Collective Conscious

Immi­gra­tion is a hot issue dur­ing this pri­mary sea­son, due in no small part to the recent deba­cle over Arizona’s new anti-​​immigration law. This is espe­cially true for hope­ful Repub­li­can can­di­dates in bor­der states, who have good rea­son to fear the Demo­c­ra­tic vot­ing ten­den­cies of minor­ity groups. The nat­ural ten­dency for them is, of course, to come down hard on an anti-​​immigrant tack in their own states, lest they be pres­sured out by right-​​wing chal­lengers. Case in point: John McCain. A recent ad:

Yes, it’s ridicu­lous, and even con­ser­v­a­tives real­ize it’s a huge joke. The best part about it is, per­haps, the parody:

Note how per­fectly the ad sets this one up. Seri­ously, though, the bru­tal right-​​wing reac­tionary response to the immi­gra­tion ques­tion is a major threat to the future eco­nomic devel­op­ment of this coun­try. Con­sider, for exam­ple, the stan­dard argu­ment that ‘immi­grants steal jobs.’

On its sur­face, it seems plau­si­ble enough: poorer peo­ple are will­ing to work at lower wages. The jobs that are in ques­tion, how­ever, are usu­ally those which are already paid at some of the low­est rates avail­able — gen­er­ally the min­i­mum wage. Only an ille­gal immi­grant would have an incen­tive to offer a lower rate and ‘steal’ the job; a legal immi­grant would be bet­ter off get­ting a job that was vacant at the stan­dard min­i­mum wage. The solu­tion to that prob­lem? Well, that should be obvious.

That claim aside, the key ques­tion is then the desir­abil­ity of addi­tional labor at that level in the first place. The only remain­ing argu­ment against sig­nif­i­cant immi­gra­tion reform is one which claims that the labor will still drag down wages on jobs even above the min­i­mum wage level, or that immi­grants will be bet­ter at doing jobs cur­rently held by Amer­i­cans and thus ‘steal’ the jobs any­way. In both cases, this is the clas­sic argu­ment against progress.

For the same rea­son that tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions (even ‘job-​​killing’ ones) are con­sid­ered to be a pos­i­tive sign of progress in our soci­ety, improved com­pet­i­tive­ness in the labor mar­ket should also be seen as such. If a more skilled man is avail­able to work a job, why should he not get the oppor­tu­nity, even if he is Mex­i­can? The Repub­li­can answer to that ques­tion can’t, and doesn’t, stem from rea­son­able thought about the prob­lem. It’s nativism, pure and sim­ple, and as a nation of immi­grants we would do best to remem­ber the power of new peo­ples and new ideas.

(Photo: *clair­ity*)