A House Divided
Lock ‘em up, says the Right.
Welcome them with (somewhat) open arms, says the Left.
Appeals to law simply don’t work.
Current and future laws can’t deal handle the issue of 11 million productive aliens who are in the country illegally.
To understand the problem, if not its solution, we have to look beyond laws to politics, economics, and history.
There is widespread understanding that employers’ addiction to cheap labor is at the heart of the immigrant issue.
Greed and the fear of being uncompetitive — and the absence of severe penalties for employers — encourage employers to integrate undocumented immigrants into their workforce, if not into society.
But there is a way to keep cheap immigrant labor out of America’s businesses and factories that has nothing to do with draconian laws, oppressive enforcement, and a nationwide network of snitches.
It’s called labor unions.
If employer abuses were not only checked by federal policy but also by the self-interest of pervasive, militant unions eager to maintain a legally protected, high wage workforce, illegal immigrant labor would be effectively marginalized.
As you’ve noticed, we don’t have a powerful labor union movement in the United States anymore.
Workers’ right to decent wages free from the depressing influence of illegal labor isn’t respected in this country.
Instead, we hear a lot about the rights of employers to remain competitive on the backs of labor, and the rights of consumers for cheap products.
We have chosen an economic structure based on weak labor, opportunistic business, and consumers indifferent anything beyond the price of lettuce and tube socks.
Now the interesting historical parallel comes in here:
146 years ago, the southern states decided that the social and economic costs of emancipating the slaves were unacceptable.
The Civil War was the result.
America’s empire has always been addicted to the kick of cheap labor extorted from legally helpless groups.
Maybe we owe our way of life — that way of life the terrorists supposedly hate, and that our fighting men and women are supposedly dying to defend — to cheap slave labor and its modern adjunct, illegal immigrant labor. Maybe not. We can leave that question to the philosophers and the economists.
But since the beginning of the Republic, private fortune, if not the public good, has relied on artificially cheap and legally and politically disenfranchised labor.
And private interest has used law, and when that didn’t work, disregard of the laws, to keep that labor — and all labor — divided, helpless, and inexpensive.
Slaves in 1860, illegal immigrants in 2006.
Legalizing illegal immigrants only makes sense if they are brought under the umbrella of the labor unions, and become economically interested in excluding future illegal labor.
But don’t expect policymakers, with their myopic focus on employers and disregard for the rights of labor, to accept it.
That would require a new social contract that would accept that the rights of working people to higher wages and unions as an acceptable social cost of an enlightened and rational policy.
Just as in 1860, it would have required America to accept that freeing the slaves and giving them power to organize politically and economically, with the enormous social and economic upheaval it would have meant, would have been not only the right, but the historically smart and forward-looking thing to do.
Instead, we got a civil war, pro forma emancipation and half-assed reconstruction, and the mechanism of segregation that entrenched the old economics and the old power structure for over 100 years after its official legal basis was overthrown.
Now it looks like any so-called solution to the immigrant problem will simply be a re-run of the plight of African-Americans at the end of the civil war, with priority given to protecting the entrenched interests of people with money to preserve a self-serving definition of stability, instead of a fundamental legal integration of illegal immigrants into the society to which they already belong.
If we are to absorb illegal immigrants and confront the real economy and society their under-compensated labor currently underpins, the power structure would change.
Unions would become more powerful. The rights of employers to exploit workers would become curtailed. And the politicians and businessmen who are trying to make careers ripping off workers and pissing on illegal immigrants would find themselves sidelined.
That’s what the debate and the marches are about.
A pattern of abuse of labor that has become untenable, and a power structure that fears the loss of its unearned privilege to exploit cheap and defenseless labor.
It’s more complicated than a civil war.
It’s capital against labor. It’s white vs. Latino. Privilege vs. justice.
And America vs. history and a pattern of abuse and advantage it is determined to ignore.
A house divided, indeed.
Copyright 2006 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
