I am against illegal immigration. Our country is more crowded than I believe it should be, and I dislike the idea of a permanent underclass that holds down wages for people who do physical work. But I’ve also been to small towns in Mexico where the average person has no opportunity at all, and the most certain way to get ahead — or even support a family in the most modest circumstances — is to send at least one family member to the United States. Meanwhile, on this side of the border, I know illegal immigrants who are law-abiding in all other ways, work hard, and are generally good people. But I also know Americans who have seen their jobs taken by illegal immigrants who work for less money and don’t expect to be covered by health insurance or even get overtime pay required by law. How do we solve this set of problems? Are they even solvable at this point?

First, let me kill the “Jobs Americans won’t do” canard. This is total crap. Pay a decent wage and treat them right, and you’ll have plenty of Americans working in fields and slaughterhouses, making hotel beds and washing dishes in restaurants. It is the nature of the unrestrained capitalist to pay workers as little as he can. In the Dominican Republic, where the average worker earns nearly nothing by U.S. standards, plantation owners hire illegal immigrants from Haiti to save money. In a December 27, 2007 New York Times article headlined A Global Trek to Poor Nations, From Poorer Ones (free registration required to read), reporter Jason DeParle talked with Anes Moises, an illegal Haitian immigrant in the Dominican Republic:

Dominican society, in his view, is complex. Some politicians want Haitians deported, he said, but employers “need us to work.” Poor Dominicans claim Haitians are stealing jobs, but refuse those jobs themselves. Officers sometimes order raids to curry political favor, he added, but low-paid soldiers want the Haitians around to extort bribes. “It’s a business they have,” he said.

Another quote from the same article:

The village of Juan Gómez lies 35 miles east of the border, past three military checkpoints that search for illegal migrants. But its illegal migrants, like Mr. Moises, live in plain view. Their open presence points to the capricious unwritten rules: Haitians caught at the border are usually sent back, while those needed by employers are often left to stay, at least until someone objects.

“We do not intervene in the workplace,” said Carlos Amarante Baret, the Dominican immigration director. “We understand the needs of the agricultural sector.” He acknowledged that the situation “benefits the landowner.”

Ah, yes. “…the needs of the agricultural sector.” We hear that one all the time in the U.S., don’t we? The only difference between our plantation owners and the ones in the Dominican Republic is that landowners there want to keep wages down to $5 per day, while ours whine about $50 per day. If either group found a way to pay workers $2 per day, or even less, I suspect that they would jump on it — as long as the cost of hauling away the bodies of workers who died in their fields from malnutrition didn’t exceed their labor savings.

The Laissez-faire Capitalism Solution

A Laissez-faire capitalist and his libertarian cousin see an obvious way to solve our immigration problem: don’t try to control immigration at all. And don’t control imports, either. If the Dominican landowner, with $5/day Haitian labor, can grow crops cheaper than a U.S. landowner, we should be happy that the market’s “invisible hand” is giving us cheap food. Displaced American (and Mexican) farmworkers have the freedom to take other jobs or to go to school and become attorneys or hairdressers or truckdrivers. Production of all goods will move to the countries that currently have the lowest labor rates and least-restrictive laws. Services that can be delivered remotely by workers in low-cost countries will be performed by the lowest-cost workers available in the world.

This solution makes immigration to the U.S. unattractive, since it kills most physical labor (and many professional) job opportunities here.

Those of you who worry about the pain this kind of economic thinking causes for American workers whose jobs go overseas need to grin and bear it and keep these homilies in mind:

• A rising tide lifts all boats
• Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
• Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither
• The government that governs best, governs least
• Cutting taxes on the rich benefits us all
• Free trade creates job opportunities for Americans

If you are prosperous enough to get the majority of your income from investments instead of work, you ought to be saying, “Damn straight!” right about now. The rest of us might find this kind of policy thinking scary, because it means our standard of living may end up being the same as Chinese and Laotian villagers. Except that if those villagers get too uppity and demand living wages, they and we will be competing with African refugee camp residents who line up for $1/day jobs.

In fact, excessive adherance to laissez-faire or libertarian principles will almost certainly lead to wide quotation of another homily:

• Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

I suspect that overly-libertarian economic policies will inevitably lead to widespread violence and chaos in the U.S., and I would just as soon not see that happen.

Can We Really Deport 12 Million People?

A major argument against strict U.S. immigration law enforcement is that we can’t simply deport 12 million (or maybe 13 million or more; no one has a firm figure) people to Mexico, and that if we try we will inevitably do lots of racial profiling and violate the civil rights of many Mexican-Americans and legal immigrants from Mexico.

I’ll admit that our current administration probably can’t handle this task. It has proven itself incompetent in so many ways that I don’t have enough server space to list them all. Hopefully, ideology and political party aside, the next administration will be able to handle federal-scale responsibilities — like deporting 12 million illegal immigrants in a humane and dignified manner.

So you know: I believe in enforcing our laws. If we don’t like those laws, we should change or eliminate them. While I have huge sympathy for the Mexicans who come here to seek a better life (and for the Haitians who go to the Dominican Republic), I believe open, widespread, government-sanctioned lawbreaking is a terrible thing for our country. And I don’t believe in amnesty programs, however cloaked and renamed, for crimes more major than illegal parking or failing to return library materials by their due date. Amnesties encourage more lawbreaking. Selective law enforcement does, too. If our government winks at illegal immigration, why shouldn’t it wink at marijuana possesion? Or usery? Or illegal gambling or driving 90 in a 55 MPH zone or beating up someone who looks at you funny?

At the same time, if we agree that we really need immigrants, we can’t just enforce our current laws. We also need to come up with a rational way to let new people into our country. The current immigration system is so broken that it gives a hard-working Mexican nearly zero chance to come to the U.S. to work within a decade of his or her application. We need to fix the legal immigration system as fast as we build our ability to enforce current immigration laws. We may also want to revisit laws that give instant U.S. citizenship to any child born here, even if both of his parents are illegal immigrants. And other reforms and changes will be needed, too, and must be made at the same time we harden immigration enforcement.

But if we are truly a nation of laws, not of whim, we must enforce our immigration laws, even if that means we deport 12 million people, including children. We can also make their return to Mexico easier by helping to build Mexico’s economy — which is currently battered on one side by NAFTA-based competition from subsidized American farms and on the other by super-cheap manufactured good from Asia.

Hmm… I am suddenly on the edge of supporting protectionism for both the U.S. and Mexico. I guess that means I’ll never get an Ayn Rand Junior Rangers badge. So it goes. But the more I look at what’s going on in my country and around the world, the less I believe in unrestrained trade. And I am not personally convinced that we really need many immigrants, if any. Remember overpopulation? I do, and I believe we already suffer from it and will suffer more from it in the future.

I Have No Easy Solutions for You

I am not running for public office, so I have no reason to pretend I have all the answers or that anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. Roblimo.com contains personal musings, not policy declarations. Worse, my beliefs have a tendency to evolve as conditions change. I’m not as prone to flip-flopping as Willard Romney or other political opportunists, but I change my mind in light of new evidence and do not apologize for it any more than I apologize for not being consistently “liberal” or “conservative” or “progressive” or whatever.

On immigration, I obviously believe we need to enforce laws already on the books, plus harden up on employers who hire people who show them false I.D. that is often so obviously faked that you or I would laugh at it. Make it hard for illegal immigrants to get jobs, and I think a lot of them will leave the U.S. of their own free will. I don’t think we’ll need to deport 12 million people if we make it hard to work without real, legitimate identification.

This leads to the idea of a national I.D. card. I’m in favor of it. Sorry, federalists, but back in the founders’ day banks and most other companies were local institutions and you knew where their owners lived. Crime, too, tended to be local. There was no need for much federal regulation or federal law enforcement. Now state lines mean little or nothing. It is easier and faster to travel from New York to Los Angeles today than it was to travel from Manhattan to Albany in 1790. Even illegal immigration, which was once confined almost entirely to states that directly bordered Mexico, has become a national problem. We need national I.D. of some sort, and since virtually every American who participates in the economy has a Social Security number, we might as well base it on that system.

Now let’s think what we can do for Mexico. A healthy Mexican economy is probably the best long-run way to keep Mexicans from sneaking into the U.S. to work.

We’re starting to see American plantation owners buy or lease farmland in Mexico as a way to get cheap Mexican labor without worrying about immigration laws. I’m fine with that, especially now that we’re seeing a growing market for biofuels. I would also like to see favorable trade treaties with Mexico and Canada that make it financially favorable for Asian manufacturers to open plants there — and here.

This obviously means that I am okay with tariffs. Our founding fathers certainly were. Import duties were one of this country’s earliest forms of taxation. I’m not talking about predatory or retaliatory tariffs here, but on the order of 5% -10% on goods imported from Mexico and other neighboring countries as opposed to 15% - 20% for items imported from elsewhere. These numbers are purely off the top of my head. Maybe they should be higher or lower, but in any case I see them as across-the-board levies, not just as taxes on imported goods (like steel) whose American producers have particularly whiney lobbyists.

Another way to seriously boost Mexico’s economy would be allowing American retirees to use their Medicare benefits in Mexico. The lack of Medicare benefits outside of the U.S. is a major reason American retirees stay in this country. At the same time, U.S. doctors complain about reductions in Medicare payments. Allowing Medicare reimbursements to approved medical providers in Mexico would make Mexico into an instant retirement haven, and would also relieve a lot of financial pressure on Medicare.

There are surely many other things we can do to help the Mexican economy get healthy enough that people there have no overwhelming reason to come to the U.S. either legally or illegally. And, frankly, if our country continues its current economic course, it will no longer be a “land of opportunity” compared to Europe and other parts of the world, which will also help solve our illegal immigration problem.

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Maybe our next president will be smart enough to figure all this out, along with all the other problems he or she will face. Or maybe he or she will hire a whole bunch of smart people to do all the mental heavy lifting, a management tactic that works for me in a much more humble position (and allows me to cover up most of my own stupidity most of the time).

Or maybe you can solve the immigration problem — not that anyone in power will listen to you if you do, but at least it’s a nice mental exercise that will fill any boring hours you have at work during the next week or two, should you choose to accept this challenge.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.