Rant Mode = On
Apr. 11th, 2006 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythOkay. Let's talk about immigration for a minute here. And by "we" I mean me. And let's talk about bad ideas, too.
This particular bad idea goes by the name of "Guest Worker Programs," but there's a more descriptive name for it. "Indentured Servitude." Basically, Guest Worker things allow immigrants to come to the country, and work, but it's on a temporary basis and doesn't offer them the same chance to be citizens as regular immigration. That's an astonishingly stupid idea, and immoral, since it's basically sanctioning the exploitation of illegal immigrants that happens right now anyway.
I'm going to go off on a tangent of a sort for a moment, but trust me, it's relevant. A little bit about cities. Cities grow all the time, but they almost exclusively grow through drawing in people from the surrounding areas. The people who live in cities don't reproduce enough to keep it growing, heck, generally, they don't reproduce enough to keep a city at its original level of population. There's a lot of reasons for this, space and crowding being the big two. But cities offer enough in opportunities, work, and other benefits to draw in people from all around them (and around the world). And the people come to the city, live in the city, work in the city, and pick up the values of the city, which is how the city survives as an entity, even as its population churns through the years.
And though I'm pretty sure the parallel is obvious, industrialized countries are basically like cities. There's more jobs, more money, more entertainment, more options, and so people want to come. This isn't really a problem. Despite all the "OMG ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS!" screams, the US does a good job of integrating immigrants. That's what the country's founded on. We even got a trophy for it. It's in my icon.
Other countries don't always do it so well. Look at France, where one of the things that encouraged the riots was the way France doesn't assimilate its immigrants, and uses guest worker programs to keep them from getting citizenship. Or look at Japan, which has some of the strictest immigration laws. Japan's population has actually been shrinking, and they're developing robots specifically to care for elderly people. I don't know enough about Japan to even go into questions of racism and nationalism. Whereas the US has survived any number of waves of immigrants, and come out the stronger for it. We welcome them in, and then their children grow up here, and their children's children, and then they start bitching about all these new immigrants coming in and taking our jobs, and the circle of life turns once more.
Can our immigration policies be improved? Sure. But building a wall across the border or hiring squads of crypto-racist "militias" to patrol it isn't a solution. Neither is declaring all the illegal immigrants here felons and deporting them. Or just making them citizens with a wave of the pen. But I wouldn't trust any of the monkeys* in charge of the government right now to write a bill that would actually make things better.
So what's all the talk about a guest worker program, then? Because it can look like a "compromise" if you don't look closely, and because it would make it legal for companies that hire illegal immigrants to keep doing it. Hiring illegals is good for the companies, because they aren't covered by OSHA or unions, and the company has the threat of deportation to hang over their new employees, so they can pay them less than minimum wage, ignore safety laws, and then they can pass this savings along to you, the consumer, through their low low prices! Most of the jobs illegal immigrants do aren't "stolen" from citizens, because the illegals do jobs nobody here wants to do, or for lots less than anybody here would accept for it. Especially agriculture and things like meat packing plans. And Wal-Mart. (More on that here, on another blog's rant, which includes the word "fuck" a couple times and attacks the Republicans.)
So no, the status quo isn't good. But the answer isn't to make exploiting illegal immigrants legal and deport millions of people. It's going to have to involve lots of things, but it's going to have to make following the rules (for the immigrants and for the companies that hire illegal immigrants) more attractive than breaking them. Especially on the company side. But I'm not holding my breath, given how the EPA's fines are still orders of magnitude less than the companies that break the rules "save" by not bothering to clean up after themselves.
See also this article by Fareed Zakaria.
* I'm sorry, monkeys, I didn't mean to insult you.
This particular bad idea goes by the name of "Guest Worker Programs," but there's a more descriptive name for it. "Indentured Servitude." Basically, Guest Worker things allow immigrants to come to the country, and work, but it's on a temporary basis and doesn't offer them the same chance to be citizens as regular immigration. That's an astonishingly stupid idea, and immoral, since it's basically sanctioning the exploitation of illegal immigrants that happens right now anyway.
I'm going to go off on a tangent of a sort for a moment, but trust me, it's relevant. A little bit about cities. Cities grow all the time, but they almost exclusively grow through drawing in people from the surrounding areas. The people who live in cities don't reproduce enough to keep it growing, heck, generally, they don't reproduce enough to keep a city at its original level of population. There's a lot of reasons for this, space and crowding being the big two. But cities offer enough in opportunities, work, and other benefits to draw in people from all around them (and around the world). And the people come to the city, live in the city, work in the city, and pick up the values of the city, which is how the city survives as an entity, even as its population churns through the years.
And though I'm pretty sure the parallel is obvious, industrialized countries are basically like cities. There's more jobs, more money, more entertainment, more options, and so people want to come. This isn't really a problem. Despite all the "OMG ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS!" screams, the US does a good job of integrating immigrants. That's what the country's founded on. We even got a trophy for it. It's in my icon.
Other countries don't always do it so well. Look at France, where one of the things that encouraged the riots was the way France doesn't assimilate its immigrants, and uses guest worker programs to keep them from getting citizenship. Or look at Japan, which has some of the strictest immigration laws. Japan's population has actually been shrinking, and they're developing robots specifically to care for elderly people. I don't know enough about Japan to even go into questions of racism and nationalism. Whereas the US has survived any number of waves of immigrants, and come out the stronger for it. We welcome them in, and then their children grow up here, and their children's children, and then they start bitching about all these new immigrants coming in and taking our jobs, and the circle of life turns once more.
Can our immigration policies be improved? Sure. But building a wall across the border or hiring squads of crypto-racist "militias" to patrol it isn't a solution. Neither is declaring all the illegal immigrants here felons and deporting them. Or just making them citizens with a wave of the pen. But I wouldn't trust any of the monkeys* in charge of the government right now to write a bill that would actually make things better.
So what's all the talk about a guest worker program, then? Because it can look like a "compromise" if you don't look closely, and because it would make it legal for companies that hire illegal immigrants to keep doing it. Hiring illegals is good for the companies, because they aren't covered by OSHA or unions, and the company has the threat of deportation to hang over their new employees, so they can pay them less than minimum wage, ignore safety laws, and then they can pass this savings along to you, the consumer, through their low low prices! Most of the jobs illegal immigrants do aren't "stolen" from citizens, because the illegals do jobs nobody here wants to do, or for lots less than anybody here would accept for it. Especially agriculture and things like meat packing plans. And Wal-Mart. (More on that here, on another blog's rant, which includes the word "fuck" a couple times and attacks the Republicans.)
So no, the status quo isn't good. But the answer isn't to make exploiting illegal immigrants legal and deport millions of people. It's going to have to involve lots of things, but it's going to have to make following the rules (for the immigrants and for the companies that hire illegal immigrants) more attractive than breaking them. Especially on the company side. But I'm not holding my breath, given how the EPA's fines are still orders of magnitude less than the companies that break the rules "save" by not bothering to clean up after themselves.
See also this article by Fareed Zakaria.
* I'm sorry, monkeys, I didn't mean to insult you.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 08:09 am (UTC)