War Liberal

"Just as we Americans hire Mexicans to do the jobs we don't want to do, the gulf Arabs import workers to do the work they consider beneath them."

Correction: Just as we Americans hire Mexicans to do the jobs we don't want to pay the minimum wages for..

Why is it that some reporters can't report without their biased opinion? Who did the work before the Mexicans flooded over the border after the near collapse of their economy in 1979? The jobs the Mexicans do would still be filled with legal American citizens, we would just have to pay a better wage.

Why is it that some reporters can't report without their biased opinion? Who did the work before the Mexicans flooded over the border after the near collapse of their economy in 1979?

African-Americans, mostly, and native-born Latinos and Indians in the Southwest. The "flood" -- which I believe started in the early seventies, not that late, it's just that no trend gets reported until it's long established -- is a symptom, not a cause. After the Civil Rights Movement, you weren't able to treat African-Americans like property anymore. At the same time, a number of anti-poverty programs had the undesired effect of making it more profitable to not work. So you had to find someone you could exploit and who couldn't just quit and move on if you did.

Look, Americans have always imported labor for the nasty jobs. That's pretty much what African slavery was, of course -- they couldn't get enough poor Europeans to sell themselves into indentures, so they brought in people who didn't have a choice. They imported Chinese to build the railroads. To stretch the standards, the military relied upon native Afghan fighters rather than send in American ground troops -- and look how that worked out.

I've written this before, but by and large immigrants (legal and otherwise) do not take jobs from Americans. They take jobs that Americans won't do, or can't do. There are many immigrants in "brain" jobs such as engineering, medicine, and teaching where there aren't enough Americans to fill the roles. And there are many more immigrants -- some legal, some not -- in the nasty jobs, particularly labor-intensive agriculture. Nobody who had a choice in the matter would do that sort of stooping farm work, but it's not practical for machines to do it, so they find people with no better options. Any American will have better options, unless it paid a lot more than McDonald's.

In the end, you have three choices:

1. Open the borders to agricultural products from Latin America, which politicians won't do because of the farm lobby.

2. "Guest workers", either legal or of the de facto kind we currently use.

3. Pay fifteen bucks for a head of lettuce.

I'm up for $15/head lettuce and such. I'll have to eat less and maybe try to grow some stuff in the garden, but I could stand to lose a few pounds. I also think all Americans need an attitude adjustment on expectations of upward ecnonomic mobility and manual labor.

Going to a formal Gulf style worker system sounds like a more organized version of what we are doing now. What's so bad about that? We shouldn't be as restrictive about letting them leave the country and confiscate their passports.

Mac...
There was another huge shift that drove illegal immigration and that was a breakdown in the law and the way it was enforced. When people brought in workers in decades for the 1970's they tended to do it legally. Non-citizens were not allowed to get government benefits. They still are not legally entitiled to benefits, but we can't find out if they are in the country legally because of their "right to privacy".

"To stretch the standards, the military relied upon native Afghan fighters rather than send in American ground troops -- and look how that worked out."
Are you talking about the Afghan-Soviet War? You are not seriously thinking we should have started a land war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Thats a whole different subject, but we didn't arm the Afghans to just save on manpower.

Re: Points 2 and 3
The fastest way to end farm subsidies would be to let lettuce go to $15 a head. Then the Mexicans could grow lettuce in Mexico and everyone would be happy, except the American farmer.

In a lot of ways we agree on this issue. Illegal immigrant labor is not really cheap.. It just moves the burden of how labor is paid onto the backs of the taxpayers.

In the early 60's when they sent all the tomatoe pickers back to Mexico the farmers cried that they wouldn't be able to grow tomatoes. So enterprizing person invented a machine that would do it and the price of tomatoes acutally dropped, even without cheap labor.

As for the "brain" job arguement. Talk to some Doctors and engineers, the problem isn't lack of workers, it is a lack of workers that will work for $18 an hour.

I was referring to the recent al-Qaeda war in Afghanistan. We relied upon local warriors to ferret out Osama and Omar, and they got away and are still fighting.

I don't see any way around it; every rich country imports low-income workers. Europe has guest workers similar to the poorer Islamic countries, and that's been far worse than anything illegal immigration has brought here. We wouldn't bring in Muslims, of course, but Catholic Latinos. The "guest worker" policy -- with which I am still uncomfortable -- wouldn't make much of a difference except we could save a little money on the INS. But probably not -- the money would just get shifted to somewhere else in DHS.

Matthew Yglesias writes from his vacation that food is three times as expensive where he is, because the farm lobby keeps a lid on imports.

He's in Iceland.

Or consider Japan, where the US is on the short end of the food importing stick, and their farmers rob money from consumers with punitive tariffs on rice.

I don't keep up too closely with the other half of the equation, the skilled workers. Look around Perverse Access Memory's archives; Ginger knows a lot more about that stuff than I.

Mac...
Your right about the food. The US doesn't need to be "the worlds breadbasket" with illegal immigrant labor. Actually, we don't need legal immigrant labor. We can buy food on the worlds open market cheaper than we can grow it here. I am all for a "Less oil, more food" import economy. In the last days of the Soviet Union 80% of their food was grown using the capitalist system on 20% of their farmland. The communist collective farms grew only 20% of their food. We could do a lot to foster freedom by becoming the world largest importer of food.

As Governor I have a responsibility to protect our citizens, property, and communities. Recent developments have convinced me this action is necessary — including violence directed at law enforcement, damage to property and livestock, increased evidence of drug smuggling, and an increase in the number of undocumented immigrants.

Democratic Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico

I only hope the President and everyone else in the country understands that the time to do something to stop this was 30 years ago. But, better late than never. Hopefully the reasonal Deomcrats and Republicans can get something substantial done on this issue.