American-Ideal.com

Politicians love the topic of immigration. Even the meekest office seeker or incumbent becomes a Wild West sheriff promising to “lock down the borders”. The toughest of the “get tough” candidates argue to personally deport millions of illegals. We are now actually building walls. Show me an example where a wall did not become the rallying point for the problem.  These so called solutions to uncontrolled immigration make us feel good, but feeling good does not make things good. The last thing voters will ever hear is the big picture of immigration and the big picture solution to our sieve-like borders – until now…read on.

To fix the problem we need to understand it. Let’s ask a silly question; silly questions are often the ones most on target.  Why do we have illegal immigration?  Now that’s a dumb question…right?  Wrong.

Immigrants come here illegally for several reasons. One is that life in their homeland stinks. Mexico is a major world oil producer. Even with $60 to $75 a barrel oil Mexico can’t become a country where wealth flows freely and reaches the lowest echelons of the society. That’s one reason for immigrating to the U.S, but why come here illegally? Why not just come over legally. Here is why.

If you are a well-to-do, educated professional and you want to immigrate to the U.S, all you have to do is show up at a U.S Consulate and the doors will open, red tape gets cut, and visas flow. Now show up as a poor person with few or no skills. Tell the clerk at the Consulate that your want to come to the U.S to nail two-by-fours, sweep floors, or pick asparagus. That person gets a weak smile, red tape, and a fat chance of immigrating. If you can’t come in legally, the Rio Grande does not look too foreboding.

So we have life that stinks and red tape, but that’s not all; it takes more than a rotten life and red tape to push a person to swim across a river or into the back of a “coyote’s” sweltering truck. The critical last piece of the puzzle is that there has to be a demand for the illegal worker in the U.S – that’s a fancy way of saying jobs. If there were no jobs an illegal immigrant might as well be sneaking into the Sahara.

Most people like to blame employers for hiring illegals, but that’s a copout. Employers respond to the market. Now here comes the politically suicidal part of my argument. Every American has a choice, we can choose $6 asparagus or the $1.99 asparagus; we can choose higher taxes to have the landscaping along our highways maintained by $20 per hour landscapers, or we can choose lower taxes and pay $7 per hour immigrants to cut the grass. We like less expensive houses built by immigrants. We like an immigrant’s work; we just don’t want to hear about them. And that’s why they come – we ask them to come via our buying decisions.

Finally, how many home-born Americans willfully seek migrant farm work, sweeping floors, or other physically demanding and low paying work? Employers have buyers that want low prices; the same buyers that won’t come to work for them. Employers are not given a comfortable choice. I suppose someone could sell $6 asparagus, but they won’t be in business for long.

Now what do we do about it?  To fix a problem we need to look at the root causes. Can we change life in Mexico or any other struggling nation? Not in the short term. We can help, but is up to other nations to fix their problems. And we are dreaming if we believe walls will keep life that stinks on the other side.

What we can control is the red tape that promotes swimming a river instead of legally coming over. We can also control the demand – basically the availability of jobs for illegals. And how do we do this? First we need a guest worker program. Employers should be able to register their jobs through the government. Guest workers should then be able to apply and get their visa; the only hassle will be a background check and biometric registration. Employers would then have access to the labor they need to respond to our buying demands. Employers would be able to sell $1.99 asparagus with legal workers. When we give employers easy access to labor we can justifiably crack down severely on any employer hiring an illegal. When the illegal jobs dry up, so will illegal immigration.

Copyright:  American-Ideal.com - 2007