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.
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.
posted by WiredSisters at 11:26 AM
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