A Plan for Immigration Reform

The right-wingnuttery is getting intense. Senator John Kyl, R-Ariz., has joined Senator Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., in a call for hearings on repealing the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution. His intent is to deny citizenship to the children of people who have immigrated to the U.S. illegally. Here’s the relevant section:

Amendment XIV

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2 deals with proportional representation, eliminating the counting of slaves as 2/3 of a person. Section 3 prevents former rebels from holding elected office. Section 4 authorizes public debt for paying the bounties and pensions of Unions soldiers, but renders invalid and illegal claims against the government by former slave owners for the loss of slaves.

That is a sizeable baby going out the window with the bathwater. Senator Kyle would bring us back to a pre-Civil War situation, with the states free to abridge our rights and pitch out due process. We might even get compensation claims from the descendants of slave owners. The main intent of the 14^th Amendment was to prevent the oppression and disenfranchisement of former slaves by southern states. Jim Crow, here we come.

The GOP joins the conservative wing of the Supreme Court in having no constitutional theory beyond expediency. Like the Roberts majority, the far right claims to follow constitutional originalism, a kind of ouija-board mind-reading of the founding fathers. They rail against their opponents for failing to uphold the constitution. Somehow I doubt that Senator Kyle will get any friendly fire from the GOP on this.

So what is to be done? The present immigration laws don’t work, except for big agribusiness and other employers looking for cheap, docile labor. Here are six basic ideas. Let me preface all of them by noting that we’ll need campaign finance reform first. Too many big donors are making too much money off the present situation.

1. Stop supporting wretched corrupt governments in Mexico and Central America. This has been our policy for a couple of centuries, intervening directly when democracy glimmers on the horizon. We have good relations with the Calderon administration in Mexico, despite video footage from the last election of Calderon supporters literally stuffing ballots into ballot boxes by the fistful, and supposedly secure ballot warehouses standing open and looted. Mexican citizens would get a better economic chance at home if they were actually represented by their government.

2. Change the way we subsidize corn production. Before the 1970’s we used price supports. When there was a good year and high production, corn prices would be forced down by the glut. The U.S. government would buy corn at a price that gave farmers a small profit margin. Later, in a bad year, the government would sell that corn at a somewhat higher price, making some money but damping down the shortage induced increase. This kept corn prices in a band that was profitable for the farmers but not ruinous for consumers.

In the mid 1970’s Earl Butz, then Secretary of Agribusiness, I mean Agriculture, decided (on behalf of his corporate sponsors) that we should have cheap corn. He pushed through a change in the law so that the government simply paid farmers some dollar amount per bushel. Farmers started planting every spare acre with corn, and the price plummeted. We got cheap corn, and with it, cheap chicken, pork, and beef from concentrated animal feeding operations. By which I mean a thousand cattle crammed in a pen, up to their shins in shit, pumped full of antibiotics.

This cheap corn made its way south of the border and destroyed the unsubsidized indigenous corn farmers, along with the local economies that depended upon them. Faced with a choice between abject poverty at home and not-quite-so-abject poverty in the U.S., people headed north.

If we went back to price supports the price of a bag of corn chips or a corn-syrup-sweetened soda would go up slightly, the price of a burger would go up somewhat more, and the farm economies of Mexico and Central America would have a chance to recover. People don’t leave their homes for a dangerous cross border journey and wretched jobs in a hostile country unless they have run out of options at home. Give them half a chance to make a living and they will stay south of the border.

3. Get the hell out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Aside from the whole concept of free trade being an oxymoronic lie, it hasn’t done ordinary people any good. Decent U.S. jobs have become crappy Mexican jobs. Wages have dropped on both sides of the border. Subsidized U.S. grain has bankrupted Mexican farmers. It’s really the North American Corporate Behemoths Stomping on Ordinary People Act (NACBSOPA?) and it should die.

4. Legalize the possession and cultivation of small amounts of marijuana, as California may do with Proposition 19. Mexican drug gangs get 60% of their income from marijuana smuggling. Cutting off that money would go a long way towards promoting good governance and public safety in Mexico. Side benefit: freeing up huge numbers of police up here to pursue violent criminals.

5. This one is just the perversely humorous side of me coming out. Offer amnesty and citizenship to the first three illegal immigrants who turn in an employer for employing them. Lay in some big fines and some jail time for employing illegal immigrants. Watch the jobs dry up.

6. But seriously, there are somewhere between 11 and 14 million illegal immigrants living and working in the U.S. That’s one out of thirty of us. They have become an integral part of the economy. They have a lower crime rate than the rest of us. They are the reason that you don’t need a home equity loan to shop for produce. They are also putting downward pressure on wages and working conditions, because they can’t ask for better.

Yes, I’m talking amnesty. You want amnesty for your everyday crimes, and they want it for their paperwork crime. Picking our lettuce and gutting our chickens are not crimes in and of themselves. Give them a path to a work visa, if not citizenship. Then they will be subject to minimum wage laws and workplace safety laws, as well as unionization, making them less appealing to employers. It’s a strange paradox: offering them the opportunity to work here legally will reduce the opportunities for them to do so.

A hundred years ago, my ancestors were the bad guys. There were mass produced signs saying “Help Wanted – Irish Need Not Apply.” My people were the dirty, drunken, foreign, lazy, disease-ridden, fast breeding masses that threatened to overwhelm the country. As were the Italians, the Spanish, the Poles, the Hungarians, and everyone else from the slums and fields of Europe. It’s always the latest immigrants who get reviled by the established immigrants, their own history glorified. Let’s get over it and deal with the underlying reasons for the real problems.

Comments

[Little Pima]

Great to see you speaking out for comprehensive immigration reform!

With huge and rising unemployment, what a perfect time to legalize a vast number of new people low in skills and high in need. That’s a super idea.

Also, with our huge budget deficits putting our economy on the brink of a disaster a la Greece, legalizing millions more unskilled and uneducated people and giving them immediate eligibility to receive our huge range of government social services is really smart (especially since almost all illegals will be among the 40% of people who pay no federal income taxes at all. Adding $120B to the deficit that is about to put us into a death spiral--that's really thinking.

Also how cool that they will become eligible to bring in their children, uncles, nieces, parents, etc. Plenty of these folks need kidney transplants and bypass surgery and so forth––we can pay for all that stuff too!

Also, it will be swell that our schools–already sinking in international comparisons–will have lots more problem cases to challenge them! That'll really show the Chinese, who are turning out millions of smart engineering and computer science majors. We'll compete in the 21st century with a new army of unskilled immigrants who don't speak our language or, in many cases, even know how to turn on computers, much less program them.

Mass immigration of unskilled people has already approximately *doubled* our poverty rate–why stop there?

References: http://www.fairus.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=23198&security=1601&news_iv_ctrl=1741

Yes, thanks for really putting on your thinking cap and figuring out how to help your country make a sensible policy decision! What a stimulating blog you run.

[Minor Heretic]

You pegged my snarkmeter there, Little Pima. Where to start?

First, please reread the post. My primary points (1-4 out of 6) are ideas on making these people's home countries more physically safe and economically viable so they will stay home. Point number 5 is a measure to ensure that people who employ illegal immigrants get caught and truly penalized. Who would do it if they knew that the first three illegals in the door would put them in jail?

Point number 6, which has triggered a sarcasplosion from you, makes the connection between lack of documentation and employability. If these people were here legally they would be far less desirable to employers, who would have to pay them properly and abide by OSHA rules. The word will get back over the border: "Now that they have to pay us real money they won't hire us." I'll be interested to see how many U.S. citizens are actually desperate enough to labor in the fields for minimum wage. Agribusiness will probably have to suck it up and start paying real money for labor, Mexican or American.

Work visas wouldn't necessarily grant them any government benefits or make them eligible to bring in relatives. We could design a work visa program any way we like. It could be "Lose your job and back you go," and "U.S. citizens get hiring priority."

One thing I failed to note is that they presently subsidize our Social Security Trust Fund with about $7 billion annually. Employers list their fake S.S. numbers so they pay in without any chance of ever collecting. Same for worker's compensation and unemployment taxes. We could make a payment in lieu of taxes part of the work visa requirement and still get a tax bite out of them.

But back to my main points: We need to stop hurting their countries with our political, agricultural, and trade policies so they can prosper at home.

Please also read my "Rules for Commenting" page and if you comment in the future try for less heat and more light.