MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 5 January
2008
Against
immigration, for immigrants
One purpose of government is to regulate behavior so that people's personal choices don't create havoc for everybody else. Thus governments install traffic lights, enforce labor laws, and issue passports. Failure to maintain such commonsense rules produces undesirable consequences, and is not generally regarded as a good thing.
Yet in the case of immigration, this obvious duty of government is questioned by many people of good will who believe that, if citizens of other nations have the resolve to disregard immigration law and enter the country illegally, we should welcome them, treat them as citizens, and even offer them citizenship. This is a prescription for disaster, just as letting drivers ignore red lights is a prescription for disaster.
Illegal and legal immigration, totaling about 1.7 million every year, has long since passed the disaster point for the U.S. Indeed it's a disaster for immigrants' home nations, especially Mexico which has recently lost many millions of its most energetic and politically active citizens. It's a disaster for the planet because immigrants participate in American's over-consumption habits and because migration reduces population pressures on immigrants' home nations. Each nation on our severely overpopulated planet needs to limit and reduce its own population rather than being let off the hook by emigration.
And it's a disaster for immigrants themselves. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 20,000 women and children are trafficked into the U.S. every year to be enslaved in prostitution and pornography. Women fleeing their homelands are raped. Illegal immigrants are exploited by employers who undercut legal U.S. workers by paying sub-minimum wages. Discrimination, isolation, language barriers, and lack of legal status prevent migrants from seeking redress for human rights abuses by their employers. Ironically, it is often these same employers of illegal immigrants who are in the forefront of the pro-immigration crowd and who complain the loudest about attempts to shut off the supply of immigrants.
I have many good liberal friends who, for humanitarian reasons, disagree with me about immigration. Their position is irrational and ultimately inhumane. It will not work. It fails to recognize such realities as a bloated U.S. population; a disastrous U.S. population growth rate that is fed primarily by immigration; 36 million Americans who went hungry in 2006; the 37 percent of us who cannot afford needed medical care; overburdened schools; sprawling land-use patterns; gluttonous resource consumption; and a sagging transportation system. A nation struggling with such burdens cannot deal with essentially unlimited immigration.
The United States is full.
We're beginning to experience a damaging divide into liberals who support immigration and conservatives who oppose it. This is a big mistake for liberals, not only because excessive immigration is out of step with reality but also because liberals then turn the issue over to conservatives who are too often prejudiced against immigrants. Judging from polls and from people I've talked with, plenty of liberals oppose excessive immigration. But they don't speak up, perhaps because many conservatives oppose immigration and if there's anything some liberals don't want to do it's take a position that's also supported by many conservatives. They need to speak up.
There's a lot of truth at the heart of the pro-immigration argument: Immigrants, both legal and illegal, are good people who have come here out of concern for their families and for their own health and well-being. We should love and care for illegal immigrants, but they need to go home. Immigrants should not be punished but should simply be sent back, at least on the first infraction. Legal immigrants should be welcomed and given much more assistance than they are currently getting, but their numbers need to be greatly reduced.
There's a humane, fair, and relatively easy way to do this. It's called workplace enforcement. It would have been successful long ago were it not for the unscrupulous employers who are central to our immigration problem. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, come here primarily for jobs, or to join members of their family who in turn came here for jobs. Our hi-tech nation can surely devise a job security system that protects civil liberties while allowing every employer to check every employee for legal citizenship. Those who are not legal citizens need be humanely returned to their home nation, while those who employ them need to be shut down.
Some
12 million illegal immigrants currently reside here. I see no reason why persistent workplace enforcement could
not solve most of this problem, without jailing immigrants on the one hand or
granting amnesty on the other.
Without jobs, few will want to come here, and many will want to go home. This has already begun in Arizona, well
before that state's new legislation cracking down on employers took effect
January 1. Under the Arizona
sanctions, businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants will be subject to
a ten-day suspension of their business licenses. A second violation would bring permanent revocation of the
license. The result is that
illegal immigrants are self-deporting to their home countries or other
states. As a research economist at
Arizona State University who specializes in illegal immigration puts it,
"When illegals don't have jobs, they don't stick around."
Some say that we are an immigrant nation. But all nations, save a few where modern humans first evolved, were once immigrant nations. Eventually, nations fill up and become non-immigrant nations, while still allowing a small flow of immigrants, partially balanced by an outflow of emigrants. The United States has reached that saturation point. We will not solve our current immigration quarrels until we realize this. The beginning of the solution is workplace enforcement.