Border Contradictions

Clinical madness! Schizophrenia! I was dumbfounded last night, listening to conservative AM talk radio 1530 KFBK's Mark Williams entertain a caller who ran a small construction firm and who had hired two illegal aliens. Finally, I thought, here was a sympathetic conservative caller who would inform the audience about some of the grittier realities of illegal immigration and the American workplace, and he did not disappoint entirely, with his talk of how hard the illegals work.

Nevertheless, despite all that we spend on the Border Patrol, both Williams and the caller decided to blame the federal government for supposedly making it easier to be an illegal migrant rather than a law-abiding migrant. No blame for employers! Nosirreebob!

So the inevitable conclusion is that legal migration must be made easier, which means - many more migrants! So the nativist Minutemen are fighting to flood the country with foreigners! I thought they were fighting for the opposite!

Life along the border is difficult - a hard economy - plus there are hazards from having so many potentially-dangerous strangers cutting across your land. I would be sympathetic if the people living there were the ones organizing patrols. For the most part, though, the Minutemen are wannabe warriors who live elsewhere. All they are doing is endangering the people who actually live there.

Here is some interesting reading from Salon:

In Palominas, I talk to an 18-year-old girl named Ashley Miller, who is pregnant and whose 3-year-old stepson plays in the dust. Miller has lived on the border all her life and watched migrants cross her land without trouble. She is not happy with the Minutemen, nor is her family, who grow hay in irrigated fields nearby.

"These people come here for a minute and they think they're men," Miller says. "They don't live on the border, they don't know the border, they know hearsay, what they've read. They'll get some ego boost from saying they've defended the border." Then, she says, they will depart, and nothing will change, except that migrants crossing her land will now expect her father and uncle and grandfather to be armed and hostile. "These Minutemen are putting the children, the people waiting at a bus stop, the people in their homes in danger," she says....

...Beyond that, the park ranger says he is frustrated because he can do nothing about an American economy that demands workers like Perez. "We can't go in and take 10,000 aliens from the tomato harvest because of the huge economic impact," he says. "We would cause a political uprising. People want their cheap lettuce, man."

Today, immigration observers point out that more than a billion dollars a year is sunk in keeping illegals out, and once they're in, billions of dollars depend on them staying. Without illegals, a great many industries -- agriculture, meat-packing, restaurants, hospitals, construction, landscaping -- would be thrown into chaos. It is no stretch to say that the hand of the Mexican migrant feeds the United States. He picks the food in the fields, stocks it on the shelves in the supermarkets, cooks it in the restaurants, and cleans the dishes afterward.

"Our economy depends on a robust influx of immigrant labor," says immigration scholar and author Jacoby. "Our workforce is more and more educated and middle-class. People don't want to work outside in the fields. So we have whole industries that rely on international smuggling cartels to get their workers." However, Jacoby says, "Illegal immigrants are not stealing jobs from American workers. They're doing jobs most Americans don't want to do."

In the meantime, "interior enforcement" -- raids on farms and construction sites that employ migrants -- has declined by 80 percent since 1998. In 1992, the Immigration and Naturalization Service fined 1,063 employers for illegal labor violations. By 2001, that number had plummeted to a piddling 78. A senior agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, who spoke honestly and therefore anonymously, tells me, "Well, why not hire the illegal? He works just as hard, if not harder, than an American, and for half the money. That's the big magnet. If you're ever gonna stop this, you gotta start fining employers. You gotta demagnetize the job pull." ...

...For his part, Simcox endorses a guest worker program, but in a manner so demanding and far-reaching that it could never be implemented. "It would have to be all employer-paid," he says. "The employer pays for medical checkup and care, immunization, safe transport into the country -- so the worker can enter this country with dignity -- insurance, proper I.D., and a safe workplace. Anything that an American worker would have. All of a sudden employers are right back to paying $21 an hour. That's good capitalism."

I tell him this seems to refute his avowed distaste for government regulation and his self-styled image as a frontiersman. I point out, too, that millions of legal American workers do not have healthcare, safe transport, insurance or a safe workplace. But Simcox is not tripped up by his own contradictions. "No, it'll stop people from being exploited," he says. "It'll make employers think about hiring Americans again because they're gonna have to pay Mexicans the same goddamn wages." This is the zealot's brand of twisted progressivism. You have to wonder whether Simcox even wants it to succeed...