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

[technocowboy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm with you. "Undocumented", for the most part, means "illegal". People who are here illegally get no rights. If they had documentation to get here, then fine, they can have the same rights every other person in the country legally has. People who seem to think that everyone in the world has the same rights need to wake up.

[xleste.livejournal.com]

This is one of those places where my humanitarian side conflicts with my b&w 'right' vs 'wrong' side. On the one hand, illegal immigration is an issue because our current systems don't really bear the cost of them (education, healthcare, etc.) and a government ought to have say in who it admits within its borders. I firmly believe that. On the other, I'm familiar with the desperation of poverty and the utter lack of hope in the home countries illegal immigrants can hail from, conditions that are insanely degrading and where the most basic tenets of human decency don't exist. That desperation leads them to America which is still the promised land. My parents came here with $50 in their pockets, and one of my cousins back in the Philippines is trying to scrape a living together selling eggs. I don't know. I don't have any clarity on this issue.

[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.

[evilmagnus]

It's thorny.

First, there's the term. "undocumented worker". It's an attempt by certain lobbies to steer the conversation away from "illegal immigration", which is what we're talking about. Then there's the specific quote:

"They have a right to seek employement, and employers have a right to hire them."

Whilst I have tremendous sympathy for people who want to come to the US to seek a better life - having done it myself - that's just flat-out wrong. You have no legal right to break the law, either as an employee or an employer. Great for you if you can get away with it, but, like speeding tickets, if yo get caught, take your licks and don't complain.

Yet it's also completely true that the grey economy is vital to US agriculture and, to a lesser extent, the service industry. It's massively hypocritical to bemoan illegal immigrants yet not actually make genuine effort to deal with the issue through enforcement - especially not when your pockets are being lined by Agribusiness.

...that said, anti-immigration, pro-agribusiness concerns are kinda screwed. If Immigration law was enforced, they'd run out of labor. If the guest worker program was enforced, they'd face significant cost increases and would pay more taxes. It's in their best interests, therefore, to prolong the status quo at the expense of the undocumented worker/illegal immigrants.

So, yeah. In conclusion, guest worker program good for government, bad for the people who lobby the government, and kinda a PITA for folks who are doing just fine at the moment being undocumented.

[evilmagnus]

Well, they have certain statutory rights in Immigration Court, but yeah, broadly speaking, they certainly /don't/ get the right to legally work. :-)

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

Like others on this page, as well as most USAmericans, I expect, I don't have what I feel is a "right" answer, just more questions.

Laws are there for a reason, and people shouldn't break them, and shouldn't be rewarded for doing so. Employers who hire illegal immigrants knowingly, or look the other way if someone has fake papers, are definitely part of the problem. In certain industries where illegal workers are common, those who play by the book are probably paying too much for labor and will get priced out of the market by less-than-fair competition.

Unfortunately, UsAmericans still want our cheap goods, and we will buy from the lowest bidder, happily buy ridiculously cheap produce, etc. Not only do we want the best deal, we really don't care if there's illegal labor making it or bringing it to us. We can't be bothered to check, anyway. That means no penalties for those employers breaking the rules, who can't be shunned or shamed into complying with the law.

This gets to my other concern, which is that the laws are rarely and selectively enforced, which means instead of being effective at stopping the illegal behavior we want to stop, it's instead just punitive and can be used to control and coerce people to work in crappy or even dangerous conditions. If someone complains about unfair or unsafe practices, they can simply be deported, and chances are the next guy to come along won't complain. It's almost like we're outsourcing those jobs to someone in a third-world country but we still get our produce picked here and our hotel rooms cleaned.

I think there's a large segment of business owners who like this shadow-system, where they can claim they're following the law and as long as the workers go to the *good* forgery guy, they can always say later that they were fooled. Yeah, um, my bad, but it looked real at the time. What else should we have done?

Now back to the top where I said "There's a reason for the laws we have" -- what might that reason be? Protectionism, plain and simple. Our country is the richest in the world and we don't want to share. Is that our "right" for having been born, as you say, into Privilege (white or not)? Right or wrong, we protect our borders and repel all boarders for the sake of keeping our riches to ourselves. At least, nominally we do. Practically speaking, someone has to pick the cabbage, and we want it done for less than a poverty-level wage, if you please. As long as the people doing the picking can be controlled and don't get to live in our suburbs, everything must be working OK, right?

Anyway, the liberal/socialist in me would like to see not only a fair wage paid to everyone, but more effort made to "share the wealth" with other countries. Maybe not to the point of allowing totally unchecked immigration with no limits, but I think we should at least be mindful of how crappy the conditions are in other parts of the world... to the extent that people can come here (illegally or not) and live in what we would consider abject poverty, and still be better off than at home AND have enough extra to SEND some money home.

[jholloway.livejournal.com]

Illegal immigration is vital to some sectors of the economy. It's "vital" in the sense that it allows employers to pay their employees less, deny them benefits, make them work in harsh or dangerous conditions, and so on, because they have no one to complain to.

"Guest worker" programs are pretty lame -- you just wind up with people living in the country for a long time who know they can't stay. They send as much money as they can out of the country, and they don't invest here, because they know they're not welcome. On the other hand, at least people here under that kind of visa have some kind of protection under the law.

But we're certainly not willing to tolerate a flood of legal immigration from Central America. Why is that, I wonder? Can you think of any possible reasons?

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

ut we're certainly not willing to tolerate a flood of legal immigration from Central America. Why is that, I wonder? Can you think of any possible reasons?
[SPARKY] You're... making one of your little 'points' again, aren't you? [/SPARKY]

[handworn.livejournal.com]

As a moderate Democrat, I nevertheless find myself probably as cynical about this as many on your wing of the spectrum: business owners are saying they should be allowed to stay because it would be a pain in the butt to replace them all, they'd have to pay the replacements more, and charge more to the customer, who might walk away from the deal.

Businesses love predictability above all, which the whole uproar about undocumented workers threatens. I suppose the UNITE guy is being much the same way.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

What part of "illegal" do these [gay, illegal] people who want to [work, get married] not understand?

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, I understand the desire to change a law that you think is bad and misformed. But I think that working to change the law by breaking it and trying not to get caught is not the most optimal method. I'm not certain exactly how I would work to try and get the law changed from, say, Ireland or Laos or Mexico, however.