Accept realities of immigration BY ANDREW GREELEY

[jbfam4]

Accept realities of immigration

March 31, 2006

BY ANDREW GREELEY


http://suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel31.html

The only problem is that such draconian solutions wouldn't be final at all because the immigrants would continue to cross the borders in the hope that they could evade the Border Patrol, the State Police, the United States Army, the National Guard and perhaps the Marines and CIA drones. They would continue to seek employment at the risk of their lives. The only way to stop them is to treat them like an invading army and kill them.

Moreover, if one could effectively arrest all the 11 million felons in the country, where would replacements be found to fill their jobs? The American economy would grind to a halt. The illegals are, in a nice irony, essential to American prosperity.

It is an iron law of economics that where there is a labor supply on one side of a border and a labor demand on the other side of a border, there will be immigration across the border. One can pass laws to make it illegal, as the United States has done, and penalties to make it dangerous, even life-threatening, but the immigrants will continue to come. One could even make hiring of illegals a capital offense. Life in prison for businessmen -- a new idea in our country -- wouldn't work either. Build higher walls, triple the Border Patrol, stage massive rallies, demand strict enforcement, that won't end immigration. All the threats and the ranting of Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) will not stop them. Nothing will.

This is a reality which most Americans cannot accept and hence most politicians cannot speak. The secondary labor market in this country, with all its injustice and cruelty, seduces men and women to cross the border at the risk of their lives. They will continue to swarm into our country, despite all the legislation, all the punishments, all the racist hatred.

[fasttense]

1. As long as corporations are making billions off of them

they will continue to flow into the US. When corporations decide they have enough Illegals to exploit, that's when something will be done.

[ThomasNewton]

2. They have the same values of the rethugs

The illegals have the exact same values as the rethugs: nothing but a greasy dollar bill.

[megatherium]

3. I read somewhere that most of the illegals from Mexico

actually leave jobs in Mexico to find work here. It's not exactly like they're starving and desperate. If anyone knows more about this, by all means please correct me.

But I fear -- if progressives argue that illegal immigration isn't really such a big problem, or that concern about illegal immigration is just racism, etc, then voters will reach the conclusion that progressives support illegal immigration. There is a lot of anger out there. That could cost us the 2008 election.

[old_techie]

4. Everbody ignores trade policy in this issue.

I have read that Mexican farmers were driven off the land as a result of NAFTA. Did the first wave of stricter border enforcement happen in the early 1990's when NAFTA was enacted, as if the proponents of NAFTA actually anticipated a mass exudus? Why give a damn who gets hurt in the name of a "free trade" agenda, whether its Mexicans or American citizens?

[Igel]

5. A lot have been driven off the land by reproduction.

It's been generations since land was redistributed, and family size has led to the splitting of inheritances. The lack of a reasonable deed/title system doesn't help, either.

This hit home in maybe 20 years ago, when many family farms either were kept intact and left to one son, leaving nothing to the others, or subdivided to yield plots too small for more than an auxiliary food/income source. When this happened in the US in colonial times, men would marry later and have fewer kids until new territories on the frontier would be opened up; then the surplus men would migrate to the frontier, clear land, set up new homesteads. Mexico doesn't have a frontier, just the frontera, unless you take into account squatting on public lands (such as national preserves or reservations); surplus rural population has migrated to the cities or the US, and they haven't altered their family sizes as much as New Englanders did in response to land/population pressure.

NAFTA made an already bad farming situation worse (and people focus on NAFTA because the blame for that can be displaced from the victims): NAFTA reduced tariffs on imported food and feed--sugar, corn, and the like, and depressed prices even while it produced factory jobs and the occasional trans-shipment job. Small-scale farming techniques don't produce enough yield or are too expensive without the price controls and de facto price supports tariffs provide; the same happens here with textile workers and rice growers. Small landowners can't use more efficient large-scale techniques because they're too expensive for small farms--even assuming that they want to farm. So they sell their land, frequently for less than it's worth (because they usually can't prove ownership), or more often keep their land and go elsewhere for money. NAFTA fast-forwarded the process for many rural Mexicans by a decade or two.

None of this takes into account the large latifundistas with extensive land holdings that were never redistributed, or the expropriation of lands by corrupt or illegal means; redistributing that land would have just delayed what was already hitting the fan--Mexico's overpopulated for its economy.