The HIdden Agenda Beneath the Immigration Debate

I have to admit that I have conflicting feelings about the current immigration debate. I get irritated when I see illegal aliens acting belligerently and insisting that they have the right to be in this country. I get frustrated when I hear about workers from other countries, not here legally, being paid subsistence wages by companies who don't want to pay U.S. citizens a living wage. I get angry when I see the abuse of our borders by drug runners and by coyotes trafficking in people, sometimes even selling them into ugly, exploitive kinds of bondage. And I, along with many other millions of Americans, get anxious about the cost of supplying social services to these immigrants and to the real security threat reprsented by our broken borders.

But before the American people throw their support behind a harsh, round-'em-up-and-throw-'em-out agenda, we need to think this through.
It occurs to me that, underneath all the rheteric of politicians and pundits on both sides of the political spectrum is the same old strategy of those in power: Divide the workforce into warring factions and get them fighting each other; that way they'll be too distracted to pay attention to the nefarious activities of the power brokers.

Pitting groups of working class men and women against each other is a long tradition in this country. A lot is said about the slavery that existed before the Civil War, but few people talk about its effect on poor whites who didn't own land or slaves. While black people were working hard, whether doing physical labor or caring for the slaveowners' children, being fed and housed inadequately and many times being physially and even sexually abused, poor whites were on the outside looking in, denied work in favor of the free services of slaves. Much of the animosity between poor white and black citizens of the South can be traced back to this visceral fight for survival, and the abuse and exploitation of black slaves on the one hand and the neglect of poor whites living on the margins of life, barely able to scrach out a subsistence living, on the other. This scenario has been repeated many times with different groups of people, including immigrants -- in the coal mines of West Virginia, in the steel mills, in the union movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

We absolutely need to secure the borders of this country, and we need to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, and the human traffickers, drug dealers, and possibly even terrorists who hide among them. But before we come down hard on those already in this country, we need to remind ourselves that, be their actions right or wrong, be their attitudes acceptable or not, these immigrants are human beings with complex lives and many connections in this country; doing a mass round-up and deportation would cause untold human suffering, and would be a stain on the conscience of the United States for centuries to come.

We need to look at the real issue -- that once again those in power are pitting poor working people against one another for their own profit -- and we need to band together to demand wage and other worker reforms.

Close the borders? Yes. Hold illegal immigrants' feet to the fire in terms of back taxes and fines, and hold them to a certain standard in order for them to be able to stay in this country? Absolutely. But beyond that, we need to look at living wages for workers, we need to look at affordable universal health care, and we need to look at severe sanctions for employers who break the law and continue to hire illegal aliens. Maybe, instead of paying farmers for not growing crops, we need to subsidize the wages of seasonal farm workers.

We need to approach this problem with a combination of common sense solutions and a good dose of compassion. If we don't, things are going to get very ugly, and we are going to end up being very, very ashamed.