Greetings,
I couldn't resist the opportinity of sharing this with you. The race to
the bottom (of the physical resource barrel) continues on merry unison.
The last 25 lines or so beginning "Economics should not..." get right to
the point.
Steve
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Labor Joins the Immigration Charade
By James O. Goldsborough
The San Diego Union Tribune, February 28, 2000
The American labor movement, in a complete reversal of policy, is urging
a
blanket amnesty for all illegal immigrants. The call was made by the
AFL-CIO's executive council at a meeting in New Orleans.
It's a good thing the AFL-CIO wasn't meeting in California.
Consider the absurdity of the proposal:
The nation will spend nearly $5 billion this year on the Immigration and
Naturalization Service to stop illegal immigration. In addition, we are
adding $90 million to the Border Patrol budget to hire another 430
agents,
bringing to nearly 8,500 the number of agents on the borders, a figure
that
has doubled in five years.
The AFL-CIO would have us reward the people who have slipped by the INS
and
the Border Patrol. Result: We would have 4 million to 5 million
undocumented
workers with union cards but no green cards.
This is a radical turnabout for labor, which, unlike Congress and the
U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, has long and consistently opposed illegal
immigration.
For labor, undocumented workers have taken jobs from legal workers,
depressed
wages, weakened the union movement and created a black market work
force.
Labor is right about that. In California, undocumented farm workers have
badly weakened the United Farm Workers, for example, which three decades
ago
had 80,000 members under contracts. Today, even as the state has
proclaimed
Cesar Chavez Day (March 31) an official holiday, the UFW is but a shadow
of
what it once was.
The AFL-CIO turnaround is easily explained. With millions of
undocumented
workers present and showing no signs of going home, let's organize them,
says
the union.
The potential for organizing undocumented immigrants, bringing their
wages
and benefits up to AFL-CIO standards, is considerable. In a recent study
for
RAND, immigration analysts Georges Vernez and Kevin McCarthy reported
that
earnings for legal immigrants were 50 percent less than for U.S.-born
workers, with the difference widening. Undocumented workers earn even
less.
Labor now has joined Congress and industry in the great immigration
charade.
Congress denies the INS the power to inspect field sites, making it
impossible to find illegal farm workers. Further, because Congress has
never
passed a workers' ID law, without which illegal workers can't be
identified,
the INS last year abandoned industry work-site inspections. The policy
of
employers' sanctions has been dropped.
Immigration policy today is driven by economics, not by law or social
values.
We should have great sympathy for the INS, striving to do its job even
as
Congress, business and now big labor wink at each other. Even the
venerable
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan supports immigration (which depresses wages
and
holds down inflation), and, like the others, doesn't worry whether it is
legal or illegal.
The argument for open borders and free immigration made by people like
House
Majority Leader Dick Armey (and indirectly by Greenspan), has become
unofficial policy. They argue that expansion is served by downward
pressure
on wages exerted by new immigrants, legal or illegal.
So why complain? Can Congress, business, Greenspan, Armey and now the
AFL-CIO
all be wrong? New workers, they argue, depress wages, increase profits,
fight
inflation and pay taxes.
This is a hard subject. The Mexican workers in California who trim
hedges,
mow lawns and pick strawberries do good work, legal or illegal. They are
as
good people as the rest of us.
My objection is to the hypocrisy of our policy. We wink at the laws
today,
then turn against the immigrants at the first sign of recession.
Proposition
187 was a disgrace because it was California's attempt legally and
institutionally to discriminate against people we had willingly hired.
No
wonder the courts threw it out.
Congress deceives the nation. It pretends we have a tough immigration
policy,
when real policy is made with little winks and nods. When voter outrage
gets
too high, as during the 1991 recession, Congress fatuously provides more
money to the INS, but never provides the tools -- such as workers' ID
cards
-- with which illegal immigration might be stopped.
Economics should not be the only determinant of immigration policy.
If economics alone determined community policy, all cities would look
like
Houston, with no zoning, or Los Angeles, where zoning came too late.
If economics alone determined industrial policy, we would have no
anti-pollution laws, no clean air and water laws, no endangered species
laws;
anthracite coal would still belch into the skies, cars would still get
10
miles to the gallon and tobacco companies would still buy our
politicians.
So why allow economics alone to set immigration policy? Immigration
should
take into account communities, resources, pollution, population,
poverty,
infrastructure, schools, transportation. It should consider both the
long and
short terms. It should bear in mind that while new workers are useful in
a
boom, they are the first to lose jobs in a downturn.
The downturn will come. The current boom already defies the Phillips
Curve
and Milton Friedman's natural rate of unemployment, which both show full
employment leading to inflation, killing expansion. We have been at full
employment for more than a year.
So let's not be too hard on the AFL-CIO. It held out longer than anyone
else
for sensible policy and only threw in the towel when it realized the
game was
rigged.
I wonder what song the union will sing when the recession comes, as it
will,
and the new members with no green cards are on the street. As the song
says
-- will you still mind?
Goldsborough can be reached via e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
