Immigration

According to this Star Tribune story, Governor Pawlenty's immigration report stems from some concerns shared with him by residents of the city of Worthington in southwest Minnesota. Worthington, which has a large immigrant population due to its meatpacking plants, is one of the state's most diverse cities, and many of its problems are shared with other cities like Marshall and Willmar, which have burgeoning immigrant populations for the same reason.

There are some real issues with undocumented workers, such as the problems that fake IDs cause for law enforcement, schools, and medical personnel. However, there is even more ignorance. The story quotes Marlene Nelson who is a founder of an anti-immigration group called Steele County Coalition for Immigration Reduction, saying "They're not coming for the cold climate. It's the welfare." I'm so sick and tired of people claiming that illegal immigrants come here for the welfare. News flash, people: they don't get welfare. Illegal immigrants are ineligible for almost all public benefits. They come here because they can work.

Immigrant come here because both employees and employers benefit. Employees get a far higher wage here than they would be getting in Mexico or wherever they are from. Employers get workers for a lower wage than they would have to pay for non-immigrant labor. It's simple, and as long as those dynamics don't change, immigrants will continue to come here legally.

So Republican plans like building a huge wall or allowing local police to arrest people they "suspect" of violating immigration laws, like Rep. Gil Gutknecht supports, are going to work about as well as the War on Drugs (an aside to Rep. Gutknecht, I'll support such a law the moment you know the entire federal immigration code inside and out). There are really only two solutions to the problem of illegal immigration. First, you can require companies to strictly adhere to all labor laws, such as not paying cash for work, verifying the status of workers, paying a high minimum wage so non-immigrants will actually work these jobs, and so forth. Since Republicans aren't terribly interested in regulating their friends and political donors in business, I don't see this happening. Second, you could increase wages in the home countries of immigrants so they have no reason to come here. Something tells me that Republicans are even less concerned about wages in Mexico than they are in regulating business.

What will happen with idiotic ideas like building a huge wall, however, is that immigrants themselves will be exploited even more. If the U.S. builds a wall, for example, that won't change the economic dynamics one bit, so people will still come to this country. However, the "coyotes" who actually smuggle immigrants across the border will charge more for their services, indebting immigrants to them for longer periods of time and leading to further exploitation. Not to mention all the people who will die as a result of trying to make it across the border (and yes, even people with dark skin have lives that are worth as much as anybody else). These kinds of plans remind me a lot of those who want to make abortion illegal: abortions would not disappear, but a whole lot more people would wind up dead.

Non-immigrant Americans want to have their cake and eat it too: they are addicted to the low prices offered by places like Wal-Mart, but they don't want to face the fact that low prices mean that foreigners or immigrants are going to be doing the work. It is because of illegal immigrants that you can get your lettuce and chicken and turkey for so cheap, but is there any appreciation of this fact? If you want to change illegal immigration, change the economic factors that drive it.