The Huachuca Mountains look like a very nice place for a hike. Better than the Sonora, fer sure.
It is not known whether the Huachaca Mountains are concealing the underground secret lair of bean-wielding supervillain Mexitron.
Stanley himself is one of the Huachaca Mountains.
So, not to be too earnest, but if there was a country to your north which was so rich that they could afford to throw away thousands and thousands of little flags for no reason, wouldn't that seem like a very attractive place to come and try to earn a living?
Oooh, this thread is the perfect place to recommend a great movie called Crossing Arizona.
It starts off telling the border-crossing story from the migrants' perspective, but it moves on to show extensive footage and interviews with self-appointed border vigilantes. It definitely has a point of view, but it's also reasonably fair to both sides.
One of the most interesting people is a Native American (I think he is a member of the Tohono O'odham nation) who leaves water bottles at stations on the reservation as a humanitarian gesture, even though other tribe members disagree.
Really, it's an awesome and extremely moving documentary. I recommend it highly.
*Parental alert: It does include two scenes of dead bodies that are pretty upsetting.
8: My point, ben, is that you should stop putting out all those little flags, because it's attracting immigrants!
Every little bit of ridicule helps, Stanley. After all you can't spell "Reconquista" without u and i.
I could not help reading all these captions in a super-bitchy voice out loud. "Nation of whiners" indeed.
9: Exactly, and maybe if we totally fucked up our economy, made a sham of democracy and totally neglected universal education we could slow down the pace a bit as well.
A storm is gathering, a storm of people...who want to [Sinister voice]mow your lawn...or bus your table or even[/sinister voice]... [extra sinister voice] put up drywall. [/extra sinister voice.]
Is it still too soon after 9/11 to bring back "Hakuna Matata" as a response to this shit?
14: But 9/11 is almost two months away, AWB.
Guys, I feel honor-bound to point out that while ridicule is a perfectly reasonable and effective response to extremists, it can be really counter-productive in addressing their follow-alongs.
There are many, many people in the US who are either laboring under the delusion that immigrants get a lot of special treatment (They all get $15,000 when they come to the US! All Koreans are given BMWs!) or are genuinely reacting to a sense of scarcity in their neighborhoods.
So go ahead and snipe at the silly and vicious fringe of the anti-immigration vigilantes. But remember that blasting them does cause collateral damage.
(I would say /end earnestness, but you all know me too well for that.)
Get up. Get up. Get, get down. Early 9/11 wears the early crown.
16: (I would say /end earnestness, but you all know me too well for that.)
I would say /end praeteritio but .... too late!
With his usual keen eye and excellent judgment, Knecht pointed out some other great photos.
This one is informative, and shows that if we can outsmart the shield of Dalcon, there's no telling what the Stackable (Wily) Mexicans will be capable of.
The Huachuca Mountains look like a very nice place for a hike.
Don't miss Garden Canyon, or the butterflies thereof.
21: It also brings to mind Feathers' solution to the ant problem (about 2 minutes in if you don't feel like watching the whole thing).
21: If the Mexicans discover ladders, we're doomed. Doomed!
16: Eh. Sniping at them probably isn't an effective tactic, but it surely doesn't preclude more effective tactics.
In Alabama, apparently it's a traffic violation not to speak fluent English.
Follow the link there for the specifics. Like, it's a real law and stuff. $500 fine, and the cop makes the decision by interviewing the driver.
Oh wow, sorry, that's a federal law. All commercial drivers are subject to random stop-and-quizzes, and the cop has the right to suspend a driver's license if he personally deems the driver not English-fluent enough.
Not just Alabama. A federal reg enforced by the states. Some states enforce it more than others. Ultimately up to the individual cop. How often do Québecoises get hit with this?
Pwnéd points to the Arctic Circler.
Holy smokes, following the link in 27 led me to this US Army t-shirt, supposedly from the Defense Language Institute. (Scroll down; it says "We speak Farsi so you don't have to.")
How exceptionally unpleasant.
(Yes, I see that it is the DLI alumni. Even so.)
16: I agree with Witt. Illegal immigration is a tough problem, and Dems are going to have trouble with it if they don't think hard and sort out a solution that addresses some of the antis' concerns.
25 -- Pwned by the governor of Montana in october 2006:
MODERATOR: Border security is an A list issue now. Montana has a huge border with Canada. Do you think the money being spent now on border security is being well spent?
SCHWEITZER: Nope.(LAUGHTER)MODERATOR: You want to elaborate on that?(LAUGHTER)SCHWEITZER: Well, once again, these big shots in Washington, D.C., they decided they were going to build a fence between the United States and Mexico that's 12 feet high. Well, Wal-Mart'll sell ladders that are 14 feet high.(LAUGHTER)
What a mess. This is from an appearance at the National Press Club.
MODERATOR: Border security is an A list issue now. Montana has a huge border with Canada. Do you think the money being spent now on border security is being well spent?
SCHWEITZER: Nope.
(LAUGHTER)
MODERATOR: You want to elaborate on that?
(LAUGHTER)
SCHWEITZER: Well, once again, these big shots in Washington, D.C., they decided they were going to build a fence between the United States and Mexico that's 12 feet high. Well, Wal-Mart'll sell ladders that are 14 feet high.
(LAUGHTER)
The thing is, nothing that the anti-immigration people want can possibly happen. You can't deport all the illegal immigrants, just for logistical reasons. You can't clamp down on border security too much before it causes major economic disruptions at a time when we need things to be running as smoothly as possible.
What is there to say? what is there to do?
The thing is, most of what anti-immigration people want makes no sense because none of them understand how the hell immigration laws and regulations work. Being tough on immigration gets you stupid laws where only permanent residents and citizens can have driver's licenses.
It is not good to have so many illegal immigrants, because they are vulnerable to many workplace abuses. (There's a reason companies want to hire them.) But most of the 'solutions' are based on very stupid assumptions (they're all Mexican, they all hopped a fence, that we have the ability to track the movements of all Americans perfectly, that the border is clearly marked.
I like Schweitzer's formatting better in the second quote.
Like Witt, I know people for whom immigration is potentially a massive issue. So far the polls tell us that the issue hasn't caught fire yet. Lou Dobbs has been hammering away on it for at least three years, probably five, as has Pat Buchanan, but so far nothing much has happened.
Partly this is because the nativists are as mad at the Republicans as they are at the Democrats -- both Bushes promoted a cheap-labor easy-immigration policy. So in a partisan sense, the issue is a wash.
In some cases, I think that some winger individuals are using immigration as an excuse to bail out on a failed administration. If Bush had been successful in the Middle East, they'd still be on board.
I'll repeat again here what I posted at DeLong (pretty much OT):
I just talked to two family friends -- small-town bankers and dyed-in-the-wool Republicans (one with Libertarian tendencies). They were very discouraged, first with McCain's chances, second with Bush, third with the Republican Party, and finally with the Libertarian Party. Both had decided not to give to the national party and candidates, but only to local and maybe to state candidates.
The more Republican of them said (truly or not) that in a parliamentary system Bush would have left office (and would have lost the party leadership) two years ago. The implication was that he thought that would have been a good thing.
The Blair experience in the UK argues against that, but it is true that the US Presidency isn't as checked and balanced as we claim, or as we wish. What we're up against is not just a man and a party, but a stacked institutional framework -- a President has four years to do his worst with no significant opposition, and with Rove's help, Bush got eight. Of course, the feebleness of the Democrats has something to do with that, but not as much as people think.
The deficit hawks and fiscal conservatives are supposedly smart, but since 2000 they've been utterly humiliated. Their resistance never amounted to a hill of beans, and in the end they went along with everything Bush has proposed. As I've said elsewhere, they really should be sitting silently in the back of the room with paper bags over their heads.
The evil Christians who enabled Bush should be equally ashamed, but they are bone stupid and genuinely loony, and mostly they're just sitting there and praying for rapture like a bunch of goddamn heroin addicts waiting for the pusher to show up.
nothing that the anti-immigration people want can possibly happen
Nothing the extremists want can happen. Plenty that the non-extremists want could happen, and there are debatable costs and benefits to doing them. E.g.:
- Deport non-citizens who have been convicted of crimes and are currently serving time in US prisons. (Current policy is a mishmash, but taxpayers are often paying $20-30K/year to house inmates who may or may not be deported when they are finished serving their sentences.)
- Reform US immigration policy to place higher priority on applicants who speak English already, have high levels of education and/or needed skills, etc. Canada basically already does this (remember that test that got linked here a while back?). We do it in some categories, but not across the board.
Any change in policy is going to have costs and benefits. The uproar over NY state providing driver's licenses proved that a lot of folks are so tied up with the "something for nothing" mentality that they see almost any cost as outweighing the benefits. But the fact that it got as far as it did in the governor's office also shows that a lot of folks recognize the benefits.
Amen to 37.
Almost nobody understands immigration laws, with the partial exception of those who are directly affected by them and (sometimes) those who are charged with enforcing them.
I say that as someone who had recently the pleasure of reading a 98-page report detailing the ways in which USCIS customer-service staff and adjudicators are not notified of policy changes by their own agency.
Cala:
But anti-immigration people aren't really against illegal immigration. They are against immigration. Right now significant sectors of the economy depend on immigrants. But if you propose any program of legal immigrants, even the Bush's blatantly pro-management guest worker program, the anti-immigration people shit brinks. Sure, I'd like to see greater worker protection, especially in farm labor and domestic labor, but that isn't even on the table when you negotiate with anti-immigration people. The only things they want are not possible in the real world.
Evidently, part of their solution is to breed more! *shudders*
What is there to say?
Acknowledge that they have a point or two before indicating how hard a problem it is.
what is there to do?
Witt offers some suggestions. I'm not comfortable with national ID cards or the like, but I've never been clear on why some rudimentary system of checking legal status at the start of a job is considered so onerous or evil.
Immigration, homeland security, and corrections seem to hire the worst possible employees at every level on up to the top, which means that you have stupid people being stupidly supervised and following stupid procedures. The intrinsic ill effects of bureaucracy are exaggerated by little-government ideologues, in my opinion, but they they reach their maximum in these fields.
The jobs don't pay terribly well, there's little glamor or prestige, they have many unpleasant and boring aspects, and they're really only attractive to authoritarians and sadists.
but that isn't even on the table when you negotiate with anti-immigration people
I think you're understating the size and diversity among the anti-immigration folk. At some point, Democrats are going to have to co-opt the more moderate anti-immigration people.
A former colleague of mine blames the insanity of US immigration law for the demise of his first marriage. (I hope this isn't too depressing for Cala.) Both he and his first wife are Canadian PhD.'s If a couple like them tried to immigrate from the US to Canada, all they'd have to do is show up at the border with their diplomas and a letter offering them a job and they'd have landed immigrant status.
I'm all in favor of making things easier for better educated immigrant workers, but really, this is just an entirely different issue.
(I'll stop serial commenting after this.)
I've never been clear on why some rudimentary system of checking legal status at the start of a job is considered so onerous
Because "legal status" is not binary. There are 15+ legal statuses, some of which are work-authorized and some of which are not.
Because "legal status" is not permanent. You can be here on a student visa, not work authorized, and then get an Optional Practical Training work-authorization in your field (no working as a nanny if you are a business major). You can come as the child of a clergyperson and then marry an American citizen. You can arrive as a tourist and then be granted asylum.
Because "legal status" documents can be expensive and difficult to replace (waits of 6-12 months are not uncommon; another 200,000 folks have been waiting more than 2 years for certain applications). God forbid you have a house fire or be burglarized.
Because "legal status" relies on checking a Social Security database that has hundreds of thousands of errors, most of them affecting American citizens.
or evil.
Because it is overwhelmingly enforced in a discriminatory fashion. The white Canadian who came here at 14 with her step-father and lost her green card years ago is going to get a pass and the guy with brown skin and an accent who won the green-card lottery and has been waiting 3 years to get his card replaced due to a typo is not.
N.b. Employers are already required to do this via the I-9 form. That does not prevent people from being fired or not offered jobs illegally, nor does it prevent employers from hiring people with fake documents or working off the books entirely.
My experience does not reflect John's 44.
But anti-immigration people aren't really against illegal immigration.
Nope. That's what makes this quite frustrating. It's not a cold dispassionate argument about the unfairness of people getting in illegally. It's a mixture of concerns about racial purity, culture, crime. Combine that with complete ignorance of how any of it works and you get a policy mess.
We're building a fence that covers, what, 700 feet? Who needs ladders?
A former colleague of mine blames the insanity of US immigration law for the demise of his first marriage. (I hope this isn't too depressing for Cala.)
It's not, but it's still something I regularly have nightmares about. I am not sure we would survive if I had to immigrate to Canada, and there's so much paperwork that one screw-up could have resulted in him getting deported. And he plays with dynamite for a living. Residue on clothing already gave one of his co-workers a hard time; it's a good thing the guy didn't have an accent.
Because "legal status" relies on checking a Social Security database that has hundreds of thousands of errors, most of them affecting American citizens.
Surely we could convince tom and W-lfs-n to work on that over a long weekend and fix at least that.
I've never been clear on why some rudimentary system of checking legal status at the start of a job is considered so onerous or evil.
What Witt said, plus, the process of sorting out a problem can take years. Women change their names; people misspell things; stuff gets lost or destroyed. In theory, everyone needs to present work authorization when they begin work. That's what the I-9 is for.
(But verifying that should not be the responsibility of the employer, because they can't be expected to. Have you ever seen an EAD? Would you recognize a fake? Or will you just not take a chance on anyone with an accent?)
The three-ish months that shivbunny was not legally permitted to work was hellish enough. I can't imagine what would have happened if that had gone on for years.
51: Is that why people focus on DL's? Because the process is faster and less confounded with errors?
I would think that the problems you and Witt have noted at least suggest a place for legislation to start.
People focus on DLs because it's the closest thing we have to an established ID, and it almost functions as a reasonable proxy for legal presence. (Of course, the problem is that it's not, really. shivbunny has his DL, which is good for seven years. He received it while his green card was pending. Had he not received his green card, and thus be here unlawfully, he'd still have a DL good for seven years.)
You cant touch the problems Witt and Cala talk about without being accused of making things "easier for illegal immigrants."
When McCain talks about things like "comprehensive immigration reform" he is talking about things like simplifying the regulations around being legal to work in the US, so you don't have 14 kinds of immigration status.
His party hates him for it.
51: Not sure what you mean by "focus on DLs." Immigrant advocates think that residents should be allowed to get them regardless of immigration status because a) licensed drivers are safer and can get insurance, and b) driver's licenses are useful photo ID that are important in many other areas of life, such as being permitted to enter office buildings.
Anti-immigrant activists -- and people who don't care much about immigration but have a general sense that laws ought to be followed -- don't like the idea of giving a state driver's license to a person who has violated federal immigration law.
50 was pretty funny, I admit. Unfortunately, the SSA database has an error rate of 0.5 to 4%, depending on who you ask. That's 1 million - 6 million workers, more or less. Given that I still can't get Amtrak, Mastercard, and my state government to agree on the proper spelling and format of my name, I don't have a great deal of hope that this problem is easily solved, and 6 million people not working because of database errors is not desirable.
(I lied about serial commenting.)
47: I do know a white Canadian, who was married to an America with American child, who was adopted into an American family in infancy, but not naturalized, who has been pestered in her middle to late 40s. I imagine that the outcome was favorable, though I've had no contact for several years, and I don't know how serious the pestering is.
I am not sure we would survive if I had to immigrate to Canada: There are simple ways to protect yourself against bears. Having sex with bears is a rare exception, not a common custom.
One problem with national IDs is that certain native-born citizens will have trouble getting them. This has already come up when IDs were required for voting. A fair number of American (older, poorer, less functional, and/or less white) can't document their existence. National ID would add another roadblock for them.
His party hates him for it.
But that's fine. I don't care if the Dems don't win the psycho vote. I just want them to get the moderate Republican vote and, more importantly, not leak their own voters.
The only part of illegal immigration that I find really critical is its connection to a multi-pronged campaign to degrade the status of labor, especially unskilled labor, and to reduce upward mobility generally.
But that's a big part.
44: seem to hire the worst possible employees at every level on up to the top
Much as I hate to pass up a chance to criticize the government, as the child of a federal bureaucrat, I'm a little skeptical about this assertion. I think though, that perhaps it points to a greater truth about bureaucracies (which, who knows, may Weber already mentioned), namely that the quality of a bureaucracy generally falls to the level of its worst employees. Why? There's the Iron Rice Bowl factor, where the worst people tend to stay the longest, and there's the Law of Not Working Better Than Your Supervisor, and there's the tendency for rules, paperwork and procedures to multiply and grow more complex over time. Bureaucracies which deal in life or death situations simply tend to highlight the most disagreeable aspects of bureaucracy in general.
I think Tim is wrong on this one, and that the Democrats should just ignore the issue. This is one of the few times that the oligarchic nature of American politics (the fact that business relies on illegal immigration) works out to a better policy than the alternative.
Like most anarchists, at crunch time Minny is a blind worshipper of governmental authority. No surprise there.
Or possibly Minny has been kidnapped and his terminal commandeered by Homeland Security.
I have trouble imagining anyone of any merit going into those areas, and I'd throw in the BIA, too. The anecdotes and my small amount of personal experience confirm my prejudice.
62: Nah, there are some really good folks at the BIA, though it's a pretty broken agency. IHS, considering the constraints, is almost excellent. But those constraints are sometimes absolute. So...
Maybe I'm a libertarian after all. I just can't imagine Minny, Witt, and Ari being right.
55: And because people are going to drive anyway, legal or not, insured or not. When shivbunny first applied for his green card, it took USCIS 60 days to acknowledge that they had received his application. So he had no proof he was here legally, and because his fiance visa had expired, he couldn't get a driver's license.
But his Canadian license was still legal, and the insurance status was uncertain enough that he drove anyway. (He had Canadian insurance. Couldn't get American insurance.)
Nobody ever seems to mention the fact that immigrants drive down wages. There used to be janitor's unions, but not any longer. If you believe in helping the poorest among us, the best way to do it is by enforcing immigration laws. If you disagree with that, explain why 20 million low skill immigrants don't drive down wages and destroy unions, or why the labor participation rate of high school and college kids is the lowest its ever been. The left's silence on this would make you think they're not as interested in helping the poor as they are in a status contest with the rich.
I think you've got the cause and effect backwards there, bjk.
What, low wages attract unskilled workers?
66: We've talked about this before; I'd say the stronger argument is that the presence of a class of outlaw laborers who don't benefit from the enforcement of employment laws drives wages down. The solution isn't to deport millions of people, which would be simply impractical, it's to regularize their legal status so that they can't be profitably abused.
Once people employing immigrants are on the same legal playing field as people employing citizens, illegal immigrants won't be a super-cheap source of labor anymore, and the effect of immigration on low-end wages should be ameliorated.
68: I don't think illegal immigration caused unions to evaporate, no.
69:
That may be true, employers might be using illegal labor because it's illegal. But that's not an argument against enforcement, it's an argument for enforcement.
If you read Fast Food Nation, the one thing the employers were most afraid of was unions. And the largest employer of illegal aliens is in Illinois, according to the SSA, home to McD's. You may not want to believe that illegals weaken unions, but employers disagree.
I think Tim is wrong on this one,
And thus does Walt Someguy--or should I say, "Juan Someguy"--out himself as an illegal.
Maybe you're right. I think that there are some legitimate issues there, and I think it's an issue that upsets a fair number of fair minded people. And, you know, if they could upgrade the DMVs, I would think they could upgrade our immigration process. Also, I hate ceding nationalist fervor to the nativist right, and this--what it means to be a citizen--seems like a place that nationalist fervor is not misplaced.
There used to be janitor's unions, but not any longer.
62: No, no, it's still an argument against government. Once you bureaucratize a process, it doesn't really matter whether you're hiring the best and the brightest, because the results will suck anyway. Look at the CIA: they recruit from snooty campuses, and the leadership apparat is all mobbed up with well-educated, well-connected Chets, and they still don't know shit from Shinola.
To the troll: If janitors, security guards, parking lot attendants and kitchen staff aren't unionized, it's not because immigrants magically cause unions to disappear. It's because the bosses use differences in race, religion, national origin and gender to segregate workers and prey on their weaknesses. What's more, there ARE unions for those groups, SEIU chief among them, but they aren't the (mostly white, male, native-born) unions that were bought off during the 1940s and 1950s with what amounted to state guarantees of high wages and good benefits. Organizers among low-wage service economy workers are out there even as we type, struggling against the dead weight of capital to improve people's lives, no matter where they happen to have been born.
The left's silence on this would make you think they're not as interested in helping the poor as they are in a status contest with the rich.
The DLC proposed writing off the bottom 20%, who are less likely to vote, and concentrate on the 21st percentile on up. The poor tend to vote Democratic anyway, regardless of any benefits actually delivered or not.
72: It's not a matter of not wanting to believe, but it's hard to see how someone's immigration status would affect the employer's desire to go around the union. (One could have immigrants in a union, too.) I really think immigration here is a scapegoat. Employers don't like unions, try to get around them, and hire illegals because they can and would try to hire someone else if they could.
It's easier to blame the illegals than blame the employers. Plus, I think the weakening of unions predates the recent kerfluffle about illegals.
68, 70: It's a multi-pronged, successful anti-labor offensive going back to 1970. Both are parts of something greater; so is offshoring.
I live in an apartment building where all the lifeguards are from Eastern Europe. There's a big ad in the laundry room for lifeguards, right where nobody is likely to see it. You don't think the local kids wouldn't like a lifeguard job for the summer? But the property management firm can get the EE's for $7 an hour. I really don't see how that benefits Americans in any way, although there are a few hot Ukrainian lifeguards.
Furthermore, as an anarchist, I know that nationalist fervor is always misplaced. Why should I have a job and a house and health care that another person lacks, just because my ancestors were white enough to come here when the land was free for the stealing? I've got a hell of a lot more in common with Sufia the janitor who cleans the office I work in, or Maria who makes the lunch that I buy or Victor the roofer who lives next door, than I do with Bill Gates or George Bush or Steven Spielberg. Anarchism is about knowing which side your bread is buttered on, and about doing something to make sure your bread doesn't land on that side when you drop it.
79: The troll is switching the playing field. There is no way to know (and little reason to suspect) that the Ukrainian lifeguards are not work-authorized. This is a complaint about immigrants, not unauthorized immigrants. Bzzt!
I've just had cookies, so I'd like a nice iced tea, please.
79: I'm confused by your reasoning here. How does posting a sign in a laundry room attract Eastern European lifeguards?
80:
You make my point precisely. When faced with a choice between Americans or foreigners, you choose foreigners. Why? Because Steven Spielberg has too much money. That makes sense.
Having a pool of illegals makes union busting easier. Workers who had thought of themselves as valuable find out that their bosses have plans to replace them at half the wage.
I did a little Googling and it seems that that's what happened with the mid-80s Hormel strike in Austin MN, which was sort of a belwether. The demoralizing effects remain.
81:
I'm a troll? I hardly post here, and I usually try to make intelligent points. I don't see how I'm a troll. And I don't support legal or illegal immigration. Either way it drives down US wages.
82:
The employer has to advertise the job in the US first. The fewer applicants the better.
82: The laundry room in your building isn't in the U.S.? I'm now completely lost.
Ugh. Anti-immigrant stuff really makes me feel kind of nauseated. I love Witt here, but I confess I don't understand what it is she's thinking the legitimate objections to undocumented workers are, other than this:
people who don't care much about immigration but have a general sense that laws ought to be followed -- don't like the idea of giving a state driver's license to a person who has violated federal immigration law.
Which I think isn't an objection to undocumented workers per se, but is instead a (reasonable, empathetic) feeling about the importance of the rule of law. Which is great, and I think that the basic approach to assuaging non-assholish objections to undocumented workers is just to talk, openly, about why undocumented workers are here and who they are. Almost any decent honest person can admit that if *they* lived somewhere where civil unrest and/or poverty made it literally impossible for them to feed and educate their children, they would, if necessary, break laws in order to find a job--a job, mind you, not thieving--that would pay them enough to put food on the table. Which is basically what it boils down to.
If you believe in helping the poorest among us, the best way to do it is by enforcing immigration laws. I
Emphasis on "us," I assume? Meaning Good American poor people versus those other poor people who were unlucky enough to be born elsewhere? (And fwiw, undocumented workers have been absolutely central in a *lot* of unionizing movements.)
Is someone saying that having a deep pool of ready labor, of any kind, doesn't make organizing a union harder? Particularly if the pool is composed of diverse workers, workers who might not have a common language that would allow for relatively easy class identification? If so, that would be a tough argument to make.
On the other hand, this bjk character is making no sense whatsoever. Though I'm intrigued by a literal (not labor, in other words) pool teeming with hot Eastern European lifeguards.
I'm bummed that "Crossing Arizona" seems not to be on Netflix. Will have to try to remember to hunt it down elsewhere.
Oh, and I'll add my own recommendation: Enrique's Journey, which was written by a reporter for the LA Times. It's being made into a film, I believe.
85.1: Wait, now you want to close the border entirely? Awesome. That's always worked well for everyone. "Us" included. Oh wait, you're "us" and my "us" are different.
(Stands, faces north.) Oh, Canada...
88: No, but I'm saying that the timeline for 'deep pool of ready labor' and 'death of unions' doesn't line up. Particularly that many illegal immigrants don't work in jobs that are unionized to begin with (farm labor, in-home child care, etc.)
I would recommend Manda Bala, about the divide between rich and poor in Sao Paolo. The rich are so much wealthier that they can't walk or drive on the street, so they travel by helicopter taxi. What's always been distinctive about the US is that we've been a middle class country. If you import half of Latin America, you're importing the Latin American social structure. Last year in Arizona there were 340 kidnappings.
85: OK, I understand now that you are against all kinds of immigration. I'm sorry I accused you of switching the playing field. You don't want any Ukrainian lifeguards, no matter what their visas or legal status or level of hotness.
But I still think you're a troll, and I'm basing that mostly on your statements in this thread and a little bit on what you've posted elsewhere. (Obsidian Wings? Crooked Timber? I can't remember where I've seen your handle* before, but it's been disingenuous.)
*If this wasn't you, that's a great argument for obeying the Lizard Breath Rule of Unfogged Commenting: Thou shalt have a memorable pseud.
91: Oh, I totally agree with you here. I was more responding to Emerson's 84. I should also note that you and I seem to be agreeing that bjk is a complete loonbag (though I don't want to put words in your mouth).
Having a pool of illegals makes union busting easier.
Absolutely. But that's *because* undocumented workers are at risk of arrest and deportation. Harsher enforcement of immigration laws has precisely the opposite effect from what bjk seems to be promoting, which is strengthening unions.
Meaning Good American poor people versus those other poor people who were unlucky enough to be born elsewhere?
Basically, yes. It's not a ridiculous idea. American labor is overpriced by world standards. If the American wage rate for unskilled labor descends to the global average, or even halfway there, a lot of Americans will be out of luck. The combination of immigration and offshoring makes that a real threat. As I said, this is the real crux of the immigration argument for me.
What's always been distinctive about the US is that we've been a middle class country.
Your myths are tedious. Though, you did let us know that your bible on labor economics is Fast Food Nation.
If you import half of Latin America, you're importing the Latin American social structure. Last year in Arizona there were 340 kidnappings.
Oh, the problem isn't illegal immigration. It's those scary brown people.
I'm sorry I tried to engage.
I wasn't sure, but 'oh noes we'll import their culture' is a common meme, so common, in fact, it was claimed about the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, oh, pick an ethnic group.
It's not half of Latin America. We're talking about 6 million people. (Using 9 million as the estimate, as that's the number I saw before it got inflated to 25-30 million, and 66% Hispanic.)
96: Offshoring is a problem; immigration is not.
91: Cala, you seem to be asking for a simple cause-effect relationship. No one will ever find than, but immigration is a big factor in the anti-labor offensive of the last 3 1/2 decades.
The labor-hating market conservatives favor open borders, or else special slave-labor visas.
83: When faced with a choice between Americans or foreigners, you choose foreigners.
I'm sorry, please, what are these "Americans" and "foreigners" you speak of? Are "Americans" people from America? In that case, many of the people you want to ban are, in fact, "Americans". Also, these "foreigners" you mention, just what about them is "foreign"? I've met a lot of people and none of them were "foreign" to me.
One thing I've learned that you may find profitable to think about: "Boss" and "general" and "Pope" and "president" are all symptoms of the same disease.
immigration is a big factor in the anti-labor offensive of the last 3 1/2 decades
John, here it seems like it might be you who's confusing causes and effects. I think that capital has forever done its level best to subjugate labor. Spurious cultural arguments and racial anxiety are just one lever for accomplishing an age-old goal, in other words.
Native labor vs. immigrant labor has been an issue here at many times in the past, and its always been extremely tricky. In my first posts on this thread I basically hoped that Democrats would not bring up this issue. If it is brought up, though, that's how it will be framed: native vs. immigrant labor.
There's no way that immigration isn't part of the problem. If immigration+ offshoring had been accompanied by various programs softening the blow to American labor (as the Clinton administration hoped) the issue would be a lot different. But movement has been retrograde in almost every way. (For example, financing college has become more difficult.)
Clinton put his programs through with Republican votes, which is why many of them were bad, and for me this was as good a reason as any to vote against Hillary.
It's so easy to be against off-shoring because it erodes good middle class jobs like programmer or tax preparer.
If immigration hurts the poorest, at the lowest paying and most difficult jobs, that's too bad for them. They really should have planned ahead, right? Gotten a better job, so they wouldn't be so screwed.
Further to Ari's 103, think of the way that the Republicans have made race a big factor in electoral politics. The divide-and-conquer strategy is the problem, not the solution.
Emerson is right: Look at all those Finns we let into northern Minnesota to work in the iron mines and lumber camps: they were the death knell for organized labor!
don't understand what it is she's thinking the legitimate objections to undocumented workers are
1. Legitimate confusion over the immigration process. It sounds awfully appealing to say "Get in line!" It takes several whole minutes of conversation to understand that for some folks, there IS no line -- you can't wait ten years, or 18 years, there's just too vast a volume of people from your country/with your skills who want to come, and no amount of waiting will give you a place.
2. Sense of grievance and fear that resources are zero-sum: "My neighborhood school only has X amount of money, and instead of spending it on special-ed services for my son, they're spending it on English for those ______ immigrants."
3. Perception of job risk. In some industries, it is an absolute reality that the availability of cheap immigrant labor (work-authorized or not) has eaten away at the hard-won gains of previous generations. If you're a security guard and your company loses its contract because you get union wages of $13/hour plus health benefits and the new contractor is paying $7.50/hour with no benefits, it's very hard to look at that as a macro-level issue, because it feels very darn personally micro-level.
4. Delusional notions of disease risk. If I had a dollar for every conversation I've had about TB, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, and leprosy (leprosy, for God's sake!) I'd be rich. But again, the anger on this issue generally drops way down if you have a one-on-one conversation with people in a non-emotional setting.
I'm not listing these as accurate reasons (although in some ways they are), but they are certainly very legitimate and real in the minds of people who feel them. You can ridicule the extremists of the world, but you have to be able to reach the high-school guidance counselor who is wavering on whether the 16-year-old kid in front of her is actually a "crime in progress" because he has just told her that he is afraid to go to college given his immigration status.
101: One was postulated; I was disagreeing. If you're going to blame illegal immigration for modern labor ills, you need to make more of a case than 'having a bigger labor pool didn't help.'
Don't get me wrong; as I said upthread, one of the real problems with illegal immigration is that the workers are extraordinarily vulnerable. Meaning that they have lower wages, less safe working conditions, and no protection to complain about abuses.
But I don't think deporting them solves that by itself, and it's much more efficient to find a way to go after the employer. It would be like if we tried to solve underage drinking by picking the kids up from the bar and driving them across the street, rather than fining the establishment.
Ari, it's all entangled and mutually-reinforcing over more than three decades, and all engineered by the same people. All kinds of things have been happening since 1973 or so, and increased immigration is one of them.
Clear cause-effect relationships are rare in history.
105 is crap. Educated people don't find it that hard to switch industries. It's the closing factories that worry me about offshoring.
Nice try at the strawman, though, trollish one.
I mean, they don't even speak a Germanic language! How are you going to organize people like that, speaking their strange Finno-Ugric syllables and with their natural tendency to bow down to imperial control!
If immigration hurts the poorest, at the lowest paying and most difficult jobs, that's too bad for them.
Most of these jobs aren't union. Just so we stay clear on where the goalposts are shifting.
If it is brought up, though, that's how it will be framed: native vs. immigrant labor.
About this we agree, John. But I think the solution is to win the argument, not cede the point and then capitulate on nativist policies. Not to mention, being on the right side of the immigration debate is a long-term electoral winner. If that's what we're talking about.
Okay, I have to run.
I really should not be throwing more fuel onto this discussion, but one critically important factor that is rarely mentioned is the role of American companies in creating the "push" factors in countries of origin. When American corporations buy up farmland in Latin America and push workers off of it, it's not crazy that those same workers decide the best hope is to come to the US for a job.
So where are those laid off factory workers going to go? How about domestic jobs like landscaping or janitorial work or food service, jobs that can't be off-shored? Right, those jobs are taken by illegal aliens. So much for the poor, screwed again! They really have only themselves to blame.
Clear cause-effect relationships are rare in history.
No! No! History is simple. Really. Just take my seminar.
115: In an ideal world, we'd solve illegal immigration by helping to make it more attractive for people to stay home.
108: Oh, I see. Yes, I agree that people's legitimate (if misguided) concerns should be addressed respectfully. I just think that most of those concerns are misguided.
And I confess that for me it really boils down to the moral issue of, do you really think it's fair to tell the Guatemalan orange-picker that his family has to starve? I just can't go there myself, and I think that very few people, if you assuage their fears, would, either.
WHY AREN'T ANY OF YOU CONCERNED ABOUT THE FINNISH HORDE?
But I don't think deporting them solves that by itself, and it's much more efficient to find a way to go after the employer.
I think (almost) everyone here would agree with that, wouldn't they? No one here wants mass deportations. I thought--per you and Witt--the problem was that placing the burden on employers was not a workable solution.
I've had this argument over at DeLong's many times. Look at basic economic principles of supply and demand. Then think:
1. American labor is competing with offshore labor in countries where the going wage is anywhere for 10% to 30% of ours.
2. Native-born American labor is also competing with immigrant labor form such countries.
Is there any way that that won't put American labor at a disadvantage? Free-trade and open-immigration economists just forget their basic principles when they talk about labor issues. They just look for the anti-labor result.
you really think it's fair to tell the Guatemalan orange-picker that his family has to starve?
I'm not sure that "fair" is the right criteria here. It is, for a bunch of reasons, reasonable to want to control the extent of immigration, and to condition benefits, where not self-defeating, on legal status.
I heard an immigrant worker speak once. Her name was Saskia Sassen. She had some pretty dangerous ideas, too! Can you imagine if more people like her were let into the country, with their foreign social structures? It would be a real nightmare, let me tell you.
121: Not an easy one, no. I really don't know what to do policy-wise on this front. It's unfair to tell someone they can't work until they're verified when government turn-around could be as high as two years. It's unfair to expect the employer to be an expert in immigration, and to punish them for being fooled by a document. We'd need turn-around to be in the days, not weeks. (Right now, I think it's 90.)
I'm leaning towards thinking that a better strategy might be to look at, e.g., why Canadians don't immigrate despite the open border, and see if there's any policy changes we can be making to move, e.g., Mexico in that direction.
And bjk seems to think that if we get rid of all immigrants, legal and illegal, those problems will go away, which seems naive.
116: Right, that's exactly how it works. People in factory towns where the jobs have disappeared would all be mowing each other's lawns if only their neighbors hadn't also been laid off all those undocumented workers weren't doing it.
do you really think it's fair to tell the Guatemalan orange-picker that his family has to starve?
That's the crux of the American immigration debate. Almost nobody can bear to do this to a person right in front of them -- which is why the guidance counselor looks at the kid and doesn't call the immigrant police. But almost everybody has a sense of the macro-level problem being difficult and overwhelming and frightening and unpredictable and hard to explain. And most of us (myself included) don't trust the pure-libertarian open-borders economist-talk that says Trust Me, We'll All Be Better Off.
When you have those twin conflicting reactions in millions and millions of people, you have policy paralysis. Which is where we've been since, oh, roughly 1986.
(Confidential to Tim: If we had a mass legalization program, a lot of those employer-enforcement issues would go away for a decade or two. The issue is to get rid of them permanently, and that's where it gets tricky.)
The Finns came along at the end of a ,ong period of immigration. The faucet was shut off around that time. Immigrants had frequently been used as strike breakers in the previous 80 years or so.
In the Austin, MN case, the union in an already-unionized plant was busted, and as time went on the labor force became more and more Hispanic as the jobs got worse. This was characteristic of meatpacking everywhere.
The immigrants are not the villains and not the agents, but the dynamic we'd have to deal with if we were to deal with this issue is the one I'm talking about.
It's als an issue that Democrats could finesse and evade, because the leading Republicans have already alienated the nativists. However, a demagogue from eaither party (or a third party) could change the game in a hurry.
Of course, people who define the issue racially instead of in labor terms usually end up not helping labor at all -- rightwing populists.
Oh, Lord. Obviously I meant "immigration police."
Although "immigrant police" conjures up some funny images.
123: What it boils down to is punishing people who are trying to feed their families. That's not reasonable.
125: if we get rid of all immigrants, legal and illegal
...then there'll be a lot more breathing room for my Ojibwe and Lakota neighbors, that's for sure!
Look, this debate is over a hundred and fifty years old, and the nativist side hasn't gotten any more convincing in all that time. Let's list their main points:
*Immigrants take all the good jobs
*Immigrants take all the worst jobs
*Immigrants have disgusting sexual mores
*Immigrants come from repressed societies
*Immigrants are uneducated
*Immigrants get too much education
*Immigrants are sneaky
*Immigrants are flagrant
*Immigrants don't want to assimilate
*Immigrants trick you into thinking they're native
and most important of all:
*Immigrants aren't me!
(Confidential to Tim: If we had a mass legalization program, a lot of those employer-enforcement issues would go away for a decade or two. The issue is to get rid of them permanently, and that's where it gets tricky.)
I think most of us support amnesty, if only on social contract grounds. And if we had a plan and some legislation that enabled it, perhaps we could use that decade or two to make it more permanent.
To the extent that the economy keeps growing and the government is pro-labor, immigration doesn't have to damage native-born labor. We can't count on either one, though.
Minny, most of American labor's big victories came after immigration was restricted in the early 1920s. before that time they mostly lost. At the BOTAW site they recently reported that before 1900 or maybe 1920 both major parties were anti-labor.
What it boils down to is punishing people who are trying to feed their families.
There's not need to assume a desire for punishment. You could, for example, increase foreign aid while restricting the border. Or we could just say, "Sorry," and mean it. That a policy causes someone harm doesn't mean it's a bad or unnecessary policy.
Immigration is a tax that's only paid by the poor, but the tax is invisible and hypothetical, so nobody seems to mind. I mean, it only hurts the poor! So easy to ignore.
128: Some immigrants were used to break strikes, yes. Then they got unionized, by themselves and by radicals from different backgrounds. Then they were the greatest army of democratically organized labor the world has ever seen. Then their children and their children's children started to believe the bosses' lies and now we're going to have to do a lot of it all over again.
"If you don't let race-hatred break you up,
And if you don't let Red-baiting break you up,
And if you don't let stool-pigeons break you up,
You'll win!
What I mean is take it easy -- but take it!"
-"Talking Union", (Lampell, Hays, Seeger)
Dialect note: "stool-pigeons" = "snitches"
I am an illegal immigrant... to Mexico. Their spicy food and spicier women compel me strangely.
bjk's model of how the economy works is fundamentally wrong. Immigrants create jobs as well as destroy them. It's possible that on net they make non-immigrants worse off, but it's possible that they make them better off. The solution is not to kick immigrants out, it's to tax the rich that benefit disproportionately from immigration. Since neither is going to happen, I can freely advocate the second...
I think multiple demogogues have tried to answer the call of history on the immigration question, and it turned out to be a wrong number. The structural politics of the US are such that the anti-immigration question will never get the elite backing necessary to succeed. This would only fail to be true if the economy implodes, but if the economy implodes I think you're going to see the illegal immigration problem solve itself.
134: It doesn't matter if that's what you intend to do or not; that's what happens.
And actually, I'm going to say that if a policy causes a *lot* of people a great deal of harm, without much benefit to anyone else, then actually yes: it's a bad policy.
Immigrants create jobs
I've been wondering when someone would point this out.
Minny, that was all after immigration was restricted, as I said.
On net, immigration makes some Americans worse off. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. But it does make some people worse off.
We're really not talking about people here, we're talking about labor forces. If you want to exert a downward pressure on wages and do it by bringing in new workers, the new workers aren't the bad guys and their personal traits and group culture are irrelevant. But the downward pressure on wages is there.
133: That doesn't follow. Yes, before 1900 or so, there were a lot of failed strikes and other actions. But the martyrdom of the Haymarket Anarchists was the catalyst for Emma Goldman's activism, and her actions brought thousands and thousands of people into the radical scene. And the people who'd been organizing got smarter, and the capitalists got over-confident and in the teens and twenties and thirties, labor started winning. Let's remember that a lot of that labor was composed of first-generation immigrants. Maybe they weren't "fresh off the boat", probably not actually, 'cause it can be hard to take a long-term view when all of your needs are short-term. Once you get a little better acclimated, once you realize that you're still on the bottom of the pyramid, once you realize that your fellow workers, be they black or Chinese or Jewish or Italian or whatever, have the same interests as you, and that those interests are diametrically opposed to those of the bosses, then you all get together and you start some shit.
Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do!
I am an illegal immigrant
This is the one statement that makes me walk away from a conversation. I've had US citizens tell me gleefully how they lived illegally in other countries, and the total disconnect between their privilege to do so and the immigration policies they advocate for the US is stunning. It's not worth talking to them.
(I'm not complaining about your joke, Walt, that's just what made me think of it.)
without much benefit to anyone else
That's what's at issue; you can't assume it away. And, yes, not engendering anti-immigrant, pro-nativist backlash counts as a benefit.
not engendering anti-immigrant, pro-nativist backlash counts as a benefit.
Come on. This kind of argument is patently offensive. And I can assume that there's no real harm from immigration until and unless someone actually demonstrates the opposite, which I haven't seen done. (I'm not talking about this thread, btw.) I've seen lots of assertions of harm, but all the evidence I've seen suggests that those assertions are pretty ill-founded.
If you want to exert a downward pressure on wages and do it by bringing in new workers, the new workers aren't the bad guys and their personal traits and group culture are irrelevant. But the downward pressure on wages is there.
And the solution, therefore, is to focus on the union-busting downward wage-pressure problem, not the immigration non-problem.
Once there wasn't a reserve immigrant army of the unemployed, labor organizing got a lot easier.
It has nothing to do about whether immigrants are good or bad people, left or right.
I've read more than one story (Charles Reznikoff's ancestors, for one) about how nice socialist immigrants from Russia or Poland ended up functioning as exploiters in order to just get by with a marginal mom-n-pop business. Regardless of class consciousness and militance, labor conditions during the heavy period of immigration were brutal. Real improvement came in the 30s.
140: So what you're saying is that strikes always failed if there was a fresh wave of immigrants to scab? That just isn't borne out by history. Lots of strikes and other activism succeeded, and as I mention above, laid the groundwork for future successes, right at the height of immigration. In fact, I think there's an argument to be made that it was precisely the way that this period immigration worked, where large numbers of people from Southern and Eastern Europe showed up in the biggest, most industrialized cities and weren't able to simply homestead western acreages, that allowed organized labor to find its greatest successes.
B, the downward pressure on wages is legal and can't be outlawed. If you have more people who can do the job, you can bid them against one another.
Reunionizing is part of the answer, but that's a long haul.
147: You can outlaw certain kinds of acts by employers; sure you can.
I didn't say "always". But during the period of peak immigration, labor was in bad shape. The militance was great, but the successes were pretty limited.
Labor always does better in every way when labor is in short supply, and one management solution is to increase the supply of labor. Offshoring is another.
More to the point, enforcing labor laws is going to be a hell of a lot easier and more effective than enforcing anti-immigrant laws. The motivation of employers is profit, and as long as there's a relatively even playing field against other employers, most employers will accept constraints on their ability to maximize profits. The motivation of immigrants is survival, and there's not a lot you can do to convince people to accept constraints on that.
You cannot outlaw non-union employers offering a lower wage in the knowledge that someone will take it. As long as it's about minimum wage, they can pay as little as they want.
This kind of argument is patently offensive.
As opposed to argument by puppy dog, which is what you're offering? It would be nice to hug out all problems, but it seems to be the case that politicians often get good by accepting the not-so-good. Some bargains are more morally problematic than others. As I can't believe any nation's right to control immigration needs a defense, the idea of controlling immigration--as different from any specific regimen of immigration--seems low on the immorality scale.
I've seen lots of assertions of harm, but all the evidence I've seen suggests that those assertions are pretty ill-founded.
Wasn't there a lot of blogospheric attention to an economic paper indicating that illegal immigration did mildly depress low-skilled wages? I thought that was now taken as a given.
151: Right, but you can pass minimum wage laws.
152.2: If I'm not mistaken, that was the same article that pointed out that mild depression of low-skill wages in some industries was more than compensated by job-creation and a larger tax base.
152.1: Really, Tim, the problem of poverty and desperation isn't about puppy dogs or hugs. It is a genuine and real problem, not some trivial feel-good nonsense.
154: Right, and there are parts of the world where it's even worse than Guatamala. But we're not sending off planes to Africa to bring back hundreds of thousands of those poor bastards. Because the country lacks the political will to do it, and any party that tried to do it would suffer massive consequences at the polls. Which would allow the other party to run riot. Which hasn't worked out well over six of the last eight years.
152: an economic paper indicating that illegal immigration did mildly depress low-skilled wages
Maybe this is true. But I'll tell you what definitely depresses low-skilled wages: the bosses, fucking people over. And strangely enough, most of the people you hear arguing that illegal immigration depresses wages also argue that the bosses should be freer to fuck people over. Isn't that an amazing coincidence?
I think I'll bow out. To me immigration is the trickiest issue in American politics, and I don't know the answer. It might be possible to evade it indefinitely.
Most of what I've said is pretty commonsensical and pretty well backed with evidence, though I haven't brought it forward. Fair-sized industries have converted to immigrant labor at reduced wage rates. Many of these industries (e.g. construction) used to be good entry level or backup jobs for people just getting started.
I really think I see a lot of denial. Partly it's because immigration has been converted into a racism issue, and partly it's because labor is hardly a factor in liberal politics any more and a lot of people don't think in labor terms at all.
Unionizing the new labor force to undo the damage is what labor has to do now, but illegals are hard to unionize for obvious reasons. High illegal immigration is actually best for employers; next best would be special slave-labor visas. There's a labor argument for legalizing everyone, followed by unionization, but that would require a union-friendly environment that we don't have and may never have.
155: Okay, I think you're misunderstanding. I'm really not trying to put forth some "lalala we should solve the world's problems" argument. And the "planes to Africa" thing is a red herring; Africans have trouble emigrating to the US because they're on a different continent; South Americans will *always* be able to get into the US, because it boils down to just being so desperate that you're willing to walk.
I mean, if your argument is that having a decent immigration policy is politically unwise, then fine; maybe it is, though I cling to the idea that most people are decent human beings and would tend to empathize with the desperately poor if they realized they could afford to do so. But *I* thought the argumet that you and I were having was simply about whether or not the moral (and thus practical) realities behind "illegal" immigration was or wasn't more important than the right of nations to outlaw immigrant workers.
There's a labor argument for legalizing everyone, followed by unionization, but that would require a union-friendly environment that we don't have and may never have.
But if the workers (many of whom, as you're pointing out, are undocumented) don't have to be afraid of getting arrested, then suddenly you've got a *much* bigger pro-union group, right?
To paraphrase Nice Guy Eddie:
"Immigrants have been nothing but good luck for us, they're a fucking rabbit's foot."
When I was a kid, East Lake Street here in Minneapolis was pretty dismal. There was a downmarket porn theater or massage parlour on every other block. Most of the businesses were grubby, nasty little storefronts that barely held on, or they were simply boarded-up shells. Then came the big boom in Latin American immigration, both documented and not. Almost overnight the work and wealth of those immigrants transformed East Lake into an economic powerhouse. Pawnshops and sleazy bars have given way to bodegas, roperias, joyerias, panaderias and taquerias. There's little kids out with their mothers, weekend vaqueros in snakeskin boots, even a few abuelitas shopping for sweets and icons. Meanwhile, the grub-white "American" parasites out in the suburbs listen to their preachers and demagogues (who ever profited on the difference between them?) and rail against the Mexicans who are "ruining" "their" country. All this immigrant-bashing, whether it's dressed up in Econ 101 terms or not, is just the same old line of nativist bullshit, and I'm not buying it.
the moral (and thus practical) realities behind "illegal" immigration
I don't know what this means. If it's wrong for a Guatamalan to starve, it's wrong for a Darfuri to get hacked to death. There are practical ways to alleviate the suffering of either. (And some of those ways wouldn't require immigration, though that's probably less true in the case of the Darfuri.)
was or wasn't more important than the right of nations to outlaw immigrant workers
This seems like the old question of whether it's wrong to steal if your kid is starving. And the answer always seems to be "Yes, but...." Which is a good answer: it's wrong, but any punishment is mitigated by the circs. It's still, however, wrong, which we think has to be said lest we find ourselves allowing anything in the face of reasonable desperation.
i'm sure that they're nice fun people, Minny. I'm talking about labor forces, e.g. in meatpacking or construction.
The reason I brought up the Econ 101 argument was because it's an Econ 101 argument that economists never make. When economic theory goes against their low-wage principles, they forget economic theory.
If immigration is outlawed, won't only outlaws immigrate?
I'm only here to help.
165: About fucking time. Actually, I blame Kit Seelye.
I am of course with Minnie and the IWW til the day I die pie in sky, and shocked shocked by the continuing perfidy of that closet tool of the capitalists John Emerson.
We have been here before.
This seems like the old question of whether it's wrong to steal if your kid is starving
Depends on who you steal from. In many cases it is simply the return of stolen property.
In the most common case, I don't see a huge ethical difference between breaking into Hank Paulsen's house (with appropriate qualifiers) and finding 50 million friends to help tax HP's wealth.
I'm trolling.
Is it wrong to troll if your brain is raving?
169:It's that procedural liberalism that has created a social insanity, where nearly anything is permissable a positive moral good for the majority under the cover of law.
Not that I object to taxing. I simply recognize it for what it is, and celebrate it.
This is so wrong. Carry on. Outahere.
(Extra Music review:Kathy Mattea's Coal has great songs and production, but still is only very good Mattea.)
High illegal immigration is actually best for employers; next best would be special slave-labor visas.
Exactly. John's fighting the good fight here, and I'm kind of surprised this isn't obvious. Come on people, big corps love love love the loose immigration regs, and that in itself should make you suspicious.
But again, the anger on this issue generally drops way down if you have a one-on-one conversation with people in a non-emotional setting.
Oof, here's one piece of anecdata against: try answering the phone at the office of a member of Congress for a few weeks.
172: I tried to do that once, but I couldn't get past the security guards at the front door. Something about not having permission from my Congressmember or some horseshit like that.
If immigration is outlawed, won't only outlaws immigrate?
And only inlaws will emigrate.
173: It's because of that time you shot your Congressman in Reno just to watch him die. That sort of behavior gets you an unsavory reputation.
174: Only coleslaw for ingrates.
They just look for the anti-labor result.
Emerson, have you noticed that you always conflate `American labour' with `labour'?
There's close to six billion people in that gap. I think that they might have their opinions.
Keir, that's the dilemma. But in American politics, you're talking about American labor. Pretty much everything that's happened since 1970 has been bad for American labor.
Globalists can spin it as rich, selfish American labor against poor world labor. But globalists are not labor, they're people with money with plans to get more. The advantages of globalization to Mexico, for example, have topped out, because now Mexico is competing with India and Bangla Desh.
In Europe neoliberalism isn't quite so dominant yet and European labor isn't quite so destroyed. I would have liked to have seen something like that for the US.
What I expect to see is a restratified America in a stratified world, and the end of the democratic, egalitarian, equal-opportuity experiment (which was always somewhat tenuous here).
No surprise that immigration is such a confusing topic and potentially a "third-rail" issue on both sides. As with all groupings of humans the fundamental existential question is always who is in and who is out. In current times with the world's land area generally neatly divvied up between them, nation-states implicitly claim status as the alpha grouping (and many of the real conflicts of the world occur where
groups with strong ethnic/religious identities do not fully embrace this "modern" notion) that trumps all other identities.
Add to this mix "globalization" which really does work better with some manner of Snow Crash-esque reduction of governmental authority. And fundamentally this the model the real top Carlyle-group money guys, the Bush family, oil sheikhs, Haliburton et al are working towards (they still need the armies for enforcement right now). My corporation is the deepest part of me (as a consumer or a worker) would suit them just fine.
So it is all a very volatile mix, particularly given that big chunks on both the right and "left" sides of the political spectrum have drunk deeply of the patriotism kool-aid and have various levels of awareness that they have been scammed. Is a Brazilian income distribution and set of values coming to the US? Good chance, but it ain't coming from the dispossessed who make it here. InBev is Belgium? Well kinda, actually management is mostly Brazilian. This is the great striving of the top folks right now, have your first-world stability cake and eat it with third-world wages and cowed governments.
<-esque reduction of governmental authority. And fundamentally this the model the real top Carlyle-group money guys, the Bush family, oil sheikhs, Haliburton et al are working towards (they still need the armies for enforcement right now). My corporation is the deepest part of me (as a consumer or a worker) would suit them just fine.
So it is all a very volatile mix, particularly given that big chunks on both the right and "left" sides of the political spectrum have drunk deeply of the patriotism kool-aid and have various levels of awareness that they have been scammed. Is a Brazilian income distribution and set of values coming to the US? Good chance, but it ain't coming from the dispossessed who make it here. InBev is Belgium? Well kinda, actually management is mostly Brazilian. This is the great striving of the top folks right now, have your first-world stability cake and eat it with third-world wages and cowed governments.
</rant>
And how the fuck do I get rant-pwned at dark-thirty Sunday morning?
Fuck you Emerson, what kind of nutcase gets up this early on a weekend and writes paranoid shit like you just did?
And fuck, comment actually stops in the middle of the 3rd paragraph. Messed up the rant tags.
Insomniac nutcases. I have a very irregular sleep schedule, sleeping 5-8 hours a night, getting up as early as 4:30, and often napping.
Emerson, minneapolitan and others may be interested in this 5-minute immigrant-made video about union organizing.
minneapolitan,
Meanwhile, the grub-white "American" parasites out in the suburbs listen to their preachers and demagogues (who ever profited on the difference between them?) and rail against the Mexicans who are "ruining" "their" country. All this immigrant-bashing, whether it's dressed up in Econ 101 terms or not, is just the same old line of nativist bullshit, and I'm not buying it.
Nice rant. "Grub-white," is that original? Awhile ago we were trying to think of a derogatory name for a white person. Grub wasn't even considered. Technically grubs are not parasites, but why quibble? Righteous anger is da bomb, ain't it?
The sad truth is we have a competitive global economy so railing against a group of people who are trying to compete is rather disingenuous, don't you think?
The peasants are playing a zero-sum game against each other for survival while the ultra-rich suck away all the profits and enjoy the show. They know exactly what to do with the proles - set them against each other and suck off the rewards. That way the game goes on forever and nobody checks to see who is making all the money.
The Minneapolis ghetto is revitalized and another ghetto springs up somewhere else. Programmer's in Beijing buy cars and programmer's in the US sell a car. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the corporations siphon the profit and the fat cats enjoy the show.
69
"We've talked about this before; I'd say the stronger argument is that the presence of a class of outlaw laborers who don't benefit from the enforcement of employment laws drives wages down. The solution isn't to deport millions of people, which would be simply impractical, it's to regularize their legal status so that they can't be profitably abused. "
"Once people employing immigrants are on the same legal playing field as people employing citizens, illegal immigrants won't be a super-cheap source of labor anymore, and the effect of immigration on low-end wages should be ameliorated."
Low-end wages are set by supply and demand. Curently most employed illegals have fake documents saying they are are legally entitled to work (which employers are required to accept) and are employed on the books. How is replacing these fake documents with genuine documents going to effect the balance of supply and demand and raise low-end wages?
Well, for one, if they're legal, they might be more amenable to unionization, which generally drives up wages.
87
"... Almost any decent honest person can admit that if *they* lived somewhere where civil unrest and/or poverty made it literally impossible for them to feed and educate their children, they would, if necessary, break laws in order to find a job--a job, mind you, not thieving--that would pay them enough to put food on the table. Which is basically what it boils down to."
What does this have to do with anything? I can understand why a starving dog would attack a child but that doesn't mean I think we should tolerate packs of starving dogs in our cities.
As Emerson has tried to point out there are real conflicts of interest between American workers and foreign workers. Most Americans think it is reasonable for American policy to favor Americans. I realize liberals have a problem with this.
185
"Well, for one, if they're legal, they might be more amenable to unionization, which generally drives up wages."
Or maybe they know there are millions more where they came from and they are easily replaced if they get uppity. If you just legalize the current illegals you will soon have millions more new illegals. Do you really support completely open borders and believe this would not adversely affect native wages?
Now why did you go and do that, Cala?
Yeah, sorry, ben. James, if you can find anywhere that I've seriously entertained the idea of completely open borders I'll eat my eeePC.
189
So what do you support? Legalizing the current illegals doesn't solve the problem if employers are using illegals to depress wages, they can just import a new batch of illegals.
I have the solution. Give Texas and California, south of Monterey, back to Mexico. The added wealth and economic activity will completely transform Mexican society. Oh sure, there will still be some immigration, but it'll drop out as a political issue anyway.
I have a deep and shameful objection to Napi's plan, but I can't decide which other president's name to use so that I can raise my objection anonymously.
Either Texas OR California, but not both, please. And California stays whole.
Unions are of two minds on immigration, except with a guest worker program which as far as I know they all oppose. The SEIU is very pro-immigration--including a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. See also the AFL-CIO's FAQ. I trust them just slightly more to speak for U.S. workers than James Shearer.
I would also note that the question of how well employees pay their workers is different from, though related to, the ability of unions to organize. I think the decline of manufacturing due to globalization and the lack of enforcement of labor laws are much, MUCH, more closely related to the latter than immigration.
My husband told me something interesting a few months back: a lot of the plants that closed in the industrial midwest, leading to the loss of those union jobs--they didn't all move to China or Central America. Some of them just moved to the South, where labor laws & labor generally are much weaker. (I don't know on what scale this occurred--I'd imagine a much smaller scale than moving overseas, and maybe so much scaler that it's more an interesting story about a couple of big factories than a huge contributor to the overall decline of union jobs in the rust belt. Also, in some cases, it's not that GM moves its plant; it's that the GM plant lays off a whole bunch of people and a foreign company puts its plant in Mississippi.)
I admire minneapolitan's desire to impoverish everyone in America for the next century out of egalitarian principle, but I feel it will be coopted by those people who want to do the same thing out of a desire to not pay their workers.