Care about exploitation? Stem illegal immigration
by Stephen Steinlight
August 28, 2008

The immigration raid on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, the largest kosher plant in the country, caught most American Jews completely off guard.

Since the raid in May, which resulted in the arrest of nearly 400 illegal workers, serious allegations have emerged against the plant, which is owned by the Brooklyn-based Rubashkin family. Those allegations include inhumane working conditions, egregious violations of child-labor laws, sexual harassment of female workers, and multiple workplace safety infractions.

Lost in the controversy over Agriprocessors is a discussion in the Jewish community of sensible immigration policies.

Avoiding that discourse is tantamount to complicity in what transpired in Postville, and ignoring the problem of illegal immigration virtually guarantees that Agriprocessors’ despicable practices will be repeated elsewhere.

Most Jews have responded admirably to the Agriprocessors news by condemning worker exploitation and advocating ethical kashrut practices. But conspicuous by its absence is outrage over violations of U.S. law and sovereignty by illegal aliens — the precipitating factor in the ensuing events.

Rendered myopic by political correctness and uninformed sentimentality about immigration, many in the Jewish community have failed to recognize that the Agriprocessors nightmare is an inevitable consequence of massive immigration by the unskilled and uneducated poor — legal and illegal — into a knowledge-based, postindustrial society.

When many of our parents and grandparents came to these shores during the great waves of European immigration, the American industrial colossus needed semiskilled and unskilled workers to fill millions of manufacturing jobs, presenting opportunities for upward social mobility. Millions of small farmers were needed to feed this country’s soaring population, and there was an empty continent to fill.

But all that is history.

We don’t have a plethora of manufacturing jobs anymore, we don’t suffer from under-population, and we no longer need unskilled immigrants. We have 73 million adult Americans with only a high school education, and that’s more than enough unskilled labor. With cheap immigrant labor flooding the market, millions of Americans are unemployed, and many have despaired about finding work.

Massive immigration has disastrous consequences for America’s most vulnerable: the unemployed, partially employed, working poor, recent legal immigrants, African-Americans, and elderly working populations. Legalization will sanction and perpetuate this assault on struggling Americans by flooding the workforce with more cheap labor.

A 1997 study by the American Academy of Sciences found that the cheap labor of illegal aliens and poor immigrants caused a 44 percent decrease in wages among the poorest Americans from 1980 to 1994.

The immigration policy embraced by the Jewish establishment is disastrous for America. It condones illegal immigration. That doesn’t improve working conditions for immigrants but has brutal consequences for struggling Americans.

The Jewish establishment endorses the Bush administration’s immigration policy, which seeks to create a huge, permanent legal underclass of impoverished immigrants that will drive down wages and worsen working conditions for all Americans.

Progressive Jews should oppose returning American capitalism to the Dark Ages.

Jewish agencies once distinguished between supporting generous legal immigration as opposed to illegal immigration. But when the leading lobby for increasing immigration, the National Immigration Forum, erased that line, Jewish member organizations abjectly surrendered.

The Jewish establishment’s hypocritical approach undermines the rule of law. Advocates of legalization argue that illegal immigrants are easily exploited and that unscrupulous employers prefer them for that reason.

Legalization, however, is not the cure. The mantra about “bringing them out of the shadowsâ€