Keeping people poor by importing poor people
I have nothing against immigrants. My grandparents were immigrants; my youth was spent working side-by-side next to immigrants in most of my dirty jobs (restaurant worker and construction laborer, to name two). There are plenty of immigrants, or their children, in the Marine reserve unit in which I serve. That many recent immigrants have contributed valuable things to American culture is indisputable; many if not most of them are patriotic in a way that would embarrass your average college professor. In the days after September 11, I was touched at how many Salvadorans had proudly mounted the American flag on their humble vehicles.
My suggestion that follows, then, is not in a spirit of fear or malice. I believe it’s a bad idea to turn illegal aliens into legal aliens just because they’ve managed to evade the INS for a sufficient amount of time. The idea of “legalization” is supported by a substantial number of bishops, as described in a recent Catholic News Service article, “Immigrants rally for legalization; bishop calls issue ‘justice'”. (A summary is here, but you’ll have to check your local diocesan paper to see if they ran the full article.) The key quotation, from Bishop Wenski of the bishops’ migration committee, is “As pastors, we witness the moral and spiritual consequences of a system which decries the presence of the undocumented and at the same time it benefits from their hard labor.”
The “system” to which the bishop is referring is, presumably, Federal law. I don’t know that it “decries” anything, but it does say that if you come to this country, you have to ask permission first. Is the bishop (or his brother bishops) saying that it’s unjust for a nation-state to control its own borders? It’s not as if the “undocumented” forgot to fill out a few forms so they’d be “documented.” They broke the law in coming to the U.S., and they continue to break the law by working and living in the country without permission.
If my choice was between a chancy existence in my hometown in Peru or Mexico, I might consider breaking American immigration law, too. I don’t blame the illegal immigrants themselves too much. The people I blame are the politicians and other leaders who look the other way when the laws are broken.
Juxtapose the bishops’ opinions on this matter with their calls for a “just wage,” and neither position makes any sense. You can’t complain about the stagnant wages of low-wage occupations, then encourage the importation of more low-skilled or unskilled workers. If there are more workers competing for the same jobs, the price of their labor goes down. If the number of workers remains the same, but demand for their labor increases, wages go up. It’s that pesky law of supply and demand, and like the law of gravity, it cannot be repealed by wishful thinking.
Why should American citizens — inner-city blacks, Hispanic farmworkers, or poor rural whites — have to pay the price because our elites are squeamish about enforcing any law that might possibly offend an ethnic minority, or because they like the cheap labor that serves them their food and cleans their houses? Drastically lower levels of immigration would make the low end of the labor market tighter. Employers would invest more in training and equipment for those workers. Training and equipment make workers more productive. When workers are more productive, employers can afford to pay them more. Isn’t that more “just”? What’s wrong with helping our poor that way?
Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that lax immigration enforcement killed 3,000 Americans last year, as reported by National Review. The State Department should have rejected 15 of the 19 hijacker-murderers, but they let them through without any serious scrutiny. (You’ll recall that the 20th hijacker was only caught when he started yelling at his flight instructors that he didn’t care about taking off or landing, he only wanted to know how to fly a plane through the air.) That isn’t related to the high immigration levels, but it does reflect the elite consensus that immigration isn’t really a serious problem, or worthy of vigorous law enforcement.
Encouraging contempt for civil law, lowering the wages of the poor, and exposing the country to terrorist attack — what’s the positive aspect about our immigration policies? One of the officers in my unit, who runs a construction business in civilian life, jokes that the government will wake up when the kids of the immigrants get law degrees and start charging $20 an hour for legal work. Then the fancypants yuppies will think immigration is a problem!