By: S. Rowan Wolf, Ph.D , Uncommon Thought Journal, April 2, 2006
This work is under a fair use Creative Commons License
We are seeing the crescendo of a furor as immigration is out forward to take the focus off other unsavory issues - the War in Iraq, illegal activities by those in the Bush White House and the GOP, illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens, the failures of Katrina and the list goes on. Is immigration an important issue? You bet it is. It is also an intensely human issue. There are two factors that are involved in any immigration - push factors and pull factors. Since the passage of NAFTA and GATT, those factors have only intensified. They have intensified globally. Globalization has resulted in the movement of about 80 million people globally. As stated by GlobalExchange:
"The forces driving people to migrate are many. After political violence, the leading reason is the problem of unemployment. Immigration affects not only those who migrate. It has major consequences for the economic and social relationships between countries involved. It is therefore necessary to agree on international rules to address not only the human and labour rights of migrants, but also to regulate the flow of labour.The impacts of immigration are complex. Developing nations have become exporters of workers who are often vulnerable to exploitation. Corporations have taken full advantage of this situation, contributing to the lowering of wages for some workers in host countries. At the same time, the money remitted by the immigrant workers to family members in their homeland plays a major role in reducing problems in the current account balance in developing economies and cushioning social problems and extreme poverty."
It is estimated that immigrants send $67 billion a year back to their home countries. For those Hispanic immigrants in the U.S., their contributions make up the largest source of income in some of their home countries. These remittances are the largest source of income forEl Salvador, and approaching the largest source of outside income in Mexico. In fact remittances from Mexican immigrants to the U.S. are estimated at $17 billion a year and are set to exceed Mexico's oil income. According to the report on Lou Dobbs Tonight (3/21/05), "Most of the illegal aliens have arrived since 1990. In the 1980s, the number of new arrivals averaged 130,000 a year; 1990 to '94, 450,000 per year; 1995 to 1999, 750,000 per year; and 2000 to 2004, 700,000 a year."
Globalization is intimately involved in both the push factors - created high unemployment and low income in "developing" countries - and pull factors - better wages in the United States. While the wages are better in the United States, immigrant Hispanics form a pool of cheap and exploitable labor for U.S. business.
The typical Mexican worker earns one-tenth his American counterpart, and numerous American businesses are willing to hire cheap, compliant labor from abroad; such businesses are seldom punished because our country lacks a viable system to verify new hires' work eligibility."
Immigration, particularly illegal immigration, does affect U.S. workers. It creates a large pool of cheap, exploitable labor at the bottom of the labor market. While this likely negatively impacts overall wage structures, it directly challenges U.S. citizens at the bottom of the employment structure - particularly Hispanic Americans and legal immigrants, and African Americans. However, it is important to recognize that employers would rather hire illegal immigrants than legal workers of any race. Why? Not simply because they are cheaper, but because they have virtually no legal protections. Therefore, they are perceived as a "compliant" labor force. Since the government, at best, only slaps the hands of employers, there is no huge motivation to hire "legal" over undocumented workers.
In a CNN report on 3/30/06 - Immigration reform: No ditches and dirty plates - Jessica Seid reports that small businesses are "sweating" over immigration reform. Why?
"The guys from Mexico are here to better their lives in Mexico, they are here to work hard and get the job done, their attendance is 99 to 100 percent," he said. If he had to hire local citizens, they would only "last a day to two days to a month."
No industry would be harder hit than agriculture if the supply of migrant labor is cut off, according to the American Farm Bureau.
"We would see up to a third of the fruit and vegetable sector go out of business almost right away... $5 to $9 billion dollars would basically be handed to our neighbors overseas," according to American Farm Bureau Labor Specialist Austin Perez."
And this points to the other side the illegal immigration debate - the consumer benefits. From agriculture, to service occupations, to clerks, to production, illegal immigrants dramatically decrease the cost of everyday life for those in the U.S. I have no idea how many billions of dollars this save folks, but I am positive that it is more than the estimated $126 for each tax payer in the U.S. (a number thrown around by the "immigrations costs us crowd.") One might even look at the purported costs, as hidden costs of both globalization and the exploitation of undocumented workers.
The environment that has been created could be summarized in this way. Contemporary globalization exploits poor nations into allowing international "investment" and dramatically decreasing funding for social programs (infrastructure, education, health care, farm subsidies, etc). Workers are driven into unemployment and become desperate for employment - sometimes in "free enterprise zones," sometimes in the plantation economy of transnational corporations. The economics of the people collapse and drives immigration. [PUSH Factor]
Meanwhile, the benefits of this exploitation translate into massive profits for the transnationals and cheaper goods for consumers in "wealthy" nations. Immigrants - essentially economic refugees - are driven to a somewhat more profitable exploitation in the dominating nations. Business and consumers benefit from this as well. [PULL factor]
However, these are real people risking their lives in order to make money to send to the families they leave behind in the plantation economies we created. This dramatically decreases what little standard of living gains they make as an undocumented worker in the United States.
On the side of the immigrants, the situation is one of survival. On the side of in wealthy countries, it is a situation of cheap goods and services. We are all participating in, and benefiting from, the exploitation of desperate people trying to survive.
If we are going to embrace globalization, then it has to be made more equal. The only thing that will mitigate the push factors is improving conditions in the countries people are immigrating from. This is truly a justice issue at its base. Instead, there is a blatant attempt to demonizing the people whose life blood is literally spilled for us. One way to gain US citizenship is to join the US military. Do you think that the government is not eyeing this as troop shortages grow and global conflict increases? Of course, that does not address the economic benefits of business exploitation.
Other Information Sources
3/29/06 Thom Hartmann, OpEdNews, Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists (and Labor is Left Behind)
3/29/06 Robert Tanner, AP, Statehouses Take Up Immigration Legislation
7/11/05 Mason Stockstill, Beyond Borders, Remittances spawn mini-industry in United States
CAIR, Economic costs of legal and illegal immigration
WRICTV Thousands of students walk out for another day of immigration demonstrations
3/25/06 CNN, Immigration bills send protesters to city streets
3/26/06 CNN, Half-million protesters peacefully clog L.A. streets
Most of S. Rowan Wolf's commentaries can be read here or
visit the Panoptic World homepage.
Someland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, 11/2005, Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2004 (pdf)
4/01/06 Archibold, NYT, Live, From Burbank, Calif., Hispanic Indignation