by Slothrop
As expected, the batch of boneheaded bills on immigration was trounced this
week. Instead of reform to provide millions of undocumented workers a place to
truly call a home (rather like the rest of us) businesses will push for
accommodations on hiring immigrants, and Tom Tancredo will get his fence and a
passel full of stinking badges to "enforce" what passes as
immigration.
But the debate will continue as "illegals" remain and arrive
for permanent membership in America’s lumpen proletariat.
Disabusing the
rhetoric of the "debate" isn’t easy. According to the virtual rightwing book of
commonplaces the "illegal" immigration "crisis" will destroy America. If you’re
a knucklehead you have to know and repeat, to whomever is unfortunate to listen,
that illegals–and god only knows the millions of potentially "amnestied"
immigrants–will destroy America’s social services, healthcare and income
subsidy programs, economy and culture. The Mexican is undermining the American
Dream.
This is hardly limited to circulation among rightwing
knuckleheads. Looking for votes, few politicians would risk contravention of a
master trope. And to be sure, the god narrative featuring Mexican immigrants
gnawing at American prosperity is good for capital.
Breaching this wall
of false consciousness isn’t easy, but it helps to be armed with a few quick
facts to disarm the depthless stupidity of the reigning discourse on illegal
immigration:
Myth #1: The Mexican under my bed will take away more than
give to America’s economy.
Nope. Study after study shows that illegals
contribute to economic productivity and profits. And the best support for this
comes from bourgeois economists who seldom pass up an opportunity to praise the
efficient maintenance of a reserve army of service workers. Support of this is
provided by the increase in productivity of efficiently employed workers. The
so-called immigration surplus, captured by employers as added productivity is
small, but positive (about .4 of GDP in 2004). George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door:
Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999); see also,
Hanson.
Even when considering skill differentials between immigrant and
native labor, immigration both legal and illegal is a plus for the
economy.
To the extent research like The Center for Immigration
Studies honestly interprets a "drain" on the economy by illegal and possibly
"amnestied" immigrants, the upshot is that any successful integration of persons
requires an improvement of prevailing policies of education, healthcare, and
taxation. It is not the fault of illegal workers, or any workers for that
matter, that the principle social pathology of poverty remains inadequately
addressed in theory and in practice. To the extent persons are condemned to
penury and public subsidy is the result of structural imperatives of capitalist
accumulation solved by greater equity in the distribution of
resources.
Myth #2: The Mexican under my bed is destroying wages because
he’ll work for almost nothing.
Nope. First, illegal competition for jobs
no doubt reduces the wage-rate. But the amount is negligible at best, and indeed
impossible to accurately assess. Even the rightwing maven of immigrant labor
economics, George Borjas, must lump all immigrant labor together to limn a
national picture of wage-effects. And his more recent
projection is around a 3.5% decline in wages among low-skilled native
workers. While immigration might have a downward pressure on menial wages, the
wage gap between dropouts and highschool graduates has remained constant for
nearly 30 years.
Secondly, the downward pressure on wages is not a choice
made by individual workers. All workers seek to rationally maximize welfare by
seeking higher wages. The problem is the declining solidarity of all workers to
confront capital, and the failure of labor to extract a larger share of the
national product. The wage-labor contract is the locus of class-war, regardless
of ambiguous and arbitrarily assigned "documentation" of the status of
individual workers. This would not change even if no Mexicans remained to
destroy America.
Myth #3: The Mexican under my bed is a parasite on the
healthcare "system."
Nope. A recent Rand study using excellent survey
data from Los Angeles found that foreign-born and especially illegal persons
spend far less, and utilize far fewer public subsidies, on healthcare.
Immigrants And The Cost Of Medical Care. By: Goldman, Dana P.; Smith, James P.;
Sood, Neeraj. Health Affairs, Nov/Dec2006, Vol. 25 Issue 6, p1700-1711. Elsewhere,
researchers
accumulate more and more evidence suggesting quite low-rates of healthcare
consumption among illegal/legal immigrants. There is no shortage of studies
concluding the same. And as for the revolting slander repeated on knucklehead
radio that Mexican women illegally enter the US to conceive "anchor babies" in
order to win cash subsidies, nothing could be less
true.
In any case, the "system" is in undeniable crisis owing to the
rationing of care by tenuously market-oriented competition, and the confiscation
of wealth by the capitalist class assured by the sanction of law. Pharma, HMOs,
insurance companies are the beneficiaries of this massively fraudulent transfer
of wealth, not "illegal immigration."
Myth #4: Isn’t the Mexican under
my bed a drug-snorting father-rapist?
Nope. Undocumented workers are not
more likely to be incarcerated or criminals. Many knuckleheads will offer FAIR(!)
research to argue otherwise. Disingenuously, FAIR correlates the adult
populations in and out of prison to reveal higher criminality among illegals. If
FAIR had fairly compared low-income non-incarcerated with incarcerated
undocumented males who are of course poor, the claim of the report could not be
supported. A more accurate assessment of crime and immigration comes from the American Immigration
Law Foundation which shows that foreign-born high-school dropouts are
incarcerated at far lower rates than the corresponding native
population.
It is hardly surprising that low-income workers–all of whom
are forced to accept dismally low-paying jobs without benefits–sometimes commit
crimes.
Other "myths" including "problems" of cultural assimilation,
language acquisition, low-IQ, "reconquista" etc. are pursuits of implicit racism
deserving no response.
As for the Mexican under your bed, strike up a
conversation in poor Spanish, repeating the phrase: Ya se puede!