Beyond Righteous Anger
Thoughts on the plight and problem of unauthorized immigrants.
I was hoping to write about the power and importance of myth and, in particular, the myth of an intellectual elite separate and distinct from the financial elite.
Unfortunately, as often happens, my employment has thrust me back into a conversation I would just as soon leave for a few weeks: immigration and, in particular, illegal immigration.
First things first: no one, not a single living soul, is in favor of illegal immigration.
Illegal immigrants would much rather be legal immigrants. Illegal immigrants would much rather enter the U.S. by bus, train or plane in search of employment. Illegal immigrants would much rather pay a fee to the U.S. government for permission to seek out such work than pay a coyote to smuggle them in.
Instead, half of all illegal immigrants enter the U.S. legally on false pretenses. The other half of this population is forced to enter the U.S. at great peril. They must pay smugglers for the service of being lead through the desert, packed into an unventilated cargo vessel, put into indentured servitude in a U.S. sweatshop.
Illegal immigrants enter the U.S. labor market at a considerable disadvantage to authorized immigrants: unable to demand fair treatment or fair wages. They avoid all manner of essential instutitions — health care, law enforcement — for fear of deportation. They are workers, only, without rights or respect.
So, let’s get that clear, once and for all: no one, least of all migrants, themselves, likes illegal immigration.
Repeat: no one wants illegal immigration.
Everyone involved in this complex social, economic and political debate — except, perhaps, for unscrupulous businesses and professional race-baiters — wants an end to illegal immigration.
How then, should we go about addressing the suffering of illegal immigrants as well as the localized fiscal drain — repeat, local, discrete and specific drain — their unauthorized status places on local and state governments?
The most important step in this direction is to move the discussion out from the fringes, from the domain of the righteous and those possessed by anger, and into the public square, into our churches, universities and government agencies.
Parts of the problem, parts of the solution
For too, too many groups and individuals, this one issue has become a simple answer to a host of complicated questions.
I suspect that the guaranteed silence, the default disadvantage of the immigrants in question, has allowed this issue to metastasize into a matter of religious overtones.
For rather than confronting the U.S. demand for cheap labor, rather than confronting the poverty that defines the vast majority of the world’s nations, those who wish to magically eliminate the presence of illegal immigrants frame the issue as a matter of morality: illegal immigrants are bad people who must be sent away.
Those who insist on placing our focus on the immigrants, themselves, rather than the role they play in our economy, are simply shooting the messenger.
In fact, illegal immigration is the result of several — repeat, several — causes and, accordingly, requires a co-ordinated and comprehensive respons — not a single law, a single wall, a single rule.
This is not, as the demagogues and rabble rousers would maintaing a matter of right and wrong, but of supply and demand. Should America export low-paying jobs or should it import workers to do the same?
Once again, illegal immigration is a matter of economic choice, however abetted by culture and tradition. Immigrants enter the U.S. illegally because they can obtain employment.
If the U.S. government truly believed that immigrants enter the U.S. illegally for benefits, you can bet your last Gramm-Rudman-Hollings dollar that there would be a far more aggressive response to this issue.
Instead, it is met with laissez faire tolerance by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, by the executive branch and legislative branches of the U.S. government because it is a matter of markets and trade, a matter of development and competition.
For if you consider the panoply of trade, security, health and social challenges on our horizon, this issue, however important, is not, as the above cited zealots argue, the fundamental threat against all that is good and just in America.
Compare for instance, the fiscal cost of the (possibly necessary, possibly gratuitous) invasion and reconstruction of Iraq. Compare that cost with the impact of illegal immigrants in the U.S.. Now, repeat this comparison all the way down the line: health care and health insurance, energy, competition with China and India, the global AIDS epidemic, etc.
Yet, sampling the various and sundry web sites devoted to this issue, taking stock of the many political radio programs and several high-profile activists (and, even, elected officials) who find a reason to be in this unresolved problem, one would think that the cure for cancer, itself, lies in an aggressive, punitive response to immigrants.
Rather than tackling the demand for immigrant labor, in all its difficult implications for capitalism and the role of government in the marketplace, they seek only to make the supply — human beings — the hated enemy of all righteous patriots.
Thus, you will rarely find in these strident jeremiads an honest or comprehensive accounting of the trade balance between such states as California and Mexico (the latter being the number one destination of the former’s exports).
Steeped in a river of rage, those who wish for a simple solution deny the complexity of the problem by casting in the shadows for a conspiracy of incompetent governors, legislators, senators, representatives, economists, industrialists, entrepreneurs and, of course, immoral peasants from the Third World. In other words, the problem is not difficult, the problem is “them.”
Hence, illegal immigration becomes a moral rather than an economic concern, allowing true believers to paint the world into a simpler place, organized betewen good and evil, rather than the far more ambiguous reality of good people in bad situations or bad people in good situations.
So it is that rhetoric decries a millenarian crisis, a world turned upside down and resting on this single issue.
The American way
Our nation’s Anglo-Saxon heritage is largely a tribute to the protection of religious minorities like the Puritans. So it is that everyone is entitled to the free exercise of their religious beliefs, even when such beliefs are stated as matters of political and social import — for what all-encompassing system does not also include prescriptions for the proper ordering of man and nature?
Our challenge, as participants in a commonwealth, is to sort out the religious implications and underpinnings of our political claims. If you see illegal immigration as a moral issue, then be prepared to discuss ethics.
Does your proposal reduce suffering or simply brush it under the carpet?
Does your plan ameliorate poverty or does it push it, temporarily, out of sight and out of mind?
Does your committment to fairness and justice entail that we organize our economy around equal opportunity or are you hoping to safeguard the privilege of some at the expense of the majority who are without?
If you feel these questions are irrelevant, then perhaps we should avoid morality altogether in discussing this issue.
Such a change in rhetoric might very well be the first step we take towards progress.