What Do We Do About Illegal Immigrants?

In one sense, the answer is obvious: arrest them and deport them. Enact, and enforce strictly, laws barring employers from hiring illegal immigrants. Nowadays, one must show proper, legal photo identification to do just about anything, and certainly this is necessary to get normal employment. Other than places like the construction trades, where contractors might find day laborers and pay them in cash, nearly all employers know, or can find out, if their employees are citizens or legal residents. In the 18th and 19th centuries North America was a vast, fertile, largely empty place, and there was a drive to find immigrants to people the plains. In those days, most farmed and some ran small businesses that arose to service the rural population. While, arguably, the US is still not densely populated, very few people farm and rural areas have been losing residents, particularly the young, to cities for more than 50 years. Most people are now not self-employed; they work for someone else. And as our population nears 300 million, do we have a shortage of workers, or even people in general? I've heard noone make that argument.

I did run across an approach today that surprised me. Basically, we should give up on immigration enforcement since it's unenforceable. It's an intriguing argument; perhaps we should widen it to all "unenforceable" laws: drugs, jaywalking, speeding, prostitution. Just throw up our hands and surrender. Difficulties in enforcing laws will always be a hindrance though I can't imagine any lawmakers taking the surrender stance. It wouldn't sell well to the voters. Another perspective would simply make the illegal legal. It's a different sort of surrender, and one the President supports. We have no "war" on illegal immigration. An ordinary citizen might ponder that; the growth of immigrant communities hits our local newscasts and newspapers with regularity and seems to have more influence on our real lives than Saddam ever did. Why do you suppose the DC honchos want to legalize the illegal?

One reason could be the oft stated, never explicated, ellipsis truncated, view that immigrants do jobs Americans won't do. From the coal mines of West Virginia to the fields of death in Iraq, I'm not certain exactly what jobs Americans won't do. The unspoken part of this position is that Americans don't want some jobs at the offered wages and benefits. This is the real issue: immigrants, and illegals in particular, work cheaply. Of course, their presence greatly expands the labor supply, increasing job competition, and drives down wages. It's, to normal persons, a peculiar philosophy that America can't afford to pay good wages and benefits to citizens to provide for their own welfare, but we can afford a trillion dollars for a war in Iraq, and who knows how many hundreds of billions of dollars to build weapons no sane society would ever need or use. A suspicious person might think he was being hoodwinked. Too bad some cheaper CEOs aren't among those wading the Rio Grande.

One thread that runs through the immigration debate is the bigotry/racism card. There may be some truth to it though I challenge its relevance. We don't need more workers; we don't need more people; we already have more than we can handle taking care of our own. Economic refugees have had a very hard time gaining official acceptance here. We apparently don't want Haitians. A few days ago the New York Times reported that 72% of black male high school dropouts in their twenties are jobless. As a nation, and within the ruling junta, there seems little concern for these young men and seemingly no imagination for tapping this large labor supply. If we are to worry about bigotry, let's start with our own citizens. Why is it that Mexico and Central American countries can't provide sufficient employment for their own citizens? If our politicians' and business owners' argument is that they want cheap labor then they should make that explicit. Let's have that debate out in the open.

If you follow our national politics you'll notice what has become almost a truism: that the Democratic Party is mostly silent and impotent. It could be because they don't connect with the voters: we want peace and good jobs and societal stability. And Democrats have nothing to offer here since they work for the same corporations as the Republicans. So the debates rage mostly over tangential issues such as religion in schools, abortion, etc. I don't denigrate those themes. I just note that they are, in fact, peripheral to the central problems most of us face most of the time. At least the immigration issue has tentacles in all sorts of areas. If we can't keep people from entering illegally to find work how do we propose keeping out the malevolent ones with bombs? Is surrender the only option?