Collins: Immigration dilemma not going away

By WILLIAM A. COLLINS
Columnist
Published: Wednesday, June 3, 2009 12:35 PM MDT
Illegal immigration, fueled by desperation back home, is common and risky the world over. Senegalese and Nigerians die in open boats heading for the Canary Islands. Haitians do the same en route to Puerto Rico. Mauritanians likewise perish aiming for Italy. And it’s no picnic even when they arrive safely. Abuse and death await Tajiks in Russia, Zimbabweans in South Africa, and Pakistanis in London.

Rewards, however, are alluring. While citizens in receiving countries may respond brutally to foreign competitors angling for their jobs, employers love them. There is nothing like cheap, vulnerable labor to increase profits. Thus, sweatshop and plantation owners everywhere become natural allies of human rights activists in seeking amnesty for the undocumented.

If this sounds to you a lot like the United States, you win. We’re little different from the rest of the world in this age-old dilemma, and in some ways we’re worse. Our own trade policies with Central America foist on those sad lands cheap subsidized American agribusiness corn. This has put their farmers out of business and forced them to sneak up here under cover of darkness.

Here they generally slip across our woefully insecure border, and if caught, find themselves immersed in our likewise woefully understaffed immigration system. There they mix with hundreds of thousands of other immigrants, legitimate and otherwise, who have become illegal because the government was too slow in processing their claims.

What a mess! The president has promised more staff to reduce the backlog, but we’ll see about that. He has a few other competing priorities on his plate too. Worse luck, he has already forsaken his campaign pledge to revisit NAFTA and like agreements, so it seems those workers from the south, whom we have already impoverished back home, are likely to keep flooding our borders. And big employers, from Microsoft to Smithfield are forever pressing Congress and the White House for more permits to import foreign labor. The job of that labor is to perform work that “Americans won’t do!â€