Immigration, rallies and elections
Saturday, Jun 24, 2006

By Doug Thompson

Election day will come, and it won't matter how many people rallied in the park.

Springdale saw 5,000 people in the park in April. Another large rally for immigrants' rights took place in May. Then a couple of months passed. Thursday, Republican party nominee for governor Asa Hutchinson came to Springdale to announce how he'd curb illegal immigration.

Hutchinson figures that most people who vote will take a different view than those who rally.

He may have a point. The spring rallies were impressive. However voter registration drives and economic boycotts associated with them sputtered.

The opposing camp has the opposite problem. Attempts to organize the tougher enforcement crowd have been chaotic and haphazard. Counter-demonstrations to the Springdale pro-immigrant rallies, for instance, had crowds numbering in the dozens.

However, the enforcement side appears to have underlying strength at the ballot box. If they didn't, Congress wouldn't be fighting over this issue and Hutchinson wouldn't have had that news conference.

The enforcement side wants to avoid being tagged with racist motives. That will be a problem if outspoken illegal-immigration opponents continue to insult immigrants as people who just want to milk social services. If a generalization has to be made, the more accurate one is that immigrants trekked across a continent to work very hard for a portion of the otherwise prevailing wage.

Our construction workers are not losing jobs to people who are not willing to work. It doesn't matter how low the wage is if the job doesn't get done. In addition, if all I wanted to do was sponge, I'd sponge somewhere with a beach.

On the other hand, far too many people dismiss all immigration concerns as bigotry. Suppose this near-endless supply of productive, low-wage labor was pouring forth from Canada. Suppose the immigrants consisted of Caucasians who could speak English better than I do. The supply-and-demand effect on wages would be the same. So would the reaction of many Arkansan voters. This is a pocketbook issue to people in the building trades and business owners who are trying to obey the law, competing against those who don't. Our ancestors had much the same situation in the mid-1800s with Irish immigrants.

Tougher laws in Arkansas won't slow immigration to the United States but could divert it to other states. That's victory enough for many. My problem is this: There is no way to be tough on immigrants who arrived today and not be tough on immigrants who arrived years ago.

The people who arrived years ago broke our laws too. However, we showed little interest in enforcing our laws until this election year. Even the most ardent anti-immigration forces acknowledge that. It's a sore point with them.

To exploit these immigrants' labor for years, and then turn them out is nothing but a bait and switch. This is especially bad because immigrants will continue to slip over the border to take the vacated jobs.

I prefer the immigrant who comes here, buys a house and wants to stay out of trouble to a string of semi-fugitives who want to make as much money in as little time as possible, by whatever means possible.

Therefore, I can't agree with tougher enforcement until and unless the federal government grants amnesty to people already here. Having those who get the amnesty pay back taxes and fines and so forth is fine.

People will argue that amnesty won't work, that it just encourages people to come here. I'll argue that granting or not granting an amnesty won't matter much to immigrants. People immigrate here for a job.

Until there are jobs in Mexico or we build a wall that works - something I believe to be impossible - illegal immigrants will continue to come. Grant the amnesty to those who are building a life. Don't grant the amnesty to newcomers, convicts or people who try to cheat the system. Then the tougher laws might work