A few days C-SPAN 3 aired their Congressional Hearing on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Security. Stephen Colbert's infamous Testimony and response to questions was clever and caring, if a bit simplistic. His presentation begins at about 56:40.
Folks who've been tracking the issue of immigration and justice for both unauthorized farmworkers and citizen laborers really should give the entire hearing a close look.
If you watch closely, you'll find that on all sides of the immigration debate, folks talk deftly around the problem of "free market" offshoring of farms and "free trade" importation of foreign goods. Neither is recognized either as a causative factor for our immigration troubles, nor as something that might actually need to be fixed.
To summarize the elephant in the Congressional livingroom:
As long as farms can be offshored and food can be imported with no tariff, US growers can't compete. They just can't. There aren't enough locavores and organic buyers and Famers' Market-patronizing consumer activists to make up for the fact that most people will buy the Chilean apple if it's cheaper.
Unlike construction work, or restaurant and hotel work, or truck driving, or many of the other sectors that are drawing on undocumented labor to reduce costs, farming does not have to occur on US soil at all. If US growers pay a reasonable living wage for hard labor, plus overtime, use the safest pesticides (or none), pay payroll taxes, Workmans' Comp, Social Security, benefits and the rest, they have no chance of competing against cheap imported produce from foreign farms that use near-slave labor under unregulated growing conditions.
(The back end of this insanity is that we subsidize giant growers like Monsanto, who in turn dump their cheap grain on foreign markets, which puts small foreign growers out of business. They then have few choices but to try to brave the border.)
Until "free market" offshoring of farms and the "free trade" handling of imports are addressed as central issues in the immigration dilemma, "reform" will involve a series of stopgaps that won't change much of anything.
For example: the UFW's idea of reform is a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, which would involve a commitment to remain in farmwork for a few years, and paying a modest fine. The UFW also argues that hiring laws should be enforced against illegally hiring employers--AFTER the period of amnesty.
Aside from the fact that such a solution would put unauthorized workers ahead of thousands or millions of would-be immigrants who have applied for working status through legal channels, this is probably the most humane way to deal with undocumented workers and their families.
However, as we learned from the first massive wave of amnesty under Reagan, the UFW's solution does absolutely nothing solve the greater problem. Once workers become citizens--or even legal--they're in a position to organize and agitate for better conditions and higher wages. This could, indeed, raise the bar for all workers--citizens as well (Colbert's argument).
There's only one problem. The preference for hiring unauthorized workers in the first place is due precisely to their inability to meaningfully organize, and that they make it possible for their employers to get around taxes, Social Security, Workmans' Comp, and the rest. Organizing, if not legal status alone, would likely get these workers fired, and replaced by another round of unauthorized workers. And as it was following the Reagan years, the cycle would continue, with citizen unemployment rolls growing ever larger.
On the other hand, if hiring laws were strictly enforced against employers (especially small growers, who are far more important to communities), it would become near impossible for their goods to compete against produce from foreign markets, where cheap labor and lax conditions are de rigor. Such growers would eventually be put out of business, and their farms would move across the border or overseas. And again, the jobs will be gone anyway, and we'll be eating our apples from Chile.
The point: until we deal with offshoring, and the "free market," tariff-free status of imported and exported goods, we won't be able to substantially address the cycle of illegal immigration. We must decide if the "free market" is more important than the survival of labor in this country. Because it will continue to come down to a fairly stark choice.
The GOP has already cast its vote, punctuated by the filibuster of a bill yesterday that would have ended the outrageous tax breaks that reward US companies for relocating overseas.