Author: Eric Johnson

A right-wing, xenophobic publication yesterday published a feature story on Mexican immigrants, insinuating that our immigration policies (or lack thereof) are exploiting the poor and vulnerable:

…But for Juan Manuel Peralta, a 34-year-old illegal immigrant who worked [at a diner] for five years until he was fired last May, and for many of the other illegal Mexican immigrants in the back, restaurant work today is more like a dead end. They are finding the American dream of moving up far more elusive than it was for [diner owner] Mr. Zannikos. Despite his efforts to help them, they risk becoming stuck in a permanent underclass of the poor, the unskilled and the uneducated.
That is not to suggest that the nearly five million Mexicans who, like Mr. Peralta, are living in the United States illegally will never emerge from the shadows. Many have, and undoubtedly many more will. But the sheer size of the influx – over 400,000 a year, with no end in sight – creates a problem all its own. It means there is an ever-growing pool of interchangeable workers, many of them shunting from one low-paying job to another. If one moves on, another one – or maybe two or three – is there to take his place.

They even found a Hispanic-hating immigration “reformer” who thinks Mexicans don’t have what it takes to make it in the U.S.:

…Of all immigrants in New York City, officials say, Mexicans are the poorest, least educated and least likely to speak English.
The failure or success of this generation of Mexicans in the United States will determine the place that Mexicans will hold here in years to come, Mr. Sarukhan said, and the outlook is not encouraging.
“They will be better off than they could ever have been in Mexico,” he said, “but I don’t think that’s going to be enough to prevent them from becoming an underclass in New York.”

Can you believe those people for writing and saying such things?
Okay, joke’s over. Both passages appeared in a front-page story in the New York Times called “15 Years on the Bottom Rung.” Mr. Sarukhan is Arturo Sarukhan, the Mexican consul general in New York, and thus probably not a “Hispanic-hater.”
Overlooking the manic obsessions of the Times’ worldview (class, race, etc.), you can see the writer is uncomfortable with the illegal immigrants’ plight. It is clearly exploitative to take advantage of poor people’s poverty and allow them to take low-wage, often dangerous jobs, and the article conveys their precarious position vividly.
Catholic Light readers may recall this critique of the USCCB’s less-than-satisfactory position on immigration, which said in part that

High immigration levels hurt the poor and the vulnerable, and are thus immoral. How do they do that? Through supply and demand: immigrants, legal or illegal, flood certain parts of the labor market, driving down the price of labor. Businesses love that, but it ends up screwing over the people who were already in the U.S., including less recent immigrants. If these labor market segments were more static, businesses would be forced to train these workers, give them better equipment, and pay them more.

Looks likt the NYT is catching up with CL!