In the ongoing debate in this country over immigration and immigration policy, I believe a fundamental truth is being ignored. It is not even being discussed.
I believe this truth lies at the heart of why our policy makers have been unable to enact fair, just and comprehensive immigration reform. I believe it also why we are unlikely to see the kind of extreme border control/security measures and severe limits on immigration that the anti-immigrant folks say that they want.
The truth is -- our immigration system creates an enduring underclass to which we are addicted.
What we really want from any changes in immigration policy and enforcement is to REGULATE and CONTROL that underclass, not to deport it and certainly not to empower it. This is all we have done with any changes to immigration policy for the past several decades.
I should note that by "we" I do not mean specifically me or any fellow Daily Kos participants and I do not even mean the Tancredos of the world who only play a role in the collective "we".
By "we" a mean the societal structures, systems and institutions that lead to how we deal with immigrants and why we rely on this permanent underclass.
Our current immigration policy, combined with economic and foreign policies create an immigration system and environment that is complex and contradictory both encouraging and disdaining immigrants and at least partially leading to the conditions in their home countries that drive the desire to migrate.
Why? I believe it is because the dirty little secret is we know that these complexities and contradictions lead to vulnerable populations because they are either undocumented or even when documented are caught up in a bizarre and often years-long immigration process that also leaves them vulnerable to employers and others. This allows for the buying and selling of their labor as a commodity and on the cheap and even for the outright exploitation of their labor.
It creates that ongoing underclass to which we are addicted.
We are addicted to our cheap food. We do not want our fruit growers moving their operations out of the country because we got a little too zealous with our enforcement and deportation activities and now the fruit is rotting on the vine because we pushed our underclass too far underground.
We are addicted to our cheap construction, our clean hotel rooms, our well-tended lawns, our domestic services, and on and on and on. In fact, we so love our cheap construction that we hired undocumented workers to help build the border fence ostentatiously intended to keep them out. We are so addicted to our underclass servants that we used them to help run the detention center that imprisons entire families from among their fellow immigrants.
But our addiction has been threatened.
In April and May of 2006, the U.S. saw some of the largest marches and rallies we have experienced in recent history – all to protest pending legislation that would have lead to severe violations of the human rights of immigrants and to ask for a proposed path to legalization.
This frightened us. Wait, we said:
They are waiving the flag of their home country along with their American flags. They must be separatists. How dare they demand a path for emerging from their underclass status?
Ignoring for a moment our long history of people wanting to both become responsible members of American society and to proudly recognize their original heritage, ignoring that they marched to ask to become a part of America, what we really feared was the threat to our system that feeds on the continued presence of this vast underclass.
Shortly after these marches, we began engaging in hugely increased raids and other "enforcement" activities, which I believe, at least partially, were intended to incite fear among and perhaps reduce somewhat the overall population growth of our virtual servants.
If that was the intention, it worked. The 2007 marches were much smaller.
We want our underclass. We just do not want them getting to "upitty". We do not want their numbers to be so large that we have too many of their children in our schools and too many of their sick in our emergency rooms. We do not want their numbers getting so large that they might reach a critical mass and begin demanding a way out of their servitude – a path to enjoying the rights and responsibilities of being a "regular" American.
No, if there are too many of them here for too long a time period, they might demand that path to legitimacy and then, horror of horrors, they might join labor unions or even worse become citizens and start voting ... and we just know they would not vote for the status quo.
This is why we tolerate raids that separate families, leave children without parents and even pulled a nursing infant from its mother.
We look the other way while immigrants are put into detention facilities where they are left to die and suffer because of inadequate medical care and other conditions that can only be called gross violations of basic human rights. It is why we allow the imprisonment of children.
We want our underclass. We just want it to stay that way.
This is why I believe that without real structural change, we will have no real changes to immigration policy or administration of that policy. We will only tweak it to regulate the in and outflow of migrants so that their numbers do not grow so large as to threaten us and their stays not so long as to begin to endow them with certain rights we deny them otherwise. We will continue to engage in border control efforts that we know will not work to stop immigration – only regulate it somewhat as needed.
In a neat trick, we are regulating out those who have been here longer and thus have social ties and networks and have learned the American system such that this might lead them to demand more from us and replacing them with newer arrivals more likely to accept whatever conditions we demand of them.
We are not addressing immigration in any systmatic fashion because a real and humane effort to create workable immigration policy would require enormous changes to our global economic and foreign policy to get at the root causes of migration both here and globally. It would require wholesale renegotiations of our trade agreements and a return to societal values that respect and uphold labor and those who provide it. It would mean regulating and possibly dismantling huge corporate enterprises that are often larger and more powerful than most governments and that often have their headquarters oversees.
Joni Mitchell once sang:
Who you gonna get to do your dirty work when all the slaves are free?
That is what is going on with immigration.
WE HAVE NO INTENTION OF FREEING OUR SLAVES.
We have too much dirty work to be done.