One of the several big dogs stalking the news kennel this end-of-week is that the Senate has come up with an immigration plan (of about 380 pages) that the President says he would sign. It seems to have balanced the teeter-totter in the middle with left and right hollering about being suspended up off the ground, the nativists on the right complaining about “law breakers being rewarded,” and the immigrant advocates on the left complaining about the re-worked family connection immigration allowances.
Count me in the I dunno camp. Whenever I hear people debating, and I listen to the various ideas, I can’t help but think that two core issues are absolutely being avoided and that the emotional excitement betrays something more visceral than laws, codes, quotas and codicils.
1) Several million people are said to be living here illegally, X % of them working — earning money, providing labor to legal, US, product or service enterprises. If these workers were magically disappeared –as the right wing is dreaming of– what would happen? Do that number, or something like it, of replacements appear (also magically) out of the “legal” population? Do high schoolers see the benefit of long summer vacations because they can go earn $10 an hour picking lettuce? Do the core urban unemployed decide to get on the buses sent in for them and go out and pluck chickens, gut hogs, do food prep work, buff tiled floors? Do the second income spouses turn their attention away from day-care and non-profit work to construction and part time garden work?
Or if no such workers appear, do the companies diminish in size and economic contribution in ways that economists like to describe as “a soft landing?”
I don’t know about all parts of the country but my on-the-ground eyeballing suggests to me that the SF Bay Area economy would all but collapse should all the illegals be railroaded back across the borders. Leaving aside the closure of all the top tier restaurants in Marin County, which alone would cause chaos in the BMW set, it would not be a pretty sight.
There is a structural problem as I see it: current levels of U.S. per capita consumption take more people to produce than the consumers themselves can provide. All talk from Democrats about accepting those immigrants who are here, and drawing the line, don’t get this. As current workers increase their own consumption, simply by fact of living here, more workers will be needed to sustain it.
Ideally, any community should produce what it needs for its own consumption and use with a little bit of overage for those years of falling short. When a community of 10 needs 12 to provide for its needs, and those 2 extra necessarily become part of the community, those 12 will then need 14, which then comes a community which needs 17, etc. There is a problem here that can not be solved by limiting immigration.
2) The second structural problem is the radical and persistent difference in wealth per capita in Mexico and the U.S. Though this is not unrecognized, all efforts to de-radicalize the difference have failed, and were probably never intended to do that in the first place. Until the wealth gradient is more like that between Canada and the US, or the US and most western European countries, the pressure for Mexicans (and those further south) to come to the US will be unremitting. No amount of border patrolling will fix that. To the degree it succeeds the pressure is turned inward to Mexico, with all the potential of a failed state as desperation rises and creative, illegal, ways of avoiding starvation are found. The numbers of decreased illegal entries will surely be accompanied by increases in deaths of the desperate, shot, electrocuted or dead of exposure in every more dangerous crossings.
The U.S. in its present, and foreseeable economic configuration needs more labor than its own population provides. Mexico and south provides more labor than those economies can use. What is to be done?
I don’t have a solution to this except to ask if what is being proposed is anything more than a stop-gap solution and that it be recognized as such. I’d like to hear that some very smart people are working on mathematical models, equal in complexity to weather and financial models that could help us figure this out. How do labor, productivity, profitability, import, export, consumption, wastage, recovery all work together? If a butterfly moving its wings in Asia can set up a hurricane in the Caribbean, what does a change in the minimum wage do to native and immigrant labor? How do we get production and consumption into balance, and sustainable into the far future, not just in the United States but in the connected economies of the hemisphere and indeed, of the world? How can economies be equalized so one nation’s economy is not held in perpetual bondage to that of another, and some people made chattel of others?
It also seems to me that nation-states and national identity are changing rapidly. Borders, as we currently understand them, may be undergoing seismic changes. Written law and political grasp of what is happening may be years behind these changes, distorting our ability to see, and analyze, and act in appropriate ways. What is the U.S. baby boomer influx into Mexico doing to certain communities, for example? Perhaps encouraging counter migration would be an interesting tool to use in equalizing the two economies and cultures.
In the meanwhile any of many compromises still to come will have to do. I’m glad I’m not at the negotiating table. Our work, out here, I believe, is to keep the fires of extremism, nativism, know-nothingism, banked. The Lou Dobbs with the big CNN microphones and the Jim Kouris with smaller microphones should be noticed, argued against, not allowed free play in the ears and eyes of by standing citizens. The road they are beckoning us down leads to very ugly places.
[Plenty of sources out there for those who haven’t kept up with the news….]