Immigration
I keep getting emails asking me where I stand on the immigration debate, so now that it doesn't matter at all, I thought I'd finally weigh in.
For what it's worth, I think both sides of this debate tend to overlook some fundamental truths.
The enforcement-only folks seem to think that it would actually be a good use of money and resources to try to wall off the border and turn the country into Fort America. This is nonsense. As long as there is demand for cheap, illegal labor in this country, people will find a way in. If we close off the land routes, they'll start coming in by sea or by air. Trying to prevent illegal immigration by physically intercepting all illegals is a fool's errand.
On the other hand, these folks are absolutely right when they say that granting legal status to illegal aliens will lead to a massive new wave of illegal immigration. This is true not because doing so would "reward breaking the law." It's true because the demand out there is not for labor, but for illegal labor. When you legalize the country's illegal workforce, you free them to pursue jobs that pay much better money, i.e., at least the minimum wage. No one who can get a job that pays $7 an hour is going to pick strawberries for $2 dollars hour. But farmers don't want to pay people $7 an hour to pick strawberries, particularly when they know that someone else is bound to come along who will do it for $2 dollars an hour.
People often say that immigrants are willing to do jobs that Americans won't do. That's not true. Illegal immigrants are willing to do jobs that Americans won't do, and only because their illegal status prevents them from being more selective.
Advocates of immigration reform talk about the value of having people come out of the shadows. And I agree with that in principle. But the second that happens, the shadows will be immediately replenished. There's a demand out there for cheap, illegal labor, and unless you get rid of that demand, we will always have illegals living in the shadows.
And, as we all know, the only way to get rid of that demand is to crack down on the employers who hire illegal aliens. You have to make the fines so stiff and the prospect of enforcement so real that it no longer makes business sense to hire illegal laborers.
If you do that, you won't need a wall.
The problem, of course, is that if you really crack down on employers, it will significantly disrupt a number of key sectors of the economy, most obviously the agriculture and construction industries. Employers who typically rely on illegal labor will see their costs rise dramatically, which will in turn lead to higher prices for consumers.
And while that's fine with me, it's obviously not fine with the business lobby, which holds enormous influence over both the Republican and Democratic parties.
In other words, the only real solution to the problem of illegal immigration is one that seems unlikely to ever be implemented. God bless America.
UPDATE: Check out this interesting (and deeply depressing) comment regarding the "coyote" industry south of the border.
For what it's worth, I think both sides of this debate tend to overlook some fundamental truths.
The enforcement-only folks seem to think that it would actually be a good use of money and resources to try to wall off the border and turn the country into Fort America. This is nonsense. As long as there is demand for cheap, illegal labor in this country, people will find a way in. If we close off the land routes, they'll start coming in by sea or by air. Trying to prevent illegal immigration by physically intercepting all illegals is a fool's errand.
On the other hand, these folks are absolutely right when they say that granting legal status to illegal aliens will lead to a massive new wave of illegal immigration. This is true not because doing so would "reward breaking the law." It's true because the demand out there is not for labor, but for illegal labor. When you legalize the country's illegal workforce, you free them to pursue jobs that pay much better money, i.e., at least the minimum wage. No one who can get a job that pays $7 an hour is going to pick strawberries for $2 dollars hour. But farmers don't want to pay people $7 an hour to pick strawberries, particularly when they know that someone else is bound to come along who will do it for $2 dollars an hour.
People often say that immigrants are willing to do jobs that Americans won't do. That's not true. Illegal immigrants are willing to do jobs that Americans won't do, and only because their illegal status prevents them from being more selective.
Advocates of immigration reform talk about the value of having people come out of the shadows. And I agree with that in principle. But the second that happens, the shadows will be immediately replenished. There's a demand out there for cheap, illegal labor, and unless you get rid of that demand, we will always have illegals living in the shadows.
And, as we all know, the only way to get rid of that demand is to crack down on the employers who hire illegal aliens. You have to make the fines so stiff and the prospect of enforcement so real that it no longer makes business sense to hire illegal laborers.
If you do that, you won't need a wall.
The problem, of course, is that if you really crack down on employers, it will significantly disrupt a number of key sectors of the economy, most obviously the agriculture and construction industries. Employers who typically rely on illegal labor will see their costs rise dramatically, which will in turn lead to higher prices for consumers.
And while that's fine with me, it's obviously not fine with the business lobby, which holds enormous influence over both the Republican and Democratic parties.
In other words, the only real solution to the problem of illegal immigration is one that seems unlikely to ever be implemented. God bless America.
UPDATE: Check out this interesting (and deeply depressing) comment regarding the "coyote" industry south of the border.
posted by A.L. at 10:37 PM
10 Comments:
You're overlooking the other important driver of illegal immigration and the two go hand in hand.
One north of the border, one south with a legion of desperately poor people in the middle.
There aren't many ways for average folk with criminal tendencies to make a lot of money in Mexico. There's drugs, ofcourse. The other is convincing people with very little that there's a better life waiting for them north of the border. It's an easy dream to sell when your kids are starving.
What happens is, these coyote groups target poor land owners and convince them to borrow against their land to pay a special guide to escort them across the border, usually for pennies on the dollar of the lands value, while they (the coyotes) watch out for the family that stays behind.
It's mostly the sons but is frequently also fathers, mothers or daughters. No one is immune and I encountered an eight year old boy traveling on the bus to Altar with his 14 year old brother trying to make it up to their mother in LA.
So once the deal is done, the family left back home is thrown off the land, ofcourse, because it's no longer theirs, they put it up as collateral for the loan. Then if they make it and get a job, they can pay back the loan plus interest and get their land back. If the traveler gets caught and re-patriated to Mexico, they are really screwed because they now have nothing to go back to and the only option now is 3-6 more days in the baking desert. They now HAVE to make it. So out they go again.
What happens next, if/when the family gets booted from the land, is the rest of the family has to try to make it north and the price for them now is upwards of $1500 apiece. Get it any way you can. So the brothels in Tijuana and every other border town always have fresh new faces.
The authorities have noticed that hundreds of girls have been found dead along the border in the last couple years. If they took notice, it MUST be a big problem! And that's just the ones that weren't buried.
Lather, rinse, repeat. It's a huge industry down there now getting close to rivaling drugs. Once I saw and heard all this first hand for myself, I just CANNOT get with these people trying to demonize the people trying to get here.
This issue has become too emotional for rational discourse so....
Hasta la vista immigration bill, say hello status quo(as it should be).
We don't need another stinkin Prescription Drug/No Child Left Behind Bill.
Besides had it passed Republicans would have tried to use it against Dems in the upcoming elections.
I tip my hat to the r-wingnuts for fighting against it,even if for all the wrong reasons(amnesty my arse).
SL
The whole process was kabuki theater at its most decadent. Nobody in Congress or the WH even knows anybody competing with illegals for jobs -- they're beholden to and part of the group that makes money off cheap labor.
And these are the people who it is imagined wanted to stem the tide that brings them their lifestyle?
The only reason this whole little play took place was that, because "national security" was losing its grip in 2006, GOP operatives raised the illegal immigration issue to try and stoke the fire and get their base out. It got away from them, as fires sometimes do, and it even lit a few on the left up, so everybody had to pretend to do something about it.
Unfortunately, the GOP is broken on immigration, because of Iraq, because of decades of pandering to racism, because of decades of relying on religious fundamentalism, and because it's still fundamentally controlled, at the top, by the interests of the wealthy. This ill-constructed Frankensteinian construct literally cannot get its right hand to agree with its head on what to do.
The Democrats often seemed more interested in stoking these schisms in the GOP, than in passing a bill, although it's hard to tell with the every-man-for-himself chaos that's reigning in Washington. It should not be overlooked that the Democrats are not exactly opposed to the interests of the wealthy, so their fat wasn't exactly on fire either.
It was hardly surprising when the whole process broke down into political posturing, with all of the rats trying to claim something they can use in 2008. With the increasing weakness of this administration, we can expect a lot more of these little stage-plays in place of serious debate.
As with so many policy questions--the plans for occupation of Iraq, universal health coverage, environmental policy to slow global warming, and illegal immigration--the real issues simply never enter the public discourse.
The point of this post is both clear and obvious--that illegal immigration will persist for as long as employers are permitted to conduct business outside of US labor law. Yet I can recall nobody in the senate, or in the media pointing this out. It's good that AL has done so, and I've seen it pointed out in some blog comments, but for the most part, silence.
You cannot produce effective policy without confronting reality.
The same thing is happening in Iraq. Nobody is publicly discussing the fact that Iraq has no national defense force, that the permanent bases are there for the US to provide a national defense. TO have the US provide the national defense for Iraq represents an indefinite occupation, and an indefinite relinquishment of Iraqi sovereignty. No representative Iraqi government would permit military bases in support of, among other missions, the defense of Israel.
Likewise, on health care the real issue is how to cut big Pharma and the insurance companies out of the revenue stream, so that costs can be reduced under a single payer plan. One person has written about this, to my knowledge, Paul Krugman. But everybody else takes for granted the retention of the very elements that have broken health care delivery in this country.
And even larger question is why the US remains on a war footing in the basence of an enemy? Again, not part of permitted policy discourse.
Personally, I think we are living in an economic slave society -- and what the anti-immigration side is really up in arms about is the idea of giving the slaves their freedom. What they want is Economic Jim Crow.
"The problem, of course, is that if you really crack down on employers, it will significantly disrupt a number of key sectors of the economy, most obviously the agriculture and construction industries. Employers who typically rely on illegal labor will see their costs rise dramatically, which will in turn lead to higher prices for consumers.
And while that's fine with me, it's obviously not fine with the business lobby, which holds enormous influence over both the Republican and Democratic parties."
It also might not be fine with many or most consumers.
Someone should ask that question.
I don't know of any "enforcement-only" folks. I do know of many who seem to emphasize enforcement more than any other course.
I am very much opposed to placing what the hapless Sandra Day O'Connor might have called an "undue burden" on employers. While I wouldn't hesitate to penalize one who knowingly hired, or sought out, illegals, that would be a difficult matter to prove. But it's hard to credit any scheme where private employers are being asked to do what the government has not sought to do, and has in any event been unable to do, for decades now.
The most intriguing proposal I have seen is that put forward by the estimable Mickey Kaus: "benign neglect." Begin right now to ensure as best we can that no new illegals enter the country, or enter it legally and remain illegally. As to those who are already here, don't cut them any slack, but don't undertake to deport them unless they commit felonies. In the fullness of time they will die of natural causes.
I have a great deal of sympathy for every illegal I have ever known--and I have known plenty. I have not known a one who came here for the welfare system; each and every one has come here to work hard, and work hard they do. But the nation has a right to establish lawful procedures for entry and accession to citizenship, and ought not to abandon those procedures simply because it has been unwilling to try to make them work.
FRANK RICH: Scooter’s Sopranos Go to the Mattresses
AS a weary nation awaited the fade-out of "The Sopranos" last Sunday, the widow of the actual Mafia don John Gotti visited his tomb in Queens to observe the fifth anniversary of his death. Victoria Gotti was not pleased to find reporters lying in wait.
"It's disgusting that people are still obsessed with Gotti and the mob," she told The Daily News. "They should be obsessed with that mob in Washington. They have 3,000 deaths on their hands." She demanded to know if the president and vice president have relatives on the front lines. "Every time I watch the news and I hear of another death," she said, "it sickens me."
Far be it from me to cross any member of the Gotti family, but there's nothing wrong with being obsessed with both mobs. Now that the approval rating for the entire Washington franchise, the president and Congress alike, has plummeted into the 20s, we need any distraction we can get; the Mafia is a welcome nostalgic escape from a gridlocked government at home and epic violence abroad.
But unlikely moral arbiter that Mrs. Gotti may be, she does have a point. As the Iraq war careens toward a denouement as black, unresolved and terrifying as David Chase's inspired "Sopranos" finale, the mob in the capital deserves at least equal attention. John Gotti, the last don, is dead. Mr. Chase's series is over. But the deaths on the nightly news are coming as fast as ever.
True, the Washington mob isn't as sexy as the Gotti or Soprano clans, but there is now a gripping nonfiction dramatization of its machinations available gratis on the Internet, no HBO subscription required. For this we can thank U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who presided over the Scooter Libby trial. Judge Walton's greatest move was not the 30-month sentence he gave Mr. Libby, a fall guy for higher-ups (and certain to be pardoned to protect their secrets). It was instead the judge's decision to make public the testimonials written to the court by members of the Washington establishment pleading that a criminal convicted on four felony counts be set free.
Mr. Libby's lawyers argued that these letters should remain locked away on the hilarious grounds that they might be "discussed, even mocked, by bloggers." And apparently many of the correspondents assumed that their missives would remain private, just like all other documents pertaining to Mr. Libby's former boss, Dick Cheney. The result is very little self-censorship among the authors and an epistolary gold mine for readers.
Among those contributing to the 373 pages of what thesmokinggun.com calls "Scooter Libby Love Letters" are self-identified liberals and Democrats, a few journalists (including a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine) and a goodly sample of those who presided over the Iraq catastrophe or cheered it on. This is a documentary snapshot of the elite Washington mob of our time.
Like the scripts for "The Sopranos," the letters are not without mordant laughs. Henry Kissinger writes a perfunctory two paragraphs, of which the one about Mr. Libby rather than himself seems an afterthought. James Carville co-signs a letter by Mary Matalin tediously detailing Mr. Libby's devotion to organizing trick-or-treat festivities for administration children spending a post-9/11 Halloween at an "undisclosed location." One correspondent writes in astonishment that Mr. Libby once helped "a neighbor who is a staunch Democrat" dig his car out of the snow, and another is in awe that Mr. Libby would "personally buy his son a gift rather than passing the task on to his wife." Many praise Mr. Libby's novel, "The Apprentice," apparently on the principle that an overwritten slab of published fiction might legitimize the short stories he fabricated freelance for a grand jury.
But what makes these letters rise above inanity is the portrait they provide of a wartime capital cut adrift from moral bearings. As the political historian Rick Perlstein has written, one of the recurrent themes of these pleas for mercy is that Mr. Libby perjured himself "only because he was so busy protecting us from Armageddon." Has there ever been a government leader convicted of a crime — and I don't mean only Americans — who didn't see himself as saving the world from the enemy?
The Libby supporters never acknowledge the undisputed fact that their hero, a lawyer by profession, leaked classified information about a covert C.I.A. officer. And that he did so not accidentally but to try to silence an administration critic who called attention to the White House's prewar lies about W.M.D. intelligence. And that he compounded the original lies by lying repeatedly to investigators pursuing an inquiry that without his interference might have nailed others now known to have also leaked Valerie Wilson's identity (Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer).
Much has been said about the hypocrisy of those on the right, champions both of Bill Clinton's impeachment and of unflinching immigration enforcement, who call for legal amnesty in Mr. Libby's case. To thicken their exquisite bind, these selective sticklers for strict justice have been foiled in their usual drill of attacking the judge in the case as "liberal." Judge Walton was initially appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan and was elevated to his present job by the current President Bush; he was assigned as well to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by the Bush-appointed chief justice, John Roberts. Such credentials notwithstanding, Judge Walton told the court on Thursday that he was alarmed by new correspondence and phone calls from the Libby mob since the sentencing "wishing bad things" on him and his family.
In Washington, however, hypocrisy is a perennial crime in both parties; if all the city's hypocrites were put in jail, there would be no one left to run the government. What is more striking about the Libby love letters is how nearly all of them ignore the reality that the crime of lying under oath is at the heart of the case. That issue simply isn't on these letter writers' radar screen; the criminal act of perjury isn't addressed (unless it's ascribed to memory loss because Mr. Libby was so darn busy saving the world). Given that Mr. Libby expressed no contrition in court after being convicted, you'd think some of his defenders might step into that moral vacuum to speak for him. But there's been so much lying surrounding this war from the start that everyone is inured to it by now. In Washington, lying no longer registers as an offense against the rule of law.
Instead the letter writers repeat tirelessly that Mr. Libby is a victim, suffering "permanent damage" to his reputation, family and career in the typical judgment of Kenneth Adelman, the foreign-policy thinker who predicted a "cakewalk" for America in Iraq. There's a whole lot of projection going on, because to judge from these letters, those who drummed up this war think of themselves as victims too. In his letter, the disgraced Paul Wolfowitz sees his friend's case as an excuse to deflect his own culpability for the fiasco. He writes that "during the spring and summer of 2003, when some others were envisioning a prolonged American occupation," Mr. Libby "was a strong advocate for a more rapid build-up of the Iraqi Army and a more rapid transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis, points on which history will prove him to have been prescient."
History will prove no such thing; a "rapid" buildup of the Iraqi Army was and is a mirage, and the neocons' chosen leader for an instant sovereign Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, had no political following. But Mr. Wolfowitz's real point is to pin his own catastrophic blundering on L. Paul Bremer, the neocons' chosen scapegoat for a policy that was doomed with or without Mr. Bremer's incompetent execution of the American occupation.
Of all the Libby worshipers, the one most mocked in the blogosphere and beyond is Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-American academic and war proponent who fantasized that a liberated Iraq would have a (positive) "contagion effect" on the region and that Americans would be greeted "in Baghdad and Basra with kites and boom boxes." (I guess it all depends on your definition of "boom boxes.") In an open letter to President Bush for The Wall Street Journal op-ed page on June 8, he embroidered his initial letter to Judge Walton, likening Mr. Libby to a "fallen soldier" in the Iraq war. In Mr. Ajami's view, Tim Russert (whose testimony contradicted Mr. Libby's) and the American system of justice are untrustworthy, and "the 'covertness' of Mrs. Wilson was never convincingly and fully established." (The C.I.A. confirmed her covert status in court documents filed in May.)
Mr. Ajami notes, accurately, that the trial was "about the Iraq war and its legitimacy" — an argument that could also be mustered by defenders of Alger Hiss who felt his perjury trial was about the cold war. But it's even more revealing that the only "casualty of a war" Mr. Ajami's conscience prompts him to mention is Mr. Libby, a figurative casualty rather than a literal one.
No wonder Victoria Gotti denigrated "that mob in Washington." When the godfathers of this war speak of never leaving "a fallen comrade" on the battlefield in Iraq, as Mr. Ajami writes of Mr. Libby, they are speaking first and foremost of one another. The soldiers still making the ultimate sacrifice for this gang's hubristic folly will just have to fend for themselves.
DrJ-
The #1 rule for trolls is "don't feed them." Ignore them and they go away. Usually
The pissing match between stobo blobo and chch16 should be taken off site.
You may not like how I have been dealing with chch16, and that's fine. You mistake my interaction with chch16 as a "pissing contest". This isn't an ego battle from my end despite how it appears to you, unless you consider allowing myself amusement in dealing with this thing to be a kind of "pissing contest".
It's true that this particular troll would leave if no one took it's bait. I have not been taking its bait by confronting it as I have done. This troll has not been hanging around here because of me at all, but because others have let themselves get sucked into its vortex by treating it as if it were worthwhile. My exchanges with it are a collateral effect of that.
So's this--what's Dolittle's number in the Republican brigade to federal prison?
"It's a familiar stance from Doolittle, who's been goading prosecutors for the past couple years. In January of 2006, he announced that he'd written that letter to the attorney general, asking the Department of Justice to "come investigate me." In October of last year, his spokeswoman announced that his lawyers had been having conversations with prosecutors "which we believe have been helpful toward clearing the congressman's name." Those contacts, the spokeswoman said, had been initiated at Doolittle's request.
The thing is, prosecutors don't seem to need much encouragement (here are the reasons why). Doolittle has been in investigators' sights dating back to the very beginning of the Jack Abramoff investigation -- back in 2004, investigators subpoenaed records for Doolittle's wife's consulting firm due to her work for Abramoff. Finally, in April of this year, prosecutors offered Doolittle an opportunity to plead guilty. After he refused, FBI agents raided his Virginia home (for some reason, Doolittle wasn't happy about that).
So it's apparent the Justice Department has taken Doolittle up on his offer to "come investigate me," and they've obviously much more than just "started." But I'm sure they appreciate the support."
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