Ross Douthat has a New York Times column today (5/3/10) criticizing those who are “impugning the motives” of the new Arizona immigration law, which
has been denounced as a “Nazi” or “near-fascist” law, a “police state” intervention, an imitation of “apartheid,” a “Juan Crow” regime that only a bigot could possibly support.
Really, says Douthat, the Arizona law is an understandable if unfortunate response to the federal government’s failure to “regain…control of its southern border. There is a widespread pretense that this has been tried and found to be impossible, when really it’s been found difficult and left untried.”
Douthat is quite vague about what he means by “control.” If he has in mind policies that would freeze or slightly reduce the number of unauthorized immigrants in the country, we already have those. But Douthat is trying to present a vision of federal action on immigration that would potentially satisfy the people who pushed for Arizona’s law, so clearly he has in mind something more ambitious.
Douthat sketches out what such “control” would mean, including “enforcement measures that will inevitably be criticized as draconian: some kind of tamper-proof Social Security card, most likely, and then more physical walls along our southern border.” Actually, removing a substantial portion of an estimated 11 million people from the United States would require more than cards and walls; more likely, it would involve massive internment camps and forced transport reminiscent of Balkan ethnic cleansing, if not even grimmer historical precedents. Though it’s clearly Douthat’s intention to propose a kinder, gentler anti-immigration position for the Republican Party, there’s no way to do such a thing in a way that could not be described as “draconian” in all fairness.
But it’s Douthat’s description of the economic measures necessary to secure that border that is most illuminating: “Curbing the demand for illegal workers requires stiff workplace enforcement, stringent penalties for hiring undocumented workers, and shared sacrifice from Americans accustomed to benefiting from cheap labor.” The key phrase here is “shared sacrifice”; Douthat acknowledges, as few people on his side do, that the net effect of forcing millions of workers out of our economy would be serious hardship for those who remain.
“You can see why our leaders would rather duck the problem,” Douthat writes. Yes, you can see why politicians don’t want to destroy the lives of millions of people in order to worsen the economic condition of hundreds of millions. What’s harder to explain is why some folks would want to do such a thing–explanations that don’t involve bigotry, that is.
“Douthat acknowledges, as few people on his side do, that the net effect of forcing millions of workers out of our economy would be serious hardship for those who remain.”
True enough. If “we” got rid of illegals, the demand for labor â┚¬“ and hence wages â┚¬“ would go up beyond what the system could afford. Then again, this might be the final push we need to wrest our capitalist oligarchs’ control of the economy. Funny how the system is self-contradictory, isn’t it?
Millions have been spent on the border since the 1970s with very little accountability nor it appears, success. Why not? Where is the foreign policy with Mexico to discourage illegals from entering while improving that nation’s economy?
Why have we let presidential campaign donations affect illegal immigration. George W. Bush Jr.’s enforcement was abysmal while he received good donations from the agricultural PACs and corporations for cheap labor. His enforcement of undocumented workers was just as bad, but no one seemed to complained. Now we have a flood from the unregulated industry on our hands.
Finally, as an Arizona resident, I must point out the author of the bill, Sen. Russell Pierce, has openly affiliated himself with the National Socialist Party (Nazi) and a key leader, J.T. Ready; both are also good friends with Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County Sheriff and progenitor of over $50 million dollars worth of Maricopa legal cost. It is evident Arizona’s legislators should perhaps declare their political affiliations before each election thus their constituents could declare their ideology. Sound familiar!!
It has become too apparent that a lack of common sense and intelligence exists on both the federal and state level.
> Douthat acknowledges, as few people on his side do, that the net effect of forcing millions of workers out of our economy would be serious hardship for those who remain.
Why would that be true? The cheap labor simply translates to low standard of living for the workers (and the unemployed). If illegal work was eliminated or reduced, there would be some (minor) hardship for the upper class and the middle class who employ (i.e., exploit) the illegal workers and who therefore reap all the gains from their low wages. Importing cheap labor from, say, Mexico has similar effects to exporting jobs to, say, China.
For most Americans, the net result will be positive: The illegals workers, who are being exploited by the employers more severely than legal workers can be exploited, produce a lot and consume little. If we accept the Keynesian analysis, which seems dominant these days, displacing those workers will open up workplaces for less severely exploited workers which will stimulate the economy providing more jobs for more people (*net* job gain – after subtracting the jobs lost by the illegal workers).
Of course, this fact should not be taken as a reason to displace the illegal workers. A radical policy which reduces inequality by reducing exploitation – benefiting both immigrants and locals – is the one that should be pursued.
Illegal immigrants put a huge tax burden on society that is almost never included in the discussion. There direct labor costs (wages) appear cheap, but they are large consumers of government services (schools, social services, police, prisons). Factor those in, and we would be better to send them home, pay higher wages to local citizens to entice them to take the jobs, and reduce the tax & societal burdens appropriately. E.g. lower end and many teenagers don’t work today because they can’t find jobs that pay anything near a living wage because the bottom of the wage scale is set by illegal immigrants who don’t pay for many services they consume.
US Government should do its job and seal the borders.
Also, the effectively open border makes smuggling of drugs and people rampant.
And easy for the occasional terrorist to come across (you’re not hearing about those captured in Arizona, but it happens more than you realize).
> Illegal immigrants put a huge tax burden on society that is almost never included in the discussion.
This is nativist dogma – Since many illegal workers are young and unattached, and since they pay payroll taxes but do not collect social security, it is much more likely that the opposite is true. But feel free to back up your dogma with data.
John, you hit the nail on the head. I haven’t heard anyone mention the additional burden for all of these years on the taxpayers. Overcrowding in the schools, hospitals, prisons. Cars on the roads with unlicensed, uninsured drivers. The list goes on and on. The taxpayers of AZ deserve better and it’s high time the state steps in where the federal gov’t has failed.
Have you read the immigration laws of Mexico? 2 years in prison, 1st time offense. Has anyone considered what would happen if this was on our northern border? Millions of Canadians coming into WA, MI or NY and adding to the tax bill of those states? Taking jobs from our UNION workers?
Why not set up immigration offices on the border? They can register when the come in, get a SS# so they can pay into our system. If they don’t have a job in 6 weeks, you gotta go.
The President welcomed several naturalized citizens last week. I would be curious to hear their comments regarding illegal entry.
WHY is the USA BANKRUPT?
You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? It is. But there is something even more costly.
Read this:
1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US .
11. During the year of 2005, there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border. Also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens have arrived from terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the US from the Southern border.
12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.
13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.
14. ‘The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States
The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR AND IF YOU’RE LIKE ME HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY; IT IS $338,300,000,000.00. WHICH WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY FOR THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY.
Are we THAT stupid? YES, FOR LETTING THOSE IN THE U.S. CONGRESS GET AWAY WITH LETTING THIS HAPPEN YEAR AFTER YEAR!!!!! AND PLEASE REMEMBER IT AT THE BALLOT BOX !!!
John,
Your numbers are self-contradictory: is it $11-22 billion or $90 billion for welfare? Is any of those numbers true? Should those numbers be added (as you do), subtracted, multiplied, or simply typed down with lots of exclamation marks and capital letters?
Where do you get those numbers?
Your logic is also faulty. When the illegals are sending their hard earned money abroad, then either they are giving us their work for free (working here but consuming nothing locally), or that money makes its way somehow back to the U.S., in which case it is not different from money spent locally. Either way, this is not a cost for the U.S. taxpayer.
As for the biggest number in your list – $200 billion in depressed wages – while that number is as suspect as any other on your list, it does seem likely, as I wrote above, that the more severe exploitation of the illegal workers results in reduced wages overall. The direct way to solve this is to increase the minimum wage and to enforce the minimum law wage universally – for both legal and illegal workers. Your proposed policy of persecuting the illegals will enable the employers to exploit those workers even more (by threatening them with turning them over to the authorities), depressing wages even more.
And regarding the ballot box: who do you think should we vote for? Both parties seem equally happy with the way things are now.
1) Not contradictory; $11-22 Billion is STATEs; $90 billion is FEDERAL. I would sum the numbers; to do anything else makes no sense.
2) They consume minimal consumer goods locally and send much of their earnings outside the USA to their families. Your statement “money makes its way somehow back to the U.S. …” makes no sense at all.
3) Importation of cheap foreign laber, whether legally (H1B Visas) or illegally, depresses local wages. I’m in a high tech industry and it is hard to compete with people from India who make a quarter or half the salary. My company’s management is learning they often get less than what they pay for. It is also very hard for teen agers to find entry level jobs at the bottom of the wage scale.
4) Minimum wage laws hurt those at the bottom of the wage scale the most, e.g. teen agers and other entry level workers. Full time workers e.g. heads-of-households with any experience at just about anyting make more than minimum wage so it no longer applies to them.
5) Closing the borders and requiring employers would simply require employers hire legal workers. It might cost them more, but taxes would be reduced by having a need for less government services. And people usually overlook the cost (overhead) of government itself to implement all the policies it takes tax payer money for. Employment equivalent of the “Peace Dividend” experienced then the nation is not at war.
> But feel free to back up your dogma with data.
Um, dogma backed up by data isn’t dogma anymore. It’s fact!
How about simply enforcing labor laws? Bust ALL the illegal employers. That would eliminate incentives for undocumented foreign workers. That only happens sporadically, for show, because our economy is crime based.
Who benefits from these workers? Cheapskate US businesses and billionaire CEOs. If they couldn’t find these people to work for below minimum wages, they would have to pay more. Heaven forbid, your lettuce would cost more.
Most Americans really don’t care how their goods are produced cheaply. The real price is dealing with all these undocumented immigrants.
Anti-immigration people make it sound like it’s a life of ease for the “wetback”. These are human beings, and our trade policies (NAFTA) make it impossible to make a living in their home lands. But we blame the little people, make it sound like they are living high off the hog, exploiting poor, hard working Americans, stealing their jobs.
As was mentioned, legal immigration steals real jobs from Americans. Employers pretend they can’t find any software engineers, for instance. Look for their job ads, they want somebody with a master’s degree to work for $18,000 a year. Nobody steps up, so they whine to the gubmint, and get some Indians to do the job.
As long as we have a system that exploits workers this way there will be “illegals”. Blame the poor. That’s the kkkristian way, Amerika!
There is so much that has not been said concerning this issue. Here are some facts: The people most adversely affected by this massive illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America are African Americans. It is a fact that the greater the population of Mexicans there are in a community, the lower the standard of living, the lower the quality of life and the poorer African Americans are in that community. This point should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence. As much as blacks would want jobs as waiters or dish washers or farm laborers, they are simply not hired. The often repeated assertion that blacks or other American citizens would not do these jobs is a BIG LIE that nobody seems to challenge. Even at the low wages being paid, there are a sufficient number of our fellow citizens who are willing to do these jobs rather than be homeless or beg on the streets.
Which brings me to another point. Those so called “black leaders” are embarrasingly dumb, selfish and self-serving. I am specifically refering to the “reverends” who have gone to march against the Arizona Law. I am mystified!!. Why would any black leader go out and support those whose very presence in America hurts black people?? Fears of increased racial profiling? Thats a bunch of bullshit. We have been and ARE still being racially profiled. This Arizona law would not change anything…repealing it will make no difference we will still continue being racially profiled. Besides let the legal Latinos also have a taste of what it is to be racially profiled, it might teach them to be a little more sympathetic to black issues(although I doubt it). I never heard them come out in protest when blacks are being profiled. We need black leaders who have the intelligence, foresight and selfless commitment to the plight of their fellow blacks, not scavengers and opportunists like Sharpton and Jackson. The Arizona Law should be expanded to every State in the Unioin.
I need support to spread this message and present another point of view from the black community. We cannot let these dubious “reverends” represent our collective points of view by default.
I love it when when right winger WHINE about what THEY (undocumented workers) take from us without EVER stopping to consider what WE have taken from THEM. They STUPIDELY demonize people who HAVE NO VOICE in the global neoliberal economic policies, US foreign policies and historic domination of third world countries for OUR benefit at THEIR expense, third world debt policies, GIANT AGRIBUSINESS POLICIES, ALL OF WHICH impact and drive immigration flows.
As I wrote someone recently:
Take U.S. domination of countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc., over the past 150 years or so. During the war in El Salvador when Reagan was in office 75,000 were butchered by the death squad government we supported.
In 1954 the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown by the CIA to get back UNUSED United Fruit Company lands that Arbenz wanted to nationalize so that the peasants (who were starving) would be able to farm and grow crops. Arbenz offered to pay United Fruit company what they said the land was worth on their tax return EXCEPT that to get a better deal on their taxes they undervalued what the land was worth so they refused Arbenz’s offer.
At the time the Dulles brothers (one of whom was in the State department and the other one headed the CIA) had stock in United Fruit, so they went to President Eisenhower and told him the Communists were acting up in Guatemala. They sent down Col. Philip Roetinger to overthrow Arbenz. He did and since then some 180,000 Guatemalans were butchered by the juntas and dictators we supported in what was considered a genocidal war against the indigenous Indian population..
United Fruit company (which I think owned something like 70% of the land in Guatemala) got back the land that Arbenze wanted to give to the peasants. They, the peasants, continued to starve in a country with abundant agricultural resources while we got their produce for our markets.
Likewise, in Nicaragua, the Marines put into power the Samoza regime around the 1930’s and we supported that brutal regime for 50 years until the Sandanistas overthrew them and then Reagan sent down the CIA to organize the Contras and about 30,000 died in that brutal war.
Many of these people fled these wars to come here. But we NEVER discuss the impact of our foreign policies and our economic policies (like NAFTA, globalized trade, neoliberal economic policies, the IMF, the World Bank, Structural Adjustment programs, etc.) and their impact on immigration flows and the lives of MILLIONS of people globally who are the victims of these policies. It is the immigrant who is the victim here and who has NO SAY in these policies that so tragically impact their lives.
NAFTA, for example, forced MORE THAN A MILLION subsistance level farmers in Mexico off their land as a result of giant agribusiness coming in with subsidized corn making it impossible for farmers to compete. We NEVER think about how THAT forced many of those people to come here as a result of an economic policy that they HAD NO SAY in. YET, we demonize them when THEY are the victims.
We ONLY know how to engage in the right-hate radio rhetoric of focusing on their illegal status and what “they” presumedly take from us. Let’s calculate how many BILLIONS (TRILLIONS?) of dollars in land and resources we stole, how much we owe THEM for 150 years of exploiting THEIR slave labor for our benefit while they starved and lived under the brutal dictatorships we imposed on them. And how do you even put a price tag on the pain, suffering and genocidal wars we supported that killed and maimed so many over 150 years? In that context, we have a lot of GALL to talk about what “they” have taken from us.
A few years ago, family farm activist Merle Hansen wrote the following in an article entitled â┚¬Ã…“Farm Crisis and the Progressive Communityâ┚¬Ã‚Â:
â┚¬Ã…“The chronic crisis of low farm prices and high production costs during the 1980’s forced off the land 24% of the rural population in the USA. Nebraska lost one third of its rural population. Since 1945 the United States has eliminated 4 million farmers. Land loss among blacks in the South continues at a rate of two and one half times greater than the national average. At one time there were 926,000 African American farmers. All of our black farmers may be gone by the year 2000â┚¬Ã‚¦
â┚¬Ã‚¦If we continue to allow this elite group of economic giants to dominate the farm and food sector, we are poised to dump two billion of the 3.1 billion people who still live in the rural areas of the world into the cities. There unemployment and other social, political and environmental problems await them. The forces rapidly pushing the world towards industrialization of agriculture are the same forces dominating U.S. farm and food production.â┚¬Ã‚Â
In August, 1931, the much decorated Commandant of the Marine Corps. General Smedly Butler stunned an American Legion convention in Connecticut with the following:
“I spent 33 years…being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested…I had…a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions…I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities…The Marines operated on three continents…”
FURTHER, as economic experts at Der Spiegel wrote years ago:
â┚¬Ã…“The global quantity of available work is shrinking â┚¬“ this beingâ┚¬Ã‚¦a STRUCTURAL (emphasis mine) problem related directly to the passing of control over crucial economic factors from the representative institutions of government to the free play of market forces. There is, therefore, little thatâ┚¬Ã‚¦the state may do to combat itâ┚¬Ã‚¦Hans Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, economic experts of Der Spiegel, calculate that if the present trend continues unabated, 20 percent of the global (potential) workforce will suffice â┚¬Ã‹Å“to keep the economy going’ (whatever that means) which will leave the other 80% of the able-bodied population of the world economically redundant. One can thinkâ┚¬Ã‚¦of ways to reverse, arrest or at least slow down the trend, but the major issue today is no longer what is to be done, but who has the power and the resolve to do it. Behind the expanding insecurity of the millions dependent on selling their labour, lurks the absence of a potent and effective agency which could, with will and resolve, make their plight less insecureâ┚¬Ã‚¦
â┚¬Ã‚¦Insecurity of livelihood, compounded with the absence of a trustworthy and reliable agency capable of making it less secureâ┚¬Ã‚¦strikes a severe blow at the heart of life politics, â┚¬Ã‚¦
â┚¬Ã‚¦There is less and less paid work aroundâ┚¬Ã‚¦Unemployment looks more sinister than ever beforeâ┚¬Ã‚¦.We learn for instanceâ┚¬Ã‚¦that in France the volume of work available in 1991 was just 57 percent of that on offer in 1891: 34.1 billion hours instead of 60 billion. During that period the GNP multiplied by ten, hourly productivity by eighteen, while the total number of people at work increased in a hundred years from only 19 million to 22 million. Roughly similar trends have been recorded in all countries which began industrialization in the nineteenth century. The figures speak volumes about the reasons to feel insecure even in the most stable and regular jobs.â┚¬Ã‚Â
Assuming this analysis is correct, THEN it is STUPID to look DOWN at those who are victims of the economi policies and we should should be looking UP at the economic elites who have created this situation.
Finally, people should also read Behind the Arizona Immigration Law:
GOP Game to Swipe the November Election
Our investigation in Arizona discovered the real intent of the show-me-your-papers law.
by Greg Palast for Truthout.org
April 26, 2010
Thank you Greg for excellently pointing out facts that so many ignorant Americans are oblivious to.
Slytot- I appreciate your opinion as I has not really thought about the Black Plight specifically in relation to the Arizona and other immigration issues.
As long as United States wages are much higher than in Mexico, immigration-both legal and illegal will continue, regardless of what precautions and deterrents are placed on the border and in the working of american society.
When you invent a better mouse trap, the mice get smarter.
We can save a lot of money and aggravation by recognizing reality. For years we did not have a replacement rate of population growth, we now are short of workers, even with high unemployment.
The year that Clinton signed NAFTA was the year he militarized the border. He was warned many, many times that this would happen, but he bought the corporate enthusiasm anyway. These “trade policies” are little more than government support for the new feudalism. Companies will go shopping for the cheapest workers, paying them barely enough to make ends meet in their OWN societies. Of course, that is American money put back into circulation . . . in someone else’s economy. What we need is better circulation of money through the American economy; the idea of ”keeping more of your money” is a form of hoarding. The GOP would have you believe that the government is “taking” money from hard-working Americans and “giving” it to the lazy and undeserving. How many poor people DON’T HAVE TO work – compared to the number of rich people that HAVE TO work? Part of the driving force of this immigration crisis is that greedy employers want this cheap labor, and seldom are punished for it. Worse, the fear of deportation for many of these people discourages them from reporting abuse or not even being paid at all! Wages won’t be higher in this country for long at this rate. More laborers than jobs causes wages to fall. It would suit corporate America to pay US CITIZENS less, so they encourage the competition among workers on the one hand, and complain about brown people on the other. If course, if the brown people voted Republican like the Cubans do, they’d really throw the doors open. But they tend to vote Democratic so I tend to believe Palast – this is about keeping Republicans in control in AZ.