http://horus.vcsa.uci.edu/article.php?id=4585

Illegal Immigration Causes Exploitation

by: Editorial

If you spent your Spring Break in Southern California, you were doubtless confronted by a barrage of doomsday proclamations by arguers on both sides of the burgeoning illegal immigration debate.

On one hand, you have groups like the Minutemen, who claim that America is “being devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal immigrants.”

On the other hand, you have groups like El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano/a de Aztláºn, who say that efforts to clamp down on illegal immigration will “harm U.S. businesses, communities and families,” “put all Americans at risk” and “make everyone who comes to the U.S. to work subject not only to deportation but also imprisonment.”

Devouring and plundering? Harming communities and families? Putting all Americans at risk? It seems like we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

And while we wholeheartedly reject the hyperbole that Jim Gilchrist and friends are peddling, we believe that there are many valid reasons for liberals to oppose illegal immigration other than ignorance and racial bigotry.

Pro-illegal immigrant groups say that illegal immigrants are taking the jobs that citizens are unwilling to do, but if there is a preponderance of illegal immigrants working in unskilled, low-paying jobs, it is not because of an ethnically superior work ethic, but because their economic situation makes them easier to exploit.

In October 2003, Wal-Mart was busted for using 345 illegal immigrants as after-hours janitors, some of whom worked seven days a week without overtime pay or health insurance. Some were paid as little as $2 a day.

These conditions, however, must seem like paradise to the illegal immigrants working in the meat-processing industry, who literally risk their lives every day on the job.

“Blood, Sweat, and Fear,” a report last year by the group Human Rights Watch (hardly a collective of right-wing ideologues) catalogues human rights abuses in U.S. slaughterhouses. Injuries and deaths, in the form of loss of limbs, suffocation on poisonous gases, broken bones, beheadings and infections, are common, and the industry tries hard to cut costs by offering little pay and no benefits.

The report states, “All the abuses described in this report – failure to prevent serious workplace injury and illness, denial of compensation to injured workers, interference with workers’ freedom of association – are directly linked to the vulnerable immigration status of most workers in the industry and the willingness of employers to take advantage of that vulnerability.”

Simply put, illegal immigrants will not complain to the authorities and risk getting deported while their employers get a slap on the wrist.

And a constant influx of immigrants ensures that those who are already here are expendable, making efforts to improve working conditions next to impossible.

And if you think Mexicans will work for cheap, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

On a global scale, Mexico is not a poor country. Its gross domestic product is the 12th-highest in the world, and 10.1 percent of its citizens are living below the poverty line (the United States, to give some perspective, has an estimated 12 percent).

Although it is plagued by problems with distribution of wealth, there are billions of people worldwide who would love to do the same jobs for far less money.

If pro-illegal immigrant groups truly want to advocate an open-border policy and believe that the undercutting of American wages by illegal immigrants is a fabulous development, let’s at least be fair about it and sell our jobs to the absolute lowest bidder.

Certainly we can find someone from the Gaza Strip (where an estimated 81 percent of people live below the poverty level) to work for little more than the cost of their meals.

Speaking of people worse off than Mexicans, let’s talk for a moment about Mexico’s illegal immigration problem.

Not their emigration problem, but their immigration problem, as in people entering Mexico illegally.

In 2004, Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Migracion deported 188,000 illegal immigrants, mostly from South America.

Specifically, many immigrants come from Argentina, where 38.5 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

Some might see a bit of hypocrisy in the attitude of our friends from south of the border who seem to believe that illegal entry into a country is great, as long as they’re the ones benefiting from it.

No one is blaming immigrant workers for trying to make better lives for themselves and their families, which is why, as we have said before, we feel that criminalizing groups that provide emergency assistance to these people (regardless of their legal status) is abhorrent. We have nothing but respect for the tenacity of these immigrants who risk so much for so little.

That’s why we’re not advocating closing our borders entirely.

There are many Mexicans now entering the United States legally, and to them we say welcome. We wish them success and hope that they will enjoy the same rights and opportunities as all other citizens. We hope that they are successful at their jobs, protected by our labor laws and paid fair wages, and that their offspring will move on to successful professional careers, freeing up unskilled entry-level jobs for the next wave of immigrants.

But on such a large scale as now exists, illegal immigrants to the United States from Mexico are doing considerable harm to each other and to legal immigrants by undercutting wages and benefits.

Our first step should be to enforce existing immigration laws and tighten our borders. When we are able to control who is entering our country, then we can have a discussion about increasing immigration quotas, if that’s what needs to happen. But in the meantime, we must not reward malfeasance with amnesty.

We conclude with a message to the short-sighted, self-serving neo-liberals who have sacrificed their traditional values just to appear politically correct or to appeal to the elusive Latino voter. If your new civil rights movement (as some have called it) advocates adopting a policy of deliberate negligence in patrolling our borders in order to allow the rich to get richer off of the blood (literally, in the case of the meat packers) of exploited working-class minorities, count us out.