Our Addiction to Illegal Immigrants by Leo Alexander


If I had it my way, those in this country illegally would be given ninety days to attend to their affairs and leave voluntarily and still retain the right to apply through the proper channels for reentry. Anyone found in this country illegally after the ninety-day grace period would be arrested, deported, and lose the opportunity to return*. For me, this isn’t an issue of race — illegal immigration is a threat to our national security and economy.

Let’s use the District of Columbia as an example. Who do you think did the landscaping, the housekeeping, cooking and dish washing in the hotels and restaurants, manned the parking garages, drove the cabs, worked the street crews, and were the maids, nannies, and chauffeurs for the rich twenty years ago? Black folks. What happened to that sector of the labor force? They have been priced out. Whether we want to admit it or not, this society has become addicted to cheap illegal labor. Take a look around now at who’s managing our parking garages, driving our taxicabs, operating local take-out joints and dry cleaners, as well as all of the lower-level labor and service industry jobs. Don’t even attempt to tell me that all these good people applied for and received visas to come to our city to join the unskilled labor pool; it simply would never happen. So what does this influx of foreign labor leave for the native-born, unskilled Washingtonian? Let’s see, there is record-level, double-digit unemployment figures in most of our urban areas, which directly contributes to broken families, depression, alcohol abuse and drug addiction, increased crime, and recidivism which all feeds one of the nation’s fastest growing industries . . . prisons.

This cycle of addiction began in our economy with the enslavement of Africans; so this is just the twenty-first century’s version of government-sanctioned exploitation. How else do you explain these day-laborer centers popping up all over? Illegal immigrants cannot go to the unemployment office like a legal citizen, so instead of our government arresting them for breaking our immigration laws and deporting them back to their respective countries of origin, they build day-laborer centers for them to organize and to price out the local labor force. I don’t think many of us would have a problem with the seasonal provisionally documented migrant farm worker coming to our country to work in the agricultural industry. But that’s not what’s happening here in the District. These illegal immigrants are taking jobs our citizens not only will do, and want to do, but also have done for generations. You cannot tell me in this information/terrorism age that our government doesn’t know that fake documents are being used to procure labor and which companies are willfully breaking the law. This means that there has to be collusion from the top down.

That brings me to an errand I ran recently to my Brightwood neighborhood Post Office on Georgia Avenue, NW, where I just happened to notice that a couple of things had changed in the last year or so since I’d been there. They now have a special desk by the door to process US passport applications. I’d seen these special counters before, but never this far uptown. Then I noticed something else -- the number of Latinos standing in line with documents to get a US passport. This in and of itself didn’t seem that unusual, given the recent Department of State passport requirement for travelers, except for the fact that they could barely speak English. When it was my turn to be served, I asked the customer service agent, “Are all of these folks here for US passports?â€