Some words on immigration

Is there an election coming up? There must be, since the other party is busy building up the newest bogeyman that you must be afraid of. In this case, illegal immigrants, streaming across the border by the millions, intent on taking your job, raping your kid, and forcing you to order your quesadillas in Spanish.

One can easily foresee a scenario whereby the dark side mixes its horrors - you must fear your gay illegal immigrant Spanish-speaking Christ-hating pool-boy, for example.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty, of course, offers a different perspective. There's a lot of gnashing of teeth and marching in the streets about a piece of legislation passed by the House, HR 4437. In a sense, this is prototypical right-wing legislation, and here's why: it's unnecessarily harsh, and won't achieve what it sets out to do. Why? Well, for starters, if you're going to create a new class of 11 million (or so) felons, one would think that you would include funding for law enforcement, some protocols for what is to be done with these felons, and so on; but the bill does not include any of these. In short, it's so much mouth music - feel-good law porn for the base. Really makes you wonder if Rs have the basic competence to govern - but that's not a new thought, is it?

But it gets worse. The proposal pushed by the Bush junta itself may well be even more impractical than the one emanating from the House. The reason for this is that, while the House is owned by extremist, nativist reactionaries, the junta is in the pocket of big business - and business loves cheap labor more than anything else. Hence, the junta is pushing a guest worker program, which is probably the worst idea to come out of American government since SDI. Why? Simple: because such a program would not create disincentives to illegal immigration, and instead create a permanent underclass with no path to citizenship - kind of like in Western Europe, and that doesn't seem to be working so well, no? And of course, legalization implies that these workers would be paid minimum wage - which takes away the incentive for business, since that is precisely what they don't do.

The reason why we have the level of immigration that we have is simple: the income differential between the two sides of the U.S.-Mexico border is the highest of any land border in the world. There is a demand for cheap labor in America - go ahead, ask the guy who picks your strawberries - and a supply of the same in Mexico. So what do you think is going to happen?

To solve the problem of illegal immigration, policy-makers can tread several paths, all of which will lead nowhere unless the underlying economic dynamic is fixed. We can legalize the inevitable - that's the Bush junta's approach - or we can seal the border, declare a 'war on illegals' - kind of like we did on drugs, with likely the same result. Or we can fine employers into bankruptcy, which ain't gonna fly, either. Republicans do not enforce laws that business does not like - get used to it, people.

Illegal immigration is exactly the kind of problem that the U.S. policy-making apparatus is not equipped to handle. Which is why nothing is going to happen. Sure, R's would like you to believe that they will do something; but they haven't done so since 1994, so the odds they'll get around to it now are slim at best. As to the Democrats, caught between the voting blocks of organized labor (beginning to turn against immigration, period) and Hispanics (pro-immigration, needless to say), they might provide a solution of sorts, especially because of labor union pressure; and Democrats at least know how to write legislation that works. But I'm not optimistic there will be a viable solution other than the quasi-legalization we have now (which is what looking away amounts to), with a periodic amnesty to accept the fait accompli.

After all, that's what we've done for the past, oh, fifty years or so.