Hell Yeah, I Support “Amnesty”. Why Don’t You?
Uggghh….the “jobs Americans won’t do” meme will never die, but who am I to argue with anecdotal evidence?
Some economists say such accounts don’t mean that Americans won’t do some jobs, but that employers such as Gurney simply aren’t paying enough.“Every time someone says illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans or do jobs Americans don’t want, I want to scream,” UCLA economist Christopher Thornberg says.
This argument makes Smallwood want to scream herself. On a recent job that went into overtime, a Diversified Landscape foreman, Vincente Sanchez, was making $52.34 an hour.
“How high can you go?” she says.
. . .Last week Smallwood wrote a flier that says she would pay $34 with experience and $14 without. The notice cautions that no application would be accepted “without verification of proper identification that allows you, by law, to work in the USA.”
The flier is up in more than a dozen landscaping supply stores. So far, Smallwood says, there have been no calls.
It’s times like these when I feel like the world has turned upside down in the last few years. After all, how else can you explain a situation in which conservatives are begging for government intervention in the economy and liberals (or at least some of us) are insisting that the laws of supply and demand should be allowed to resolve a situation?
The thing I find so damn frustrating about this never-ending argument is the fact that the “jobs Americans won’t do” are jobs Americans did do, at least until employers figured out they could pay illegal immigrants less and not have to worry about getting in trouble for it. From what I’ve read, the massive influx of Mexican immigrants didn’t pick up steam until the late 60’s or early-70’s, but it’s not like we had self-picking fruit and lawns that didn’t require mowing before then. The implication that Americans aren’t willing to get their hands dirty and put in a honest day’s work is not only factually incorrect, it’s insulting as well.
And none of this is to denigrate the work ethic of immigrant laborers. I’ve been saying for years now that anyone who comes to this country to do manual labor for next to nothing has worked a lot harder to achieve the American dream than I’ll ever have to, so if anyone’s earned the right to pursue citizenship, it’s them. If they’re already here and working hard, why shouldn’t they be allowed to become citizens and participate in all of the rights and responsibilities that come along with that?
Please spare me the hand-wringing about people who “skip to the front of the line”. The reason there’s a line in the first place is because the number of people we allow into the country is based on an arbitrary quota preference system that doesn’t accurately reflect the number of people entering our country. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the fraction of immigrants who are allowed to begin the path towards citizenship, the process for becoming a citizen is often prohibitively expensive and a bureaucratic nightmare. The naturalization process isn’t indicative of the needs of our country or the immigrants themselves.
Which, in the toxic terms that define the current immigration debate, means that my position would be described in a sneering, Lou Dobbs-ian tone as “supporting amnesty“. As conservatives work towards making the word “immigrant” synonymous with “criminal”, this strawman argument is a way of modernizing the Willie Horton slur and broadening it to include almost every Spanish-speaking immigrant. If you support giving “illegal aliens” citizenship, you support criminals (unlike the God-fearing, flag-waving patriots in the Republican party). The racist subtext of this debate is starting to make itself clearer, but it’s not like this is the first time the GOP has exploited racial tension in an election year.
Besides, there’s a big difference between giving people who are already here a clear path to citizenship and granting citizenship to a large subset of our population automatically (a position I haven’t heard anyone endorse). As far as I’m concerned, if they’re already working here, we should be doing everything we can to further integrate them into our society, not cement their status as second-class citizens residents through a “guest worker” program that does nothing but cover the asses of employers who have been disregarding our nation’s labor laws. If the President truly believes that immigrants are an essential part of our economy and are doing jobs that we “won’t do”, then there’s no reason to exclude them from our American family.
Of course, the greatest irony is that the only halfway decent excuse for keeping immigrant laborers segregated from the rest of the working class is the faux-righteous outrage that the immigrants in question are “breaking the law”. One wonders where these defenders of civic virtue have been over the past few years as the Bush Justice Department has made a deliberate effort to cut down on the enforcement of laws that make it a crime to hire undocumented workers. Apparently the only crimes worth shedding crocodile tears over are the ones committed by poor Mexicans. Perhaps we should take a cue from the Republican response to the President’s own lawbreaking by working to bring immigrants’ residency status back “within the scope of the law”.
As I said above, my position is that we should expand our citizenship to more accurately reflect our population and ensure that the American dream is within the reach of anyone willing to work hard to achieve it. If you want to call that “amnesty”, so be it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a reasonable naturalization process, strong border security (at both borders), and increased enforcement of the laws that are already on the books. Of course, such an approach might put the needs of the working class and the nation’s security ahead of those of lawbreaking businesses, and we can’t have that.
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Amen and thank you. You’ve expressed 20/20 moral vision, factual insight, and political and social courage with this post.
I encourage you to continue to prepare the way for this country to acknowledge its unperformed moral responsibilities toward all people who live here. To paraphrase the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history bends toward justice - and your voice draws us closer to the powerful sweep of that arc.
Comment by John Lamb — May 18, 2006 @ 4:04 pm
A study by the Hispanic Pew foundation shows that illegal immigration has not grown at a steady rate rather it grows in spurts. One large increase was in the mid 1990’s at about the same time NAFTA went into effect.
I think we need to ask ourselves is illegal immigration really an important issue in the face of things like Medicare, Katrina and the war in Iraq. I think logic says it is not. NAFTA has been a disaster not only for Mexico but for the U.S. and Canada as well.
So what is the issue with illegal immigration, the issue is probably a created one hyped by a desperate republican party who are worried about staying in power. Immigration is not taking jobs from Americans rather it is NAFTA that is taking jobs from Americans and Mexicans and Canadians and here is why.
From Public Citizen:
http://www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/
Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment - never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils. NAFTA required limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.
Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and among economists never read the agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached to it. Now, ten years later, the time for conjecture and promises is over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model - a watered down version of which is also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO) - is merely one among many options. Throughout the world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are organizing to demand the better world we know is possible. But, we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are now pushing to expand it and lock in 31 more countries in Latin American and the Caribbean through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and five Central American countries through a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
Comment by rob payne — May 18, 2006 @ 4:31 pm
While most of what you say is true and needs to be said, it should be noted that our agricultural system has been dependent on “migrant labor” since at least the great depression, and many of these have traditionally been illegal immigrants. So no, we didn’t have “self-picking fruit”, but it’s been a long time since farm owners were willing to pay what it would take to get most Americans to spend long hours stooped over in the hot sun picking strawberries. It seems others have learned from the farmers…
Comment by coasterbear — May 18, 2006 @ 4:43 pm
What we will end up with is a 1.9 billion dollar fence that will cost 3 billion and 10 years to build. Except for the illegals actually at work building the fence, all others will go around. Everything else will look the same.
Comment by Mike Meyer — May 18, 2006 @ 9:53 pm
Great stuff greg. What really drives me nuts about all of this is that the crime we are talking about here is basically about not properly filing the paperwork and waiting patiently enough in line. For this, folks want to build the Great Wall of Texas and man it 24 x 7 with a paramilitary force equipped with minefields and robotic spy planes.
Yeah, that makes a lot of economic sense.
Comment by moonbiter — May 18, 2006 @ 11:47 pm
The name for this immigration /workforce issue should be “TEXAS SLAVERY”. If you lure someone into your employ with promises of freedom and streets of gold just over the horizon, the game you are playing is Texas Hold’em. The difference between the poker game and the human slave trade is the verbage, and that is to make the players feel better about what they are doing so they keep playing. If they had been raised right by good people, they would not consider playing games with people and their lives.
Comment by patrick — May 19, 2006 @ 6:11 am
The “Jobs Americans Won’t Do” line drives me crazy as well.
Guess that explains why all Americans are stockbrokers and CEOs.
Comment by Humbug — May 19, 2006 @ 1:56 pm
Thanks, Greg. You know how ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ actually begins? By massively investing in the bureaucratic side (USCIS) of legal immigration. Clear the fucking backlog for people already in the queue, then reform the laws however you see fit. If there’s a transparent and speedy immigration process, backed up by a well-funded bureaucracy, then there’s much less incentive to go to the coyotes. Until that happens, no amount of dick-swinging and fence building will help.
Lou Dobbs has it ass-backwards. You can’t ’secure the borders’ then look at the law and its administration, because once you play border theatre, the election has passed and no-one gives a shit any more.
Instead, you get the paradoxically chauvinistic use of the purported number of ‘illegal’ immigrants (and that’s a very loose term to cover a lot of situations) to suggest that America is oh-so-great because millions of people are desparate to enter. If no-one wanted to come to America, I bet Dobbs would be complaining for different reasons.
The amount of ignorance on display here is amazing, and it’s because the only people who really understand immigration in the US are either immigration lawyers or immigrants themselves. And the latter group doesn’t get to vote. On the other hand, talking tough about Mexicans brings out the Deliverance wing in droves.
All that talk about ‘tamper-proof IDs with digital fingerprints’? Every pundit was oohing about that. Every immigrant was thinking ‘Huh? Sounds just like my green card or EAD.’ Every illegal immigrant was thinking ‘fuck that, it’s easier to claim I’m a US citizen.’
Comment by ahem — May 20, 2006 @ 12:57 am
Shit, I’d work for $34 an hour doing landscaping. I do it all the time at home for nothing.
Comment by The Critic — May 20, 2006 @ 7:15 am
Heck, these immigrants are our working class.
Comment by janinsanfran — May 24, 2006 @ 11:02 pm