Si me voy

[cyrano]

I am once again exposing my White Privelege. Because I need somebody to explain in small words something about the immigration issue. I understand why many in labor feel that the guest worker plan is a bad one--the idea that a corporation can basically blackmail employees by threatening to fire them and get them deported if they do anything inconvenient. But in an article I read today, UNITE HERE president Bruce Raynor says "There are 12 million undocumented people living here, who are important to the economy." So far, so good. I understand that. "They have a right to seek employement, and employers have a right to hire them." This is where I get confused. 'Undocumented' often means that they're in the country illegally, which I think would restrict some of their rights.
I don't understand the idea that somebody has gained entry to the country by breaking the law and therefore should be allowed to stay because they're already here. As a left wing socialist, I feel like I'm missing something.

Comments

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

I also have mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it totally breaks the system to have unregulated immigration. We're turning away people in droves, while others sneak in, and that's not fair.

On the other hand, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. If they think they can have a better life here, even though they are not citizens, isn't it immoral and unamerican to deny them their pursuit of happiness?

And, if we have work for them, isn't the system broken if we can't legally get them in? They'd be much better off with legal green cards working minimum wage, with legal options.

If we really want to fix this, it's a two pronged approach. It's already very attractive for the illegal immigrants to come anyway, and we have a really hard time changing that. Instead, you need to make it unattractive for companies to employ people without proper paperwork, probably to the "you'll be going out of business now, with the owners doing some jail time" level. And simultaneously, make it much easier for companies to support low-wage legal immigrant work. This is really what's good for the immigrants, and lets us have some amount of control back of our borders.

On the other, other hand - the republican stance lately on immigration is a giant gift of the Hispanic vote to the Democratic Party, and I'm inclined on that front to let them dig their own grave. Hispanics were breaking more and more to their side, and they just threw all that away.

It's also very important to keep the whole thing separate from racism. Particularly in California, where many Hispanic families settled there when it was still part of Mexico. Just because someone speaks Spanish doesn't mean they're illegal or unamerican, and that's probably a more important ethic than anything else about the issue.

This is one of the few issues that I think Bush has a thought-out, defensible policy on, actually, and it's very ironic to see his party take a rare break from him on it. Lock-step, except when he starts talking sense. Sigh.