers who are knowingly hiring illegal workers. I agree with that.
3. and 4. Democrats who supported the illegal immigrant marches were not advocating open borders and more illegal immigration, but rather were calling for humane policies for those illegal immigrants already here.
After Hurricane Katrina, some companies that got big government contracts to do cleanup work actually sought illegal aliens living outside the Gulf Coast area to move to the Gulf Coast to take the cleanup jobs. (My comments here.) I understand some went to third world countries and recruited people to enter the country illegally to do the work. Your taxpayer dollars are doing this. I think employers who do this ought to be prosecuted, punished with heavy fines and jail time, and barred from ever receiving another government contract again. But the Bush Administration / Republican approach to this problem is to jail and deport the workers but forgive the employer. This makes no sense.
As long as employers can get away with hiring cheap and exploitable illegal labor then more and more illegals will cross the border looking for jobs. If people outside the U.S. hear that they can’t get jobs here any more, they’d be a lot less likely to cross the border illegally. That was the point of my post. How to treat illegal immigrants already here is a separate issue.
In the real world you’re not going to round up and deport the 8 to 9 million people living in America illegally, and unless the government shuts down employers who hire illegal aliens they’d just come back across the border, anyway, fence or no fence. For illegals who are working and obeying the other laws here it is far more sensible to give them some kind of documented status so that they don’t have to hide and so they have the same protection from exploitation as other workers. (This would not only protect the immigrant workers; it also would protect the jobs and wages of native-born workers.)
Some kind of amnesty is especially desirable in the case of illegals who have been here for a long time. Chances are they have children, spouses, and other loved ones who are here legally, citizens even, and deporting them means breaking up families.
You criticize Democrats who call for more humane treatment of illegals already here, confusing that with being in favor of open borders and encouraging illegal immigration. Republicans make a big show of “toughness” and talk about building fences and sending troops to the borders, but they don’t want to punish employers who hire illegal aliens, and they seem not to have a plan about immigrants who come here on visas and just don’t go home. I suspect some of those Republicans want the cheap labor to come here, and the talk of toughness and fences is just for the sake of the rubes (like TLB).
Once again, we have an outward show for the public–let’s call it ‘the mask’–the immigration issue’s outward show is all about getting serious, i.e., tough and mean. Behind ‘the mask’ we have reality….that posture of toughness and meanness will only be struck against the little guys who have no power to fight back. Criminalize the illegal immigrant job-takers, ignore the law-breaking job-givers.
This is akin to how the investigative resources of the IRS were used selectively: the IRS which went after the poorest folk who claim the earned income credit but ignored the much greater problem of the tax avoidance shenanigans of the rich [like off-shore accounts]. Again, we have the ‘mask’ that pretends to be tough [on tax cheats]……but only targets those who cannot fight back.
An attorney told me years ago, “There is nothing fair about the tax system. It is simply a conglomerate of rules serving special interest groups.” I think we can say something similar about immigration reform; whatever reforms might be instituted, they will reflect a skewing in favor of the already powerful, whether that be employers who want to hire immigrants or the corporations vying for the billions to be spend ‘securing’ the border.
This lecture by Minister Eric Muhammad speaks powerfully to the issue of illegal immigration and reveals what it truly means to both Blacks and whites in this country.
It has been removed by THE WHITE MAN due to, we assume, the number of people downloading it and complaints concerning it. We do not know how long it will take for them to delete it again. Get it while you can.
THE BLACK…WHITE…PROBLEM IN AMERICA 4/16/06
THIS LECTURE IS 5.90MB IN SIZE. WITH HIGH SPEED INTERNET, IT WILL TAKE ONLY SECONDS TO DOWNLOAD. WITH DIAL-UP IT COULD TAKE UP TO AN HOUR.
CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO BEGIN DOWNLOAD.
http://www.zshare.net/download/the-black-white-problem-in-america-4-16-06-wma.html
MUHAMMAD’S TEMPLE # 15
ATLANTA, GA.
Just passing by, but wanted to share this bit of enlightening history.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10482
The problems with all this are: (1) Mexicans are willing to die for a chance to work in the USA; (2) the main reason they’re willing to die is that Mexico is industrializing agriculture, and there’s a lot of people coming off the land who have nowhere to go; (3) the second reason they’re willing to leave Latin America is that it’s very difficult to become middle class in Latin America because their financial and legal systems are hugely corrupt.
All this means that no amount of penalizing employers is going to work. Mass murder at the border probably would work, but I oppose it, and I suspect you do too. Which leaves some more sensible economic reform program: probably some combination of allowing Latin Americans (at least) to come here and work under the same conditions as citizens (which makes them more expensive labor), pursuing real reform throughout Latin America, and improving our own manufacturing economy.
Randolph:
Mexicans are willing to die for a chance to work in the USA …
… All this means that no amount of penalizing employers is going to work.
If Mexicans (and not all illegals are Mexicans, and not all illegals get here by crossing the Rio Grande) were to understand that it’s highly unlikely they could get work here, I believe that would slow them down quite a bit. It’s not the whole answer, but it’s a start.
it’s very difficult to become middle class in Latin America because their financial and legal systems are hugely corrupt.
And the Republicans are driving us down that same road as fast as they can. It may take us a few more years to get here, but truly, if we don’t change course it’s going to be as difficult to become middle class here as it is anywhere south of the border. Come to think of it, that might be the real strategy to stop illegal immigration.
probably some combination of allowing Latin Americans (at least) to come here and work under the same conditions as citizens (which makes them more expensive labor), pursuing real reform throughout Latin America, and improving our own manufacturing economy.
As I said in the post I’d like to see the 9 million or so illegals already here given some kind of documented status that gives them protection from exploitation under American law, but I will need to be persuaded that we need to import more labor as part of a “guest worker” program. Seems to me we’ve got a few million guest workers here already.
pursuing real reform throughout Latin America, and improving our own manufacturing economy.
Those are excellent goals, and every day Republicans run the country we move further away from those goals.
I was after all writing about Mexicans and Latin Americans, not immigrants in general. But the immigrant “problem” is largely Latin American and especially Mexican–there are not anything like the numbers of people interested in coming from anywhere else and the Mexicans are only coming because they are, basically, refugees within their own country. I think you underestimate the difficulty of persuading employers not to hire illegal aliens, even with enforcement directed at employers as well as immigrants–the scale of enforcement alone ought to give pause; if there are 10 million undocumented aliens in the USA, there have to be at least a quarter of a million employers to act against.
I also agree that any Bush administration “guest worker” program is likely to be bad for everyone involved–certainly the last proposal would have knocked the bottom out of the US labor market.
It seems to me likely that the Bush sons are using Mexico as a model for their labor policies.
Mexicans would much prefer to stay in Mexico, if they could; these are people who love their country, and very family-oriented. If we can, somehow, manage to get some reasonable reforms going in Mexico, the Mexicans would mostly stay there.
In passing I note the following from Daily Kos, “Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a Mexican news service, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them ‘as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they’re polluting.'” That’s the road we’ve started down. I want to stop.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of persuading employers not to hire illegal aliens, even with enforcement directed at employers as well as immigrants–the scale of enforcement alone ought to give pause; if there are 10 million undocumented aliens in the USA, there have to be at least a quarter of a million employers to act against.
First, do you want to attempt to reduce illegal immigration, or not? It’s going to be a huge undertaking, no matter how we approach it. So “the scale of enforcement” is not necessarily an argument against it, because “the scale of enforcement” for any other approach — border security, mass deportation, etc., is enormous.
Regarding employers, although I’m sure there are employers who unknowingly hire one or two illegals with forged papers, you’ve got a lot of companies who hire many illegals, who know they are hiring illegals, who do so repeatedly, and who even recruit illegals. And I’m saying that when these companies get caught they should suffer serious and ruinous consequences, and not just a slap on the wrist. A few “examples” should cause other such offenders to reform. People are often persuaded to stop breaking a law when they know the government is real serious about enforcng it.
Of course, you’re not going to stop hiring of illegals altogether, but not putting some teeth into the law against hiring illegals makes absolutely no sense. And that combined with better border security should make a measurable difference.
Long-term, of course the U.S. should help Mexico, but that’s also going to be a huge task that won’t be accomplished next week.
“Long-term, of course the U.S. should help Mexico, but that’s also going to be a huge task that won’t be accomplished next week.”
The change in enforcement you advocate is not going to be accomplished in a week, after all. The problem has been decades in the making, and both countries have been making it worse and worse for most of those decades–it’s not going away quickly. I don’t ask that we solve it next week; I ask that we start pursing a compassionate solution. The attempt to reduce Mexican immigration by law is working about as well as the attempt to reduce drug abuse by law; possibly penalizing employers would make a difference, but I suspect that penalizing will stop as soon as it shows up in the prices at the supermarket.
What I want is a healthier relationship between Latin America and the USA. Maybe that involves stopping immigration, maybe it means admitting immigrants legally. So far I’m not convinced that we can stop immigration by law without draconian measures. I also wonder if stopping Mexican immigration (the majority of the people involved, after all) is going to make all that much of a difference to US workers. There are after all other factors at work: the manipuation of the exchange rates by East Asian, especially Chinese, banks, and the various problems of US industrial production.
More questions than answers, I fear. About the only thing I’m sure of is that “stopping illegal immigration” isn’t likely to work, and supporting it plays into the hands of some of the nastiest factions in US politics.
The change in enforcement you advocate is not going to be accomplished in a week, after all.
So we’re agreed that any course we choose will take a long time and will be very difficult, which means that time and difficulty factors do not eliminate any other course we choose.
And, remember, we’re not talking either/or here. We can BOTH penalize U.S. employers who hire illegal labor AND pursue policies that will improve the job market in Mexico. Both policies working together should make a difference.
I ask that we start pursing a compassionate solution.
I agree completely.
What I want is a healthier relationship between Latin America and the USA. Maybe that involves stopping immigration, maybe it means admitting immigrants legally.
That’s fine, but I’m afraid my greater concern is protecting U.S. jobs and wages. Growing jobs in Mexico is, I agree, one way to do that. But my first concern is for the U.S., not Mexico. The quality of jobs and wages is eroding here, and it will do none of us any good if that erosion continues. Yes, of course there are many factors at work to cause that erosion, but the last thing we need right now are more workers competing for too few jobs.
When a policy benefits both countries that’s great, and there’s no reason we can’t enact policies that do benefit both countries. But the first concern of U.S. policy is, and should be, the U.S., and my first concern about any course of action is how it will impact U.S. jobs.
I suspect that penalizing will stop as soon as it shows up in the prices at the supermarket.
We have to be sure that doesn’t happen. And “well, it won’t work because it won’t be enforced” is not an argument against the policy.
About the only thing I’m sure of is that “stopping illegal immigration†isn’t likely to work, and supporting it plays into the hands of some of the nastiest factions in US politics.
Not stopping illegal immigation isn’t going to make those factions any less nasty, believe me.