Borderline Thinking
PHOENIX– I come to Arizona a lot but it’s been a while since I have sensed such a strange and uneasy atmosphere. Saturday is the kick-off a “freedom summer” to protest the Papers Please anti-immigrant law. And while there are reportedly busloads of Californians heading this way, it’s anybody’s guess if the organizers can really draw the 50,000 marchers they are hoping for.
No question that a majority of Arizonans (and Americans in general) support the new draconian law. There should be no surprise there. When you ask people if they oppose “illegal” anything a majority is going to say yes.
But let’s get some basic facts straight. The U.S.-Mexican border is never going to be “secured.” This is pure political demagogy and fantasy and it is depressing to see how many Democrats are now buying into this B.S. A 2000 mile border running through deserts and mountains that separates one of the richest countries in the world from another whose overwhelming majority live in poverty will always be porous. Cubans, I will remind you, have NO border with the U.S. but a million or so have them have nevertheless made their way to El Grande.
I am NOT defending Obama’s decision to send 1200 National Guard troops to the border (I oppose it). But one of the reasons he did it is precisely because he knows it is effectively meaningless and only symbolic (though its symbolism is wrong-headed as it endorses the ignorant notion that the problem is a lack of border enforcement).
Folks, there IS border enforcement. The Border Patrol has been tripled. Hundreds of miles of fence have been erected. Thousands of sensors, detectors, cameras and other hi-tech gadgets are stacked up on the line. All sorts of repressive legislation has been enacted in Arizona over the past couple of years, before this unconstitutional SB1070 was even heard of, and the truth is: none of it has made any real difference.
Latest figures are that on any given day almost 1000 people are detained trying to cross just the Tucson sector of the border. And an equal number or more, or many many more, are NOT apprehended. And if Arizona tightens the screws, then the human flow will move back to California and then east back to Texas and New Mexico.
Put the 6,000 troops that the shameless McCain and other Repubs are clamoring for and it will still make no difference. Nor would 600,000 troops.
The only way you are going to stop Mexican immigration to the U.S. is to lower domestic wages to Vietnamese levels and –presto– there will be no more illegal immigration. Even tougher work place enforcement will have little impact. There’s plenty of that in Europe and all that generates is a back market in labor. Same thing will happen in the U.S.
Here’s another simple fact: fifty years ago only about half of Americans finished high school. Now almost everybody does. College is mandatory for a majority of Americans. And damn few of them aspire to be manual, service or agricultural workers. The truth is, even with widespread unemployment, the American economy requires about an additional 1/2 million younger, lower wage workers a year to grow properly. And lo and behold, that’s about the same number of “illegals” who make it here every year. The marketplace at work.
Hire BP to literally seal the border with flaming oil and walls of drilling mud and –within months– Mexicans will be arriving by raft on the California and Oregon and Louisiana and Florida coastlines.
The solution to illegal immigration resides in common sense comprehensive reform which includes more border enforcement, more work place enforcement but most importantly which recognizes our NEED for a growing number of immigrant workers and that provides those already here a non-punitive way to legalize their status.
I don’t hold out much hope because in the short run all I see is cowardice and denial — from both parties.
Maybe, just maybe, the absurd situation created here in Arizona will bring a reaction of sanity. Maybe the DOJ will directly take on the yahoos behind this new law. Maybe Congress will finally be moved to propose some realistic solutions. Or just as likely, the capitulation to demagogic non-solutions will only escalate.
One thing is for sure. Whatever happens or not in terms of legislation, the Republican Party is currently in the process of guaranteeing a LONG exile from national power. They might do well in November. But with each day that passes they are losing the Latino vote and without it, simply, the GOP has no mid to long term future.
May 29th, 2010 at 8:35 am
Please start sharing whatever dugs you’re taking
May 29th, 2010 at 9:37 am
Although we probably disagree on some tangential issues around illegal immigration, I agree mostly with your core approach: “The solution to illegal immigration resides in common sense comprehensive reform which includes more border enforcement, more work place enforcement but most importantly which recognizes our NEED for a growing number of immigrant workers and that provides those already here a non-punitive way to legalize their status.”
The irony is that I think that we have more than enough “border enforcement” and probably way too much. I believe that if we had an effective payrolling ID – and most of the “illegal” workforce that’s already here and could establish their employment and no serious criminal record I would put first in line with a green resident worker card and a “21st Century Social Security Card” (along with a path to citizenship that wasn’t unfair to people who were “legally” in line) – i.e. electronic, instantaneous workplace enforcement for any job that requires federal payrolling data – we could do away with any “iron curtain” crap on the border and let border agents focus on any activities by real criminals, not people intent on committing “Hard Work While Speaking Spanish.” Any jobs that are routinely conducted via cash payments – handyman, lawn work, baby sitters, bus boys, whatever else in the “gray” menial labor market – aren’t really of concern. Making payrolling dependent on proof of legal residence – using the same technology that banks and credit card companies put in nearly everyone’s pocket on a daily basis – would end 80% of the problem. And if the numbers were 20% of what they are, it wouldn’t actually be a problem. I also think that since immigration/naturalization is a federal policy, the federal government should allocate some payments to local social services and school systems, based on ratios of recent immigrants, to help with any additional costs that people in the process of assimilation might add. Not sure how the details would work, but it seems fair.
May 29th, 2010 at 10:04 am
I love your analysis, Marc, but I gotta take issue with this:
“College is mandatory for a majority of Americans. And damn few of them aspire to be manual, service or agricultural workers”
All due respect, but you obviously don’t run in the same crowds I do. I’m smack dab in the middle of the Midwest, and college is a pipe dream for a strong majority of both the middle and lower class here–same for whites, blacks, and Latinos. I’m talking both rural and urban populations. The cost of college is completely unreachable now for considerably more people than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and even for those who are able to obtain a more affordable community college education, they’re competing for fewer white collar jobs.
To put it simply: middle and lower-income folks in the Midwest aspire to whatever puts food on the table, and provides health care if you’re damn lucky (fewer each day). Custodial jobs, yardwork, entry level machine shops, grocery stores–every job you cite as an immigrant job in California (save for farms, which are either automated or pay illegally low wages) is performed by all walks of life here in the Midwest. A different ballgame here.
June 2nd, 2010 at 7:37 pm
I couldn’t agree more, Marc. With immigration, it seems we are tangled in a mess of “on the one hands”/“on the other hands.”
On the one hand, the existence of any substantial undocumented population is a vitiating force against any self-conception of the U.S. as a “nation of laws.” While that sounds like a straightforward “law and order” stance, how pleasant an existence is it really for those undocumented individuals, forever worried about their status, the police, being found out? Not to mention, for many folks, being consigned to dead-end jobs. So—on the other hand—a more “regulated” atmosphere of immigration has the possibility of serving the interests of those living here illegally—or those who, some day, would do so.
And we can go on: on the one hand, an amnesty program rewards those have broken the law. On the other hand, some sort of humane solution regarding the 12 million folks here without papers must be pursued.
On the one hand, the issue of illegal immigration is a serious one, and frustration is merited. On the other hand, much of the frustration Americans voice is tinged with unmistakable shades of bigotry.
On the one hand, as long as we retain national borders, they ought to mean something. On the other hand, we have barely hesitated in dissolving borders of transnational business expansion, financial accounts, and so forth. Does it make sense to any longer limit the mobility of the labor force—whose efforts, after all, power the economy that today’s titans have so readily manipulated across global boundaries?
Arizona’s new law, rather than acknowledging the “on the one hand/on the other hand”s, has laid down a single forceful hand on the side of draconian suspicion and round-em-up fervor.
Indeed, the above questions—with their reflecting-mirrors complexity, their lack of resolution—can depress us. Or they can spur us to action. To resolutions that take account of the complications. We need immigration reform as comprehensive as the problems they would seek to address.
I am reminded, as I often am when it comes to politics, of Auden’s famous poem “September 1, 1939,” and his attempt to, “Beleaguered by the same/Negation and despair,/Show an affirming flame.” Let’s raise our voices. Let’s maintain hope in something better than the dehumanizing negation found in Arizona’s law, and the despair among so many of those who oppose it.
June 3rd, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Christopher Vaughan:
On the other hand, much of the frustration Americans voice is tinged with unmistakable shades of bigotry.
Si no estoy de acuerdo contigo, me vas a llamar perjudicado. Y no estoy de acuerdo contigo. Prefiero fronteras controladas. Los Mexicanos si controlan sus propias fronteras. ¿Son perjudicados ellos?
¿Me entendés?
June 6th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Estaba buscando otro tema y di con tu blog , muy buena info! saludos