What 'these people' contribute remains America's saving grace

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8064

What 'these people' contribute remains America's saving grace
by Pierre Tristam | Jun 12 2007


If anyone doubts that bigotry is enjoying a Great Revival of its own in the United States, the spectacle of the past week's "crass roots" banding up across the land to defeat what they called a "shamnesty" immigration bill in the U.S. Senate should kill those doubts. The bill was enormously problematic -- except for the winding road to citizenship it gave some of the country's 12 million undocumented immigrants. And that's what killed it. The defeat is attributable to one thing: Americans don't want more Mexicans and other brown-skinned people here.

"These people came in the wrong way, so they don't belong here, period," was how one Monique Thibodeaux, whose name suggests her American origins don't quite date back to the Jurassic, summed it up in the Sunday paper.

These people. It's as if the civil rights era never taught us anything. Welcome to Brave New America, where a nation of immigrants is re-engineering its once broad-hearted traditions to ape those of nativists, xenophobes and selective supremacists. It is, after all, the 75th anniversary of Aldous Huxley's classic. "Progress is lovely, isn't it?" as Lenina tells Bernard when the pair is, appropriately enough, traveling through New Mexico in the 26th century.

Let's not look that far. By 2050, the population of the United States by one estimate is projected to reach half a billion. The 200 million increase is twice the current population of Mexico. Accommodating that many more people doesn't seem to be the issue. More people means more consumers. In a nation that consumes more than it produces, and where two-thirds of the economy depends on consumption, immigrants are a double boon. They're ready-to-work employees in whom the state doesn't need to invest a cent in education dollars. And they're ready-to-buy consumers. They also explain why the economy since the early 1980s, when this latest immigration boom started, hasn't stalled. Immigrants, including -- if not especially -- undocumented immigrants, have been its saving grace (see fact box). Without them, the economy would collapse.

At no point in this country's history have immigrants, involuntary or "illegal" included, hurt the country nearly as much as those exploiting them. Undocumented immigrants aren't hurting the country now -- not as we're constantly reminded of record stock gains, record corporate profits, low inflation, low unemployment and low interest rates. That rosy economic profile hides serious fissures, to be sure. But inequality is top-driven, never bottom-driven, and certainly not immigrant-driven. The country is profiting on the back of undocumented immigrants and treating them like dirt in return when it should, without question, offer them legal status up to citizenship on a silver platter. Instead, we have the Great Bigotry Revival: Yes, the country will fill up with two more Mexicos over the next 50 years. Just don't let it fill up with Mexicans and these people. Why not, considering how much this country owes the neighbors to the south it has so derisively neglected when it hasn't invaded them?

snip//

So it bears saying one more time, for those who think America's immigration history is bunk. Just as "illegitimate child" is, morally speaking, an oxymoron -- a child is by definition legitimate for being innocent, regardless of his parent's choices -- there are no such things as illegal immigrants or illegal aliens. There are immigrants. Some are documented. Some are not. Both contribute. Both make this country work better than it would without them, as they always have. The difference is details. The country's debt to immigrants, legal, undocumented or involuntary, isn't. It's larger than America could ever repay. If all those immigrants have the right to say one thing to Americans lobbing all that sham legalism and moralizing at them, it's this: Save it for yourselves.
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[mike_c]

1. rec'd-- racism and xenophobia are the roots of the immigration debate....

Always have been. Chinese immigrants, Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Greek immigrants, eastern European Jewish immigrants, Japanese immigrants, and now hispanic immigrants-- all have been reviled, persecuted, and attacked as they added their cultures to the American melting pot.

[athebea]

2. Last time I checked...

"These people came in the wrong way, so they don't belong here, period," was how one Monique Thibodeaux, whose name suggests her American origins don't quite date back to the Jurassic, summed it up in the Sunday paper.

... "Thibodeaux" was a pretty common Cajun name.

Why is some of the left intelligentsia so 'politically correct' so willing to play the 'racism' card that they would rather march shoulder to shoulder with the Wall Street Journal editorial page to drive down the wages of working class Americans than seem 'xenophobic' or 'bigoted' ?

[mike_c]

3. over-simplify much...?

All employers should be required to pay their employees a living wage (defined by local economic conditions). The way to end worker wage exploitation isn't to scapegoat immigrant workers-- it's to make employers stop exploitative practices. And yes-- I say that if a business must pay workers less than a living wage in order to exist, then it should go out of business immediately.

Imagine the effect on the U.S. economy of raising the spending power of the populous BOTTOM of the economic/class pyramid!

[Donnachaidh]

4. Well when the PRESS starts stating the FACT that EMPLOYERS are the PROBLEM

Then perhaps we'll be able to stop this circular firing squad that some have set up against ALL workers in this country.

It's far easier to call those who are questioning the repeated failed amnesties racists than it is to address the REAL problem of EMPLOYERS wanting cheap labor.

[mike_c]

5. agreed!

:toast:

[athebea]

6. Refuse to face facts much ?

We live in the middle of a global glut of labor. There are millions of people in the world who want your job and will do it for less. That means their interests and yours are diametrically opposed.

There are laws that say employers are supposed to pay H1B's the 'prevailing wage'. When was the last time you heard of any employer being charged with that ? Of course not because in the context of a labor glut it is fundamentally unenforceable. Neither the H1B nor the illegal has any leverage whatsoever to bargain for wages or benefits. Both know they can be easily replaced if they get out of line.

It is naive to expect employers to pay a 'living wage' (i.e., keep labor prices high) amidst a glut. That is why American workers (and Black workers in particular) have NEVER been in favor of high levels of immigration. High levels of immigration; wages drop. Low levels; wages rise. Basic Adam Smith. That is why employers are always eager for high levels of immigration. Has it occurred to you to wonder why every cheap labor business interest in the country is behind 'comprehensive immigration reform' ?

That means that the American worker, to protect his livelihood, must eliminate the glut that destroys his bargaining power. That means ending illegal immigration (and its concommitant ills like offshoring and outsourcing). Not with phony 'togetherness' in the absence of any common interest.

[acmavm]

7. Save yourself the trouble of trying to explain why it's not bigotry,

or xenophobia, or any of the other insulting insinuations for why you may be anti-illegal immigration. The Utopians are incapable of understanding the need for American workers to be able to work and collect a livable wage at the end of the week. A glut of cheap and illegal workers ensures that will never happen again.

[athebea]

9. True. For the Utopians...

... the greatest sin is being 'xenophobic' or 'bigoted' and to that end they are completely willing to expend working Americans to a Wall Street Journal agenda.

For the left, this would be disaster. A left that is too multiculturally politically correct to fight for American workers is just like the leftists back in the 70's and 80's who insisted that people afraid of violent crime were 'racists'. That 'society was to blame' so we shouldn't be angry at a mugger for 'stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving child'. This at a time when people planned their lives around being at home before dark. This romantic indifference to the security needs of working and working poor Americans cost the left plenty.

A left that will not fight for working Americans has no valid reason to exist.

[mike_c]

8. we should protect our niches by scapegoating other working people...?

No thank you. Workers are not the problem. Exploitative employers are.

[athebea]

10. People who want your job...

... are not your 'working brothers and sisters' and can never be your 'allies'. The illegal and the cheap labor employer are allies against the American worker.

Zero sum socioeconomic competition is making the Black-Hispanic relationship in California violently hostile. Just as it was between Blacks and Irish in the mid 19th century.