GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR...

It's hard to make sense of the "immigration crisis," or even to determine what makes it a crisis now, as opposed to five years ago or two years hence. Let's get that argument out of the way first--immigration is being turned into a crisis now to distract us from various shady dealings by the administration, most recently the indictment of Karl Rover for perjury and obstruction. Yes, there is a bill pending in Congress that proposes to turn illegal aliens into felons, based (so far as I can tell) entirely on the fact that their presence in the US is "illegal." My presence on my neighbor's front lawn would be illegal too, but the law has decided to call it "trespass" and make it a misdemeanour at worst. Eating my lunch on the CTA bus is illegal, but it's a mere regulatory offense, not a felony. If all illegal acts were felonies, our criminal justice system would be in an even bigger mess than it is. Deciding to call a particular illegal act a felony requires more than mere illegality. It requires a serious policy decision that this particular illegal act threatens grave harm to society.

So okay, is the presence in this country of several hundred thousand illegal aliens a threat of grave harm to society? Depends. Do they drive down wages and working conditions for workers who are legally in the US? Or do they take jobs that those workers wouldn't take? That's the way the issue is usually phrased. And that's part of the problem. Because there is no imaginable job that somebody wouldn't take if the pay were high enough and the working conditions pleasant enough. It's true that many African-Americans will not do domestic labor as it is currently constituted. Turn it into a contract housecleaning service at twenty dollars an hour, and people of all races and nationalities will beat down the door to apply. Working on a garbage truck is an unpleasant prospect at best. But doing it with the protections of both civil service and a strong union, at upwards of twenty dollars an hour, attracts far more applicants than the city of Chicago can possibly hire. At the moment, there is a waiting list for such jobs.

Similarly, the anti-immigrant lobby bewails the dreadful working conditions of illegal immigrants who work in the "hospitality" industry, sleeping ten to a room in restaurant basements, working 14-hour days and 7-day weeks. We are expected to believe that employers treat them this way only because they are illegal and therefore do not dare quit or complain. But there are plenty of workers legally in the US who put up with the same kinds of conditions, and do not dare quit or complain for fear of being fired or blacklisted, or becoming homeless. The fact is that we could protect all these workers, regardless of their immigration status, if we really wanted to. Instead, we choose to blame the victims.

There may once have been a time when workers legally in the US actually had legal protections for their wages and working conditions, and illegal workers did not. Most people currently under retirement age have trouble remembering such a time.

The nicest people in the anti-immigrant chorus merely say, "My grandparents immigrated legally, so why can't these people?" My husband's grandparents, for instance, came to the US from eastern Europe in the early part of the 20th century, when all you needed was the money for fare and the ability to give the right answers to a bunch of intrusive and racist questions when you got here. Now, legal immigration usually involves applying from one's own country and then waiting for years until one's number comes up. It often involves separation from one's immediate family. It can involve expensive return trips to the Old Country for more bureaucratic hassles. And above all, it involves interaction with a system that is (deliberately, one suspects) overburdened, understaffed, and underfunded so that everything takes three times as long and costs three times as much as it is supposed to. If the system for legal immigration were in good working order, I wouldn't object to requiring people to use it, and probably most of the immigrants involved wouldn't either.

Should we be solving the problems of Mexico's economy? That's a whole nother batch of questions, beginning with whether we bear any responsibility for any of those problems in the first place, given our age-old fondness for corrupt and cooperative governments in Latin America. But suffice it to say, immigration is a fake crisis, and most of the problems illegal immigration is connected to in the popular media could be solved without touching immigration itself.

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE'S MIRRORS

Another thing that has taken up a lot of the last month is the huge public uproar about immigration. This raises two sets of questions:

1. What do we do about the millions of undocumented workers in the country, one of whom cleans my office and occasionally my house? and

2. Why is it such a hot issue now? What has happened in the last couple of months to bring it into the public eye?

Let's start with the easy question first. Immigration is a hot issue now for the same reason that gay marriage was a hot issue a couple of years ago and Terry Schiavo was a hot issue a couple of years before that--because the Right needs something to distract voters from real issues, like the increasing unfairness of the tax system, the decline in real wages for almost all working Americans, and the dismal consequences of the war in Iraq (which itself started out as a distraction from the other real issues.) It's a fake issue, in that nobody is seriously proposing to do anything about it that gets in the way of Business As Usual, but a lot of people can be aroused to blind fury by discussing it.

And blind fury is exactly what the Right wants us to experience. The Left, unfortunately, has allowed itself to be baited into blind fury about immigration, just as it did about gay marriage. I'm all for gay marriage (though, as a lawyer doing a lot of family law, including various procedures to make unofficial gay and lesbian families look like official straight marriage, I should oppose it, since it would probably reduce my client load.) I'll go into my position(s) on immigration further on, but, although I always enjoy a good demonstration, I think the immigration marches may have generated the same kind of backlash as the media blitz over gay marriage, and the Right probably counted on that in both instances.

All of this stuff is part of the Culture Wars. The essence of the Culture Wars in this country is that:
1. My dream is someone else's nightmare,
2. And vice versa.
3. All the fulminating and marching in the world will not change the culture overnight. Culture changes at its own pace, the slow, hidden pace of individual decisions and individual awareness of other people's individual decisions.
4. Culture consists of two crucial components: what people do, and what they believe people ought to do,
5. Which are rarely the same.

So the fulminating and marching can't change the culture, and aren't intended to--at most, they express what different groups of people believe people ought to do. But while we're fulminating and marching, the Right can carry on its grim agenda of impoverishing American workers and then punishing them for being poor, without anybody on either side noticing, including those most seriously affected.

So next time you see a hot issue surface out of nowhere, ask yourself: why today? why this issue? and, most important of all, what's the other hand doing? And try not to get distracted.

MONTH IN REVIEW

It has been a productive and exhausting month. I spent most of it doing a divorce/child custody trial in a "local" suburb (how local can it be if it takes two hours to get there?) and part of it preparing for and enjoying my friend's wedding, an interesting study in contrasts.

Obviously client confidentiality prevents my giving too many details about the trial. It involves some rather nasty issues of child abuse and religious bigotry, and once again confirms my belief that most couples who get divorced break up for reasons very similar to those that brought them together in the first place. In this case, my client was initially attracted to her husband because he was so good with kids. Now they're fighting over custody of the kid.

I don't believe in divorce, except where one of the 4 A's is involved (Abandonment, Abuse, Addiction, and Adultery), but I seem condemned to make a living from it anyway. Most of the cases that don't involve the 4 A's could have been prevented if the parties had learned manners in kindergarten. Which leads me to wonder: if everything we need to know, we learned or should have learned in kindergarten, what do we do with people who got "social promotions" from kindergarten without learning that stuff? Every time I come to a 4-way stop, I seem to be catty-corner from somebody who flunked the part about taking turns, for instance. Since testing is now in and social promotion is out in elementary and secondary school, why not take the same tough stand in kindergarten? It would certainly improve the quality of our politicians.

On the other hand, my friend's wedding was surprisingly encouraging. He's my age, she's a bit older, and it's the second time for both of them. He has spent years building up a reputation as a partyer, but in the section of the service he wrote and spoke, he talked about lifetime commitment with a seriousness that amazed me. Given that she is somewhat older than he and wears a pacemaker, one has to think of lifetime commitment more seriously than kids getting married ever do. Anyway, they were both beaming. I've seen them both almost every day for two years, and I've never seen them happier.