Six Seeds of the Pomegranate

Jonathan Power has an interesting piece on First Drafts regarding some of the drawbacks of immigration. Some points are a bit narrow and forceful for me, but one or two of his points were long overdue for discussion, such as:

The main trouble is that modern capitalist-inclined governments rather like it: immigration keeps down wages. (I’m not talking about the immigration of professionals—and how governments like to mislead the public by often conflating the two!) It provides an underclass who live on the margins of established society. They may not pay income taxes (although they pay VAT and every other kind of consumer tax), but this is made up for by their willingness to do dirty jobs, night shifts and off the books jobs like cleaners and nannies. Immigration, in short, is a deflationary economic tool and governments love that. Note: He’s principally talking about the UK and South Africa, so for the purposes of this post insert “illegal” before “immigration” and “to the US” afterwards.

This is one of my principal problems with illegal immigration to the States: It creates an underclass ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous and greedy companies. That the government turns a blind eye to low wages, unsafe working conditions, and sometimes outright abuse encourages many corporations (for example, the strawberry farmers Eric Schlosser described in Reefer Nation) to actively seek out illegal labor. Given the choice between hiring an unskilled citizen or legal immigrant who understand their right to recourse for unfair treatment, and an illegal immigrant living in fear of the law and probably desperate to feed a starving family, what’s the profit-conscious company to do? The lack of enforcement against these companies is a shameful abdication of governmental responsibility. If labor laws were strictly enforced, there wouldn’t be as much of a market for illegal labor. Moreover, wages would no longer be weighed down by low bidders rendered desperate by their circumstances. But corporations and legislators alike profit from this near-slavery, so the latter placate their constituencies by brutal token roundups, all the while accepting tributes from the former.

What is the answer? Keeping immigrants out is not easy. But there are ways for the government to favour their own citizens. First, they can commit resources to retraining programmes for their own unemployed or poorly employed citizens.

Okay, this is definitely problematic. Suggesting the government “favour its own citizens,” especially in the US, starts you down a nasty slippery slope. In an ideal US, workers would be hired based on their merits: their skill set, their work ethic, and their willingness to work for a fair — not grossly depressed — wage. Employers, in turn, would be judged by the fairness of their wages and work conditions, and thereby forced to conduct themselves properly or lose all the qualified labor to better firms and/or suffer legal penalties. Of course, this is not the case, but it is the standard to which we ought aspire. Additionally, improving our school system would go a long way towards preventing under- or unemployment.

Second, they can help the major countries of emigration develop their economies at home. When countries that once were big emigration countries developed—as varied as Turkey, Puerto Rico and Ireland—the immigrants voluntarily returned.

It is disingenuous to claim illegal immigrants deserve a better life in the States, because the statement doesn’t take into account the multitudes who remain in the countries of origin. All human beings living in poverty and squalor deserve a crack at a better life, and they deserve to have those opportunities available where they are. Any government truly committed to improving conditions for these people would exert social, political, or economic pressure on “exodus nations” (which tend to be impoverished more by corruption than by a lack of resources) to improve conditions so that their citizens were not forced to leave in order to support themselves and their families. But the arrangement works for too many people, except of course for the workers: The destination country’s government gets cheap labor, corporate contributions, an apparently strong economy, and (maybe) political leverage, and the originating country’s government gets a steady stream of income from its expatriates which bolsters the economy and feeds, clothes, and generally placates the remaining citizens, thereby freeing it (the government) of responsibility for reducing corruption or attacking the causes of poverty.

All that said, I support immigration; I am truly proud to be part of this diverse and dynamic melting pot, in spite of all its faults. However, the system is in dire need of an overhaul and we as a nation are in equally dire need of an honest debate about how to bring policy up to principles, and how to govern in a way that respects human dignity, maintains fairness, and offers as much real opportunity to as many as possible.