Lift Up Your Hearts!

Once again leaving the rest of my life to fend for itself for a while, I return to my commentary on LaMonte M. Fowler's Huffington Post article.

Mexico isn’t going to pay for the wall, and we’re not going to deport millions of people and break up families. If you think either one is a good idea, you’re not smart and probably not a person I want to hang out with.

Aside from the rudeness, I agree with him here. It ought to be glaringly obvious that Mexico has too many problems of its own to finance something that only helps its rich neighbors to the north. If they have any leftover pesos, I'd rather they put them towards conquering their drug lords and ameliorating the conditions that make their citizens take desperate risks. And deporting millions of people isn't any more of a solution to our problems than the creation of Liberia was to the problem of slavery.

Nonetheless, focussing on these extremes misses the valid and important points behind the bombast. I can name a few.

• Illegal immigration is ... illegal. We keep missing this point. It's possible that, as with Prohibition, immigration restrictions are so unpopular that they only breed a nation of scofflaws and fuel organized crime. I don't think so—other countries manage better—but we either need to muster the national will to enforce our existing laws, or else change them to something we are willing to uphold.
• Illegal immigration is slavery. First, it unnaturally depresses wages by providing an unending supply of workers. Even legal immigration has that effect. When it's illegal, however, the workers are powerless because of their status. I heard an otherwise upstanding citizen brag, in my presence, that his workers do as they're told, because they know that if they don't, he'll pay a visit to the immigration authorities.
  
  To the farmer who insists he needs his undocumented workers because he can't afford to farm without them, I say that was the excuse the Southern plantation owners gave for owning slaves. To the commentator who said that without such workers we'd be paying $45 for a head of lettuce, I say I don't believe it. Switzerland pays good wages and their prices, though high, aren't that much more than ours. Less, in some cases. And even if our prices did skyrocket—is it right to allow slavery just so we can have cheap lettuce?Illlegal immigration is unfair to all those who have gone through the effort and expense to obey the law. In the case of poor immigrants, it is cruelly so. We know a family of refugees who built an honest and successful HVAC business that thrived until they could no longer compete with the companies that use cheap, illegal workers. Thus a real-life, recent example of the American Dream come true was scuttled by our collective unwillingness to enforce the laws meant to protect such people.
• The problem of breaking up families is largely the product of a policy I'd change if I could—although that's hard, because it's in the Constitution. Most countries do not grant automatic citizenship to a child simply because he is born there. Our Swiss grandchildren are Swiss because their father is Swiss, not because they were born there. Granting American citizenship to minors whose parents are in the country illegally, or even legally as tourists, has become the root of many problems, not the least of which is the inability to enforce immigration laws without either breaking up families or illegally deporting citizens.

Unless you can trace your family line back to someone who made deerskin pants look stylish and could field dress a buffalo, you are a descendent of an immigrant. Please stop saying that immigrants are ruining our country. Such comments are like a giant verbal burrito stuffed with historical ignorance, latent racism and xenophobia, all wrapped in a fascist tortilla.

As it happens, I do have ancestors who wore deerskin pants and could dress a buffalo. But how is that relevant?  Everyone who came to this country, Native Americans included, was an immigrant. (As an interesting side note, if you want to see a hotbed of illegal immigration, look no further than present-day Boston and the Irish.)  Who says that "immigrants" are ruining our country?  

Where people see ruination, or the potential thereof, lies in the coincidence of (1) an uncontrolled flood of immigrants, most of which are very needy, and (2) our modern society with its greatly expanded governmental services. No longer are immigrants supported solely by their own hard work, their families, their churches, and their communities. It's a good thing to have an additional safety net, but that net is not infinitely stretchable, especially in an era when the country and the economy are no longer expanding.  Even leaving aside the social safety net, ordinary governmental and infrastructure services—such as schools, police and fire, water and power, and roads—are stressed by rapid population growth, especially when that population will not for a long while represent a commensurate increase in tax revenue.

We don't just need a solution to our immigration situation. We need a solution that's affordable and above all sustainable. The United States is like the Earth itself: vast, rich, and full of resources. But those resources are not inexhaustible, and it's as irresponsible to act without taking that into account as it is to continue consuming as if fossil fuels were going to last forever.

To be continued....