Q: Why did the worker cross the border?
A: Because there was a job for him on the other side. But when the worker was nearly across, a group of men who already had jobs and didn’t want the one he was going for told him he had to go back to where there were no jobs. They said he wasn’t welcome in the land of jobs, despite the fact that if they hadn’t found him, he would have gotten the one he wanted.
You would think that the theoretical simplicity of the global capitalist system — where if you have something someone else wants, you sell it to them — would make immigration policy relatively clear. If multinational corporations are free to move jobs wherever they can pay people the least, and can relocate their headquarters to obscure locales in order to avoid paying taxes, then the workers in that system should also be expected to cross borders in order to get jobs. If we are going to allow large organizations (or even powerful individuals) to do virtually anything to maximize their own benefit, shouldn’t we allow poorer workers to do the same thing?
Q: When, apparently, is it proper to punish people who act according to our country’s most basic principle and take radical action for their own self-interest?
A: When those people are brown.
In America, the only thing that matters more to the establishment than whether or not you play according to their rules is whether or not you fulfill the current (arbitrary) definition of someone who deserves rights in the first place. During most of this country’s history, if you were black, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican or any of a host of other non-Caucasian nationalities — whether or not you were a citizen — even the most capitalist of ethics wouldn’t earn you political rights or social membership.
Today, instead of using race explicitly to exclude people from the opportunities an established white citizen takes for granted, we use political affiliation (class too, but that’s a different part of the story). For Latinos looking to ditch their floundering home countries for comparatively plush jobs in the United States (most of which are unthinkably menial by our bourgeois standards), the incredible sin of wanting a better life for themselves and their family deserves a punishment illustrating the worst side of the American character. Alexander de Tocqueville wrote in “Democracy in America” about the ridiculous tendency for Americans, no matter how undereducated or uninformed, to think that they automatically know the best solution to everything.
Today we call this the Minuteman Project. This motley crew of misguided rednecks “sacrifice their time, and the comforts of a cozy home, to muster for something much more important than acquiring more ‘toys’ to play with while their nation is devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens” — they go out on the Arizona/Mexico border and defend it by themselves.
Q: What do the Minutemen fear will be the result of allowing an illegal immigrant across the border to fill a job they don’t want?
A: “Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious melting pot.” [sic]
Having trouble missing the racism in that last statement? So am I. Also hard to overlook is the same argument used by critics of every wave of immigration, from Irish to Japanese, which says that the admission of any more members of a particular group (in this case, Latino workers) will lead to the end of the American way of life. (That should be all I need to prove these guys’ use of brainpower is inversely related to the amount of fuel consumed by their four-wheel-drive vehicles.)
Whether or not Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger really meant it when he said the Minutemen were doing “a terrific job,” the most interesting political reality of the debate over immigration policy is that the Bush administration ain’t doing a thing about it, either way. Even though the Liberty and Law crowd are (shock!) some of his most ardent supporters, Bush’s vital (read: financial) support comes from Big Business, and Big Business knows that illegal immigrants are a fantastic source of cheap labor.
Bush doesn’t want to offend supporters on either side of the issue; his solution, as it stands now, is just to do nothing. Which means that those noble fools out in the desert are going to get really sunburned this summer, and the poor dudes who just want a better job are going to get it even worse than they already have it.
Critics of immigration are correct to demand documentation and information about their fellow workers; they are wrong to want a different set of rights for them. Since the real problem with illegal immigration is not that people are coming — but that we don’t know who they are, where they work or whether they follow laws and pay taxes — isn’t the solution to these problems the obvious first step toward a realistic immigration policy?
There’s a crucial gap that has to be crossed before we get to that point, however. Creating a mechanism to legalize the millions of alien workers in this country would result in the sudden situation that many workers in this country who now have no rights and no political power would gain both. All the illegals working for less than minimum wage would get to complain as loudly as they want. All the mothers without health care for their children would get to complain, too.
It’s not hard to see why our immigration policies are a mess. A sudden spike in politically enfranchised, working brown people? Dedicated, vital workers or not, they’re apparently still too scary for the white establishment to handle.
