President George W. Bush toured the Mexican border states this week in an attempt to quell growing unrest over illegal immigration. His proposal would allow illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States to have legal status as "guest workers." This toughen-up-the-border/guest worker hybrid is a half-baked recipe for disaster politically designed to keep conservative businessmen and straightjacket Republicans in the same boat.
The inanity of closing the border while at the same time legalizing millions of illegal aliens reflects the current schizophrenia within the Republican Party on its biggest hot-button issue. This is mainly because sealing the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico boundary is made more difficult by giving American hopefuls an incentive to do anything and everything to cross it.
If we are to devise a viable immigration policy, let's put the issue into perspective. First, we have the "dirty work" argument. We've all heard it. Illegal immigrants are critical to this country's economy because they are willing to take the low-wage service and agricultural jobs Americans snub. The argument is emotionally popular because it conjures up images of fat greedy Americans enjoying this country's great wealth on the backs of people working overtime for less than minimum wage.
The real issue, however, is not how much less illegal immigrants are willing to work for, but how much less employers can pay undocumented aliens. Liberals have a tough time with this argument. On the one hand, mainstream leftist thought is that illegal aliens should be legalized and brought "out of the shadows," making it easier to enforce minimum wage laws. Yet at the same time, many on the Left oppose cracking down on illegal residents, arguing that doing so would drive average wages up and lead to inflation.
We can't have it both ways, and therein lies a crucial problem with the Bush plan. Granting tacit amnesty to the 9.2 million illegal aliens in this country essentially means paying a large proportion of them minimum wage or above. I'm all for paying minimum wage. In fact, Congress should raise the federal minimum wage immediately and tie it permanently to inflation. But that's not the point here.
If you were an employer and you had the option of hiring a relatively more educated, English-speaking American who has some knowledge of business practices or a Spanish-speaking Mexican, who would you choose? The American penchant for altruism aside, businesses aren't hiring illegal aliens today out of the kindness of their hearts.
This brings me to a variation on the "illegal immigration: we need it" theme. The argument that illegal immigrants take the jobs ordinary Americans disdain-and therefore constitute a net gain for the economy-only tells half the story. Perhaps if immigration slowed during times of recession and high unemployment, it wouldn't be such a problem. But Mexicans mulling a border run aren't sitting in front of their laptops analyzing U.S. unemployment trends.
The rate of illegal immigration has increased steadily over the last decade, up more than 25 percent since 2000. During the course of the 2001 recession, immigration-both legal and illegal-rose so fast that the immigrant population assumed a disproportionate share of new jobs while their unemployment numbers also rose disproportionately more than other demographics.
This all means that states rapidly expanding at the hands of immigration are becoming overpopulated and simultaneously assuming unreasonable obligations. We have a socially responsible policy of not turning away anyone at the emergency room, paying for incarceration and sending kids to our schools. But this also means the border states shell out tens of millions in tax-payer dollars each year to pay for immigrants' ER visits, their share of the space in the county jail and to send their kids to school.
Fixing immigration won't come with vigilantes scouting our borders or a shoddy amnesty deal that undermines its own goals. Ultimately we must repair our trade policy, specifically with regards to NAFTA. Since 1994, NAFTA has driven tens of thousands of small Mexican farmers off their land due to cheap U.S. imports. The growing pool of impoverished Mexicans helps explain the increased exodus to the border. It's a long-term plan, but finding fair trade solutions to raise the overall standard of living for our southern neighbor is a much better solution than a farcical border-control/guest-worker plan.
Jared Fish is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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