Last week a group of Republican
members of the house sent a letter
to the President criticizing his efforts to reform our broken immigration
system. The letter references millions of American’s out of work or who can’t
find a full-time job and the falling wages of American workers over the last
decade. The authors of the letter seem to think that the current state of
immigration is to blame for this fiasco and that any comprehensive reform of
the system will make it worse. They are wrong on both counts, although I still
haven’t made up my mind if the error is caused by willful ignorance of the
economic facts or some xenophobic defect.
Like most things it’s probably somewhere in between.
Let’s get the wage thing out of the
way first. There is no doubt that the average wages of the American worker are
lower now, in both absolute and relative terms, than they were just a decade
ago. This has so little to do with immigration, be it legal or not, that it is
statistically insignificant. The real reason your that wages are lower has more
to do with the disastrous monetary and fiscal policies promulgated by the
authors of this letter and their cohorts in the hall of Congress. I guess we shouldn't be surprised that politicians are trying to blame someone else for
the consequences of their actions.
As far as the millions of unemployed
are concerned, there are jobs out there, they just may not be jobs that the
unemployed want to do. There is a reason that immigrants come to this country
to work and that reason is simple – there is a demand for their labor. There is
demand for skilled labor and unskilled labor alike. The system we have right
now, while broken, is somewhat decent for skilled labor, but woefully
inadequate for unskilled labor. There is just some unskilled labor that can’t
be outsourced. You can’t outsource construction, or farm labor, someone
actually has to be here to perform those functions. People would not come here
if these jobs were not available. So the argument that Americans are unemployed
because immigrants have taken their jobs is just flat wrong. The vast majority
of unemployed are without a job because their expectations are simply not in
line with reality.
The most comical part about this
letter is that Republicans are couching their rhetoric in terms of economic
justice. They used to be against immigration because of all the people that
were supposedly coming here and siphoning off benefits for which they did not
pay. Ever since that has been shown to be absolute nonsense, they have started
spouting this garbage about how they are fighting for the rights and welfare of
the American worker. When did the Republicans jump into bed with the AFL-CIO?
Since when is the Republican Party fighting for the rights of the American
worker and trying to guarantee everyone a job?
This letter is nothing more than
politics as usual, political pandering to a base with which they are woefully
out of touch. If the Republicans think they can turn this issue into another
social referendum like they did in 2004, they will be sadly mistaken. The
electorate now cares much more about the cost of their home and other services
than who actually provides them, or whether their neighbor has a job – the
statistical evidence is overwhelming. It just goes to show that at the end of
the day immigration is overwhelmingly an economic issue not a social one, and
unless the Republican Party gets this through its head it will continue to
circle the drain as a national party.
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