Immigration

I'm going to surprise all of you who think I am the worlds biggest liberal. I just finished a book called "Little Bee" (A nice couple of hours after "Infinite Jest"), about a young Nigerian girl who stows away on a freighter to Great Britain to escape political strife. It's a sad, heart warming and ultimately heart rendering story about this girl's quest for freedom, and Great Britain's draconian immigration policies. The book reminds me of "Tortilla Curtain", another book with similar overtones, about a poor Mexican family trying to make it as illegals in Los Angeles.



I can't blame anyone for trying to escape the tyranny or poverty of their respective countries, they are only doing what anyone with a sense of self-preservation would try to do. If I lived in some third world hell hole, I hope I would try to escape myself. I do blame the corrupt and greedy governments that do very little, if anything, to improve the conditions of the citizens in most of these countries. And I blame countries with progressive governments, for self serving actions that have allowed these conditions to exist. And, yes I include the United States in that last statement. Anti communism, United Fruit, the Panama Canal, drug wars, Batista, Castro, Allende, Haiti, you name the place or cause, we've meddled. And a lot of that meddling has been solely for our national interests, regardless of the impact on the common people who live in these places.

I am pragmatic enough to understand that countries do have national interests. It is in Mexico's national interest to use the United states as a safety valve for it's poor, underclass population. Migration to the United States brings hard currency to Mexico, while removing a segment of the population that might foment unrest or even revolution in their home country. No matter how sympathetic we are towards these poor and oppressed immigrants, it is not in our nation's best interest to allow this to continue. There are over one half of a billion people in Latin and South America, and over one hundred million people in Mexico alone. The United States cannot possibly absorb even a small portion of the vast numbers of these people looking for a better life.

There are already between thirteen and sixteen million illegal immigrants from Latin and South America in the USA. They cannot be allowed to stay here. If we allow them to assimilate into the United States, and become citizens, their political influence will assure that the floodgates of Hispanic immigration will open. Here's something that strikes me about this whole Hispanic Immigration issue. The Hispanic immigrants in the United States only have one Grand Falloon in common, That is, their common language, Spanish. By encouraging bilingualism in the United States, we have reinforced the united front that Hispanic People put forth to block reasonable immigration control. Here are a few of my arguments for controlling our borders.

I would say that any Mexican with any sense of history believes (and rightfully so), that the entire US southwest and California was stolen from Mexico, and that in an ideal world, this territory should be reunited with Mexico. With the incredible increases of Hispanic population in these areas, how long will it be until there is a movement to reunite these states with Mexico. I know this sounds far fetched, and I risk losing credibility by saying it, but long term, if there is a serious tear in our national fabric, this is one of the fault lines upon which our nation would divide.

The illegal immigrant labor force is stealing American jobs. Don't tell me they are taking jobs that Americans don't want. That is a lie perpetuated by greedy Americans that don't want to pay other Americans a living wage. I'm in the construction business, and I've seen how it works. An American contractor hires a few Spanish speaking employees, soon he finds one who can speak English well enough to take instructions, and then before long, potential English speaking American employees are passed over for other Hispanic workers. Blacks should be rioting in the streets over this practice. From what I have seen, it is nearly impossible for a young black under educated man to get a decent job in this country. Blacks have been stereotyped as lazy, undependable, and dishonest, while Hispanics are considered hardworking trouble free employees. Of course one of the big reasons the Hispanics are hardworking and trouble free, is that if they are illegal, they are really at the mercy of their employers. If illegals were not here, Blacks and whites would be sought out to fill these jobs. They might not be quite as pliable as the illegal immigrants, but employers would make do.

I don't believe that we need illegal immigrants to do our work for us. They don't do the necessary labor, they perform the luxury labor. Here's what I mean. The industries that employ illegals include the following: Agriculture, Construction, meat processing (poultry, beef, pork, chicken.), and service(restaurant, hotel, landscaping etc.). There are others, but you will see where I'm headed with this.

In agriculture, farmers have taken the luxury of using illegal laborers to pick their crops instead of investing in capital improvements and innovations that would have allowed the use of less manpower. They have widely used illegal labor, even though there are workers available through the H2B visa program. I've read that only about fifty thousand workers are employed through the H2B system. Farmers have discovered that it is cheaper, their is less red tape, and they do not have to provide adequate facilities if illegals are used.

In construction, the average size of a new home has doubled since the nineteen seventies, aided to a great extent by the use of illegal workers.

Today, we have the luxury of eating almost twice the amount of meat we consumed in the nineteen fifties. I've read that is takes about nine pounds of grain to produce one pound of poultry, so, our increase in meat consumption indirectly causes an increase in grain consumption. The availability if cheap foreign labor has kept meat and poultry cost low so that we eat much more than is good for us or our environment.

And then there is the luxury of service. How many of our families had landscaping services in the fifties and sixties? How often did we eat out, or travel or have our houses cleaned.

All of these things I've mentioned are luxuries that we could cut back on or do without if we did not have illegal labor keeping the cost low.

Even though the direct labor costs are lower by using illegal labor, the indirect costs, which we all pay, but do not see, are squeezing us dry. Just look at our costs for providing services for the illegals. Health care, schools, social programs, crime, these are all costs that we as individual taxpayers are paying, while the employers are getting off scot free. And there is the cost to provide these same services to American workers who are displaced by the illegals.

We don't need to build fences or increase border patrols to stop illegals from crossing our borders, what we have to implement is attrition by enforcement. We as a country have to make it nearly impossible for employers and individuals to hire illegals. Here's what we need to do.

Employers must be required to check the national registry for proper documentation immediately upon hiring any employee. Right now, the immediate check of employees is voluntary. None of this business of filling out and sending in a form, which comes back six months later, from some government bureaucrat, saying that Jose's social security number does not match his name. "Please check and resubmit the proper documentation". Enforce the laws that define a subcontractor versus an employee, so that the employer cannot mail out a 1099 form to some bogus address, and then wash his hands of the matter. Strictly enforce laws prohibiting individuals from hiring labor under the table. Make employers and individuals subject to fines and or imprisonment so steep that no company or individual would dare take the chance of hiring an illegal. Without jobs, most illegals would have to go home. If these laws were enforced, no company would have a labor cost advantage over any other company. As things stand now, companies that want to hire American workers are at a competitive disadvantage, and are often forced to break the laws to compete.

Okay, there is my shockingly right wing stance on immigration. My apologies to all of the perfectly fine Hispanic illegals out there who just had the bad luck to be born poor in a third world country. As Bill Clinton characterized Bush's compassionate conservatism: "I'd really like to help, but I just can't, I just can't."