As everyone knows, the State of Arizona recently passed an immigration bill which is draconian in scope and threatens the civil liberties of not only undocumented immigrant citizens but legal immigrants and even native born American citizens simply because of the shade of their skin color. Much outcry has poured out over the unconstitutional and racial aspects of this law, most of which is justified, and boycotts are already being organized against the state of Arizona to change or repeal this odious new law. While the mainstream media has focused on the racial aspects of this law, the real issue behind the immigration debate has hardly been mentioned at all, which is the demand for cheap, unskilled labor and its effects on the economy as a whole. This is the elephant in the room which needs to be addressed before there can be comprehensive immigration reform.
While most people who have read about the provisions of Arizona's "papers please" immigration have been rightfully angry about how the law can and most likely will be abused by police to harass legal citizens because they have brown skin or a Latin last name, supporters of the new law have stated that the federal government has not done enough to address the issue of people pouring over the borders from Mexico, including the number of undocumented immigrants having children, using public resources like hospitals and schools for basic welfare, and drug and weapons trafficking. Once you get past all of the hateful rhetoric on both sides (mostly the right wing, but yes, both sides), we are still left with a huge national security issue which must be addressed.
Immigration has been an issue in this country since its founding. Of course the original wave of darker-skinned immigrants didn't really choose to come to America, but nevertheless they were used as cheap labor to build huge empires for their wealthy planter landlords. And while this certainly ties into the racial component of today's immigration debate, it's not entirely about that, as other examples follow.
After the civil war and beginning with the industrial revolution, huge industries began to emerge in oil, steel, and other manufacturing. These newly formed mega-companies were in a frenzy to find workers to run the factories, and while they initially found workers from the farms, they couldn't get enough of them, so they reached out overseas to find new workers. First came the Germans, but there still weren't enough workers, so they reached out to Italians, and then Irish citizens escaping from the potato famine, and then eastern European citizens. Like many of today's immigrant workers, they worked in mostly harsh, backbreaking, and often squalid conditions, and they often had no safety net to protect them when they got hurt or sick. On top of that, these immigrants brought their culture from their home countries with them, and then, like now, many native-born American citizens viewed these new immigrants and their culture with suspicion. Xenophobia began to foment, and many native-born Americans began to treat these immigrants as second class citizens with racially bigoted slurs and treatment.
But even the hatred of the bigots was nowhere near as bad as the abuse they took from the very corporations who hired them. The companies often forced workers to do extremely dangerous tasks in squalid conditions, and they were barely paid anything for their efforts, if at all. A number of immigrant workers were seriously injured or even died on the job, yet to the robber barons who owned these companies, the workers were nothing more than chattel which could be easily replaced.
No longer being willing or able to deal with the horrid working conditions, the immigrant workers began to organize and demand more pay and better working conditions. So how did their employers respond to this? By offering raises and benefits for their valuable contributions? Of course not. They had the police round up intransigent workers and beat them down. When that began to lose its effectiveness and the workers began going on strike, the employers hired a bunch of goons to cross the picket lines and attack the striking workers for advocating their rights. We also know that workers were often locked into buildings with no chance to exit until certain work was done, which unfortunately led to some rather tragic accidents. It was because of this that laws were passed to protect workers' livelihoods and give them the right to unionize and collectively bargain for benefits.
After the Great Depression and World War II, immigration slowed to a crawl, but large manufacturers were able to make up the shortfall of unskilled immigrant labor by hiring southern Blacks who migrated north for work and a better life. Once again the same issues reared their ugly head, and many of these were addressed in the civil rights movement.
But flash forward to the 1980's and 1990's. After the election of Ronald Reagan, the country moved rightward politically, and the major industrial businesses began to break up the unions by moving manufacturing plants overseas, leaving thousands of workers without good paying jobs. They then petitioned the Reagan administration to lower the minimum wage, stating that labor costs were a serious drain on the companies' revenue. While they didn't lower the minimum wage, it was set for nine years at the same rate while inflation and the cost of living increased. Workers who demanded better wages soon found themselves out of a job, and other Americans refused to work for such low wages, primarily because it didn't allow them to sustain basic living expenses.
So what did these major companies and firms do? Well, with the jobs they could not outsource, they began looking for cheap labor from other countries. They were able to find a steady source of labor from the neighboring country of Mexico. The Mexican immigrants were willing to do the harsh, backbreaking work in the fields and farms, the factories, hotels, restaurants, and retail stores which native-born Americans refused to do for such low wages and benefits. So these major agribusiness, hospitality, food, and retail companies began hiring these workers in droves, often paying only minimum wage or under the table, and certainly not offering any benefits like health insurance to the workers. Once again many of these workers were and are exposed to hazardous working conditions, and when they got sick or injured they were often forced to get medical treatment at the emergency rooms of hospitals and had to apply for welfare and food stamps even though they work longer hours than the average American.
Now of course you have bigoted and xenophobic people who believe that these people should not be in this country because they have not applied for citizenship. But instead of going after the major corporations profiting mightily from the efforts of these undocumented workers, they instead resort to racial profiling, saying that these immigrants are demanding special rights. They also play up the crime element, exaggerating the number of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, especially violent crime related to the drug trade.
But once again, when you get past the hated and bigotry of these anti-immigrant xenophobes, the pressing issue still remains; how do we deal with all of the undocumented immigrant workers in this country, and how do we effectively deal with the number of immigrants coming into the country?
First of all, we need to get workers who are already here on the path to citizenship. Get them out of the shadows and give them a chance to become American citizens. That means giving them work visas so they can continue to earn a living.
Second, we need to go after the employers who hire undocumented workers and benefit financially from their contributions. Just like Wall Street needs reform, labor laws should be reformed which respect the dignity of these workers, and we need to allow these workers to collectively bargain for higher wages and benefits (i.e., unionize). And for those companies who violate these laws, serious civil and even criminal penalties need to be enforced.
Third, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) needs to be seriously overhauled. While the intention of the law was good, the major result was that huge American companies moved to Mexico to take advantage of lax labor and environmental standards, and the main result was to bankrupt Mexican citizens of their livelihoods and force them to come north to the USA to find a better life.
Fourth, we need to put some pressure on the Mexican government itself to protect and champion the rights of its own people. They have the power to force major businesses to respect labor and environmental laws. Instead, many have been corrupted by lobbyists for big business and pushed their problems on America to solve.
Fifth, as for the drug trade, we need effective drug policy, not only along the border, but in all of the USA and Mexico. The Mexican drug cartels are extremely violent, and that violence is spreading across the border. Having said that, the drug cartels are only as powerful as the people who support them, and by that I mean the users of these drugs. Maybe if more Americans stopped snorting lines of coke up their noses, put down the crack pipe, or stopped shooting heroin into their veins, the drug cartels would be less deadly and take their business elsewhere. Or in the case of marijuana, we could legalize that and not only collect tax revenues from the proceeds but create a whole new cash crop industry around that which could create tens or even hundreds of thousands of jobs while freeing law enforcement to go after violent criminals.
Now the biggest argument against immigration reform, mostly espoused by these same billion-dollar businesses profiting from undocumented immigrant labor, is that allowing these workers to remain in the country and paying fair wages and benefits will increase the cost of basic food and goods in the country. They argue that the cost of tomatoes will go from $.50 a pound to $5.00 a pound, and that Americans will balk at paying those prices for food.
While this economic argument seems convincing on the surface, the reality is that the average American citizen is already paying increased costs related to illegal immigration. Sure, we may get "cheap" meat and produce at the supermarket and inexpensive fast food value meals, but thanks to the number of immigrants being forced into hospital emergency rooms for basic primary health care, we pay huge health insurance premiums through our jobs or have to take out huge deductibles in order to afford health insurance and hope we don't get too sick or hurt in an accident. The health insurance premiums themselves dwarf the cost of "cheap" food. Not to mention the costs of shipping food and goods thousands of miles from these border states which lead to higher gas prices. Which then lead to either drilling for oil offshore and dealing with the potential catastrophic environmental costs, or invading other countries with despotic but otherwise impotent leaders which did not attack us so we can rape and pillage their petroleum resources. The average American is already paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the higher health and auto insurance premiums, yet the major businesses benefiting from illegal immigrant labor are making record profits. What immigration reform will really do is make these major corporations share in these costs.
Even assuming the worst case scenario of paying $5.00 a pound for tomatoes by reforming our immigration laws, maybe this will cause us to address other issues, particularly the amount of food we waste every year. Having "cheap" food in the supermarket causes a lot of people to become more lax in the way they use resources, which often leads to wasteful habits. Or better yet, if the cost of providing immigrant workers fair wages and benefits is going to drastically raise the cost of food and goods from border states, maybe we can start more regional agriculture and manufacturing to defray those costs. If the major agirbusinesses can't handle paying fair wages to immigrant workers, maybe this will encourage more family farms to form which will pay fair wages and even give a chance for small businesses to form and multiply, thereby creating more jobs for immigrants and native-born Americans alike.
So now that the racists and xenophobes have brought the immigration issue to the front of the national debate, we should deal with those issues, but don't lose sight of the real reason behind immigration and why we need reform.