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The High Cost Of Cheap Labor: The power brokers of corporate America don't want to see any serious attempts to stop illegal immigration
By Robert Emmons
For The Register-Guard
Published: Sunday, May 7, 2006

Mention stopping illegal immigration in some circles and risk being labeled a racist or demagogue. After all, we're a nation of immigrants, the righteous exclaim, by which is meant of course us second-comers, us Euro-refugees.

All of it, though, all the name-calling and accusations and indignation, serves as a red herring leading us away from a clear look at the true costs of illegal aliens in this country.

No serious effort has been made to stop illegal entry from Mexico because the power brokers of corporate America and Mexico know a good deal when it crosses the border. American industry profits off the backs of slave labor, while Mexico passes its overpopulation, social services needs and environmental degradation to the United States.

Payback, perhaps. Karma. Just ask the American Indians.

With curious, if wary, good faith, the original Americans may have welcomed the first boatload of strangers. But then the ships continued to land, bearing more gifts of guns, germs and steel.

Survivors of the first inhabitants are still hanging on in reservations here and there or hybridized among the immigrant masses. Assimilation, we Euro-Americans call it.

After guns, germs, steel and government land grants unsettled the natives and resettled the restless pioneer, the frontier was adjusted to property lines and borders. And as the ships from abroad kept unloading their human cargo, former immigrants - neo-natives - began to realize that their finite resources could not support infinite immigration. Quotas were imposed, and tests were required for citizenship.

Too late. Cheap labor had become as addictive to American free enterprise as tobacco. Legal immigrants were cheap, but illegal aliens were cheaper.

Desperately destitute, the southern border-crosser - if she survived the heat - sweated blood for a pittance in the promised land and often was cast out without a paycheck. So it went; so it goes. Exploitation by any other name.

Hispanic workers suffer exploitation at home because of overpopulation and lack of education, and are exploited by American corporations in league with Mexican politicians willing to sacrifice citizens and the environment for their share of the easy money. Waiting for the refugees on this side of the border are corporations, perhaps the same corporations doing business in Mexico, with the same cynical ethic, and social services stretched to the breaking point.

It's worth noting that United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez strongly opposed illegal immigration because he understood that illegal workers threaten both the number and the wages of jobs available to documented workers.

In recent Register-Guard columns, Dennis Shine and Jim Hale have voiced their support for the corporate trade in desperation. Against bills in the House and Senate that would penalize aliens and those who hire them, Shine poses the threat of higher food prices. His logic appears to be that an unlimited supply of cheap labor is good for the growers, good for consumers and, therefore, good economics. Cheap labor, cheap food.

Hale, a former Lane County Republican Party chairman, struts his pedigree as the descendant of Oregon pioneers, that is, immigrants, who have "been welcoming newcomers to Lane County for 150 years." According to Hale, an illegal immigrant is indistinguishable from a legal one, and anyone not as welcoming as he says his family is, is just plain selfish and bigoted.

At the very least, Hale says, the Republican Party ought to roll out the red carpet because Hispanics have "entrepreneurial spirit. ... They are natural Republicans."

Leaving aside the stereotyping implicit in that conclusion, Hale may be offering us more truth than he intends. For modern-day Republicans have shown themselves to be particularly adept at the "entrepreneurial spirit" at the heart of illegal immigration - the callous exploitation of individuals and their culture for profit.

In the economy according to Hale, aliens should be encouraged to learn from the master how to do unto others as he has done to them. Because those who've learned that lesson "helped George W. Bush to win."

While Shine considers illegal immigration good economics, Hale considers cheap labor a good investment in Republican virtue. Both echo a national outcry of indignation and accusation at any suggestion or proposal to repair a corrupt system and to stop an unsustainable increase in population.

How cheap, then, is the labor upon which this economy depends? We may begin to answer that by taking a look at agribusiness in Fresno County, where Shine taught economics.

On vast plantations in central California, where commodities such as fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown for markets thousands of miles from the source, there's plenty of sun, less water. In fact, water use on the scale of food production in California comes at a tremendous cost to the aquifer, to rivers, to streams, to wetlands and likely to future inhabitants.

Moreover, to feed a nation instead of a village, growers resort to massive applications of expensive herbicides that continue to build up in increasingly depleted soils and in runoff to waterways. They build up in wildlife unavoidably exposed to them and in human bodies as well.

How many migrant workers will end up cheated not only by unscrupulous growers, but also by cancers resulting from herbicide exposure? How many consumers in New York, in Miami, in Seattle, are risking their health by eating chemically grown "cheap" food, food the genesis of which they are completely ignorant of?

By the time an orange from Im- perial Valley in California reaches a table in Seattle, it's been planted, watered, fertilized, sprayed, picked, artificially colored and crated by migrant workers. Then it's transported a thousand miles fueled by a polluting resource, the decreasing supply and increasing cost of which threatens not only California agribusiness but the world economy.

It should go without saying that the price of that orange in the supermarket does not reflect the actual environmental and economic costs of production, transportation and waste.

Nor does it reflect social costs. All the millions of aliens - and their families - reported to be living and working in this country illegally require housing, schools, health care, transportation and food. Even if the illegal worker chooses to pay them, the taxes from his meager wage do not begin to cover the costs of support services.

In fact, California's addiction to "cheap" illegal labor is bankrupting the state. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates the cost of health care, education and incarceration of illegal aliens at $10.5 billion per year. They also depress wages for all American citizens by an estimated $200 billion. Granting aliens legal status would make accessible to them more services, the cost of which would not be covered by taxes from their largely low-paying jobs.

Are the recipients of this largesse decent, hardworking folks? Doubtless, most of them are. Indeed, because they are hardworking and because they are many and desperate, they've been readily exploited by corporatism on both sides of the border. Its perpetrators, full of entrepreneurial spirit, must be smiling as their defenders spout superficial economics and point fingers at those who dare to suggest that illegal also means corrupt.

The high cost of cheap labor is ecologically, economically and ethically unsustainable.