Category: Immigration

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Andrew Sullivan, who I generally agree with, recently wrote in his blog about immigration. I think he explained the problem fairly well but provided very little in the way of solutions to this complex problem. His whole idea is better policing at the border which helps some but it isn’t really the problem. It may slow the stream. But how this will stop illegal immigration is a mystery.

Immigrants aren’t leaving their countries because it is a lark and they think it will be fun to illegally enter the United States. They are coming because they are poor, hungry and desperate. When a reader pointed this out to him, Sullivan responds, “It is not the job of American taxpayers or the American government to fix all the misgovernment on the planet, end climate change, prevent natural disasters globally … in order to have a stable nation-state with defensible borders.”

Well, then. I guess Sullivan told them. Better policing and support for bureaucracy to handle the policing is the answer. But we all know, it isn’t. These people have walked thousand of miles through jungles and deserts. They have risked their lives, and the lives of their children, in overcrowded ships which often send their passengers tumbling into the seas in the dark of night. These people, knowing that the people they are dealing with might just rip them off and sell them into slavery, are giving them what little money they have any way. These are the people who are going to back down because of more police. Really?

Sullivan rather blithely compares these immigrants to the invading Russian army in the Ukraine, “we have currently spent $75 billion defending another country’s borders; it seems to me we should be fiscally capable of defending our own.” The Russians invaded the Ukraine with bombs, tanks and soldiers trying to force the Ukrainian people to become a part of Russia. They have killed people and bombed cities into rubble. Their aggressiveness is a problem for all free countries and needs to be dealt with just as aggressively.

Immigrants, on the other hand, travel to Western countries because they want to be a part of an economically free country where they can work hard and succeed. They have bought into the Western ideal. These are, by and large, good people who are only looking for a chance. They know the history of the US and how immigrants were a large part of our success. Why wouldn’t immigrants continue to come? Isn’t that part of the American Dream? The statue of Liberty and all that. Instead Sullivan prefers give me your well rested, your well to do, your highly educated and after a highly selective vetting process we will let you in.

There is also the cost. Why spend billions of dollars on better policing? Better policing may be a part of the answer but only a small part and it is totally reactive. Stopping them at the border will cost billions in police, bureaucrats, walls and detention facilities but will do nothing whatsoever to stop what is driving immigration — which is poverty and hopelessness. But, by all means, let’s spend billions of dollars to not solve the problem. It is something we do well. The net result will be a much larger Federal bureaucracy costing a lot more money failing to stop the flow of people into the country. Some people will mistakenly believe that the government is actually doing something. There is that.

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I was surprised to see this article about teens illegally working for PSSI, a company that cleans up for meat plants. So here we are in 21st Century USA where companies hire underage labor to do their work. In this case, the work also is dangerous because it requires the use of toxic chemicals and machines capable of killing a person.

PSSI claims that it did a thorough check. It is not their fault if these precocious teens used false documents to get their jobs. This argument will probably get them off the hook. The company may have to pay a fine, an upper management person might have to fall on his sword but when all is said and done the country needs people willing to clean the dirty floors of meat plants.

The teens in question were immigrants which makes me curious about this company’s HR practices. Being immigrants, I would think the company would be particularly careful when a prospective employee provides this information. The Federal Government requires every employee to prove that they can work legally in the USA. This is the whole reason for law. But 31 underage teens got employed. I mean I can give PSSI one or two teens getting through a rigorous vetting of the documentation but 31 suggests something altogether different. HR was either not checking them at all or not caring that they were fake. Also forget the documents, I suspect that some of these teens actually looked like teenagers. There were 13 year olds working at the meat plants. That someone in charge wasn’t a bit startled to see all these fresh face youths working in the plant and not question their age is alarming.

This raises another question for me. If PSSI wasn’t checking documentation to ensure the age of their employees, how well were they checking the adults they hired for their immigration status. I suspect not very well at all. Which gets us closer to the real problem — PSSI can’t get many American citizens to do this dangerous job for the wage they are paying. I mean why else would they overlook the law regarding underage employees. The company was taking a risk. The fines are probably minimal and, mark my words, there is probably a tidy sum set aside for just such an exigency. So if a company needs to pay low wages with little risk of getting caught and minimal financial hardship or legal punishment if they get caught, what is a company to do? Hire the most vulnerable and desperate people and hope they don’t get caught.

Capitalists are pretty adamant that prices must follow the market. If there is less of a product and high demand, the prices go up. If there is a surplus of a product and low demand, the prices go down. The same, at least in theory, applies to wages. Except it doesn’t. Companies set the wages they want to pay and then find the people who will work at those wages — even if they have to act illegally to get those employees. They would rather illegally employ children in dangerous jobs at low wages than up their wages in order to attract a legal adults. This is not how market capitalism is supposed to operate.

It makes me curious as to why the Republican Party has not latched on this particular problem. They oppose immigration. They say they want Americans in good private industry jobs. Enforcing child labor laws and immigration laws would seem like a no brainer. Make it difficult for companies to employ illegal immigrants and children. Hurt companies with hefty fines and imprisonment of executives who break these laws. If there are no jobs for immigrants, a large wall on the border would be unnecessary. They wouldn’t come.

Of course a large wall on the border would involve all kinds of construction and money, money, money for everyone and the immigrants would keep coming. Business secretly wants these low wage immigrants because they can control them better than American citizens. If the Department of Labor started enforcing labor laws, it would get messy fast. The Federal Government might see how business actually operate, the government might even try strictly enforcing these laws which might force companies to pay higher wages.

This is why we have children in 21st Century America working with toxic chemicals at dangerous jobs.

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As someone who considers himself a part of Western Civilization, I ask this question because people are always carrying on about the success of the West but, it seems to me, that the basis of that success was the departure of millions of people from Europe to other parts of the world. These migrations were so large that the majority populations in three continents (North America, South America and Australia) have changed from a majority indigenous population to a majority immigrant population. The other 5 continents, at least until recently, didn’t find it necessary to send their excess population across the oceans in order for their people to make a decent living. The European world did. And why is this seen as a success?

Over 70% of the population of the United States has European ancestors. They left, by and large, because they were poor. They saw little chance for themselves or for their children in the old country. They left the world they knew to take a treacherous trip across the ocean, bringing precious little with them and landing in a new world. Many immigrants didn’t speak the language of the country they were going to or know anyone who could help them when they arrived or have any money to invest in their new country. They still left family, friends, and their known world. Imagine how bad it must have been for millions of people to take this risk.

Americans have a tendency to glorify this mass movement of people and, because it has been the driving economic philosophy of the time, capitalism as a success story. Poor people were given a chance to succeed in the new world, a chance they didn’t have in the old one. But it begs the question, if the western world and capitalism were so successful why did so many people have to leave Europe, the home of Western Civilization, in order to make it happen? Europe certainly had a problem sustaining the population it had. What would have happened in Europe if the New World had never been discovered? Also troubling is the way the immigrants took the land from the indigenous people. It was less a cash transfer from seller to owner and more outright theft of property. This certainly is the antithesis to how capitalist ideology is designed. How successful would the immigrants have been if they had to actually pay for the land they took?

What bothers me here is that there is this unquestioning assumption about the success of Western ideas in general and Capitalism specifically. It is highlights freedom, personal initiative and courage and forgets the despair the drove the emigrants and the elimination of indigenous cultures. Neither of which speaks well of capitalism, at least, capitalism as it is supposed to be practiced and hardly should be considered a smashing success for Western Civilization.