The way Americans understand the issue of illegal immigration continues to frustrate me to no end. The American Limbaugh/Trump/Breitbart right is overtly racist and xenophobic in its opposition to illegal immigration, and they also don’t make much distinction between legal and illegal immigration. The left in response wants to protect the immigrants, both legal and illegal, and the left also unfortunately doesn’t always make sufficient distinction between legal and illegal immigration.
Legal immigration, in its currently regulated form, is a strong net positive to the US. There are tons of studies and statistical evidence to this effect. Illegal immigration, on the other hand, is driven by illegal employment and has significantly greater negatives than legal immigration.
Writing about this is a nearly impossible needle to thread: on the one hand, the vast majority of anti-immigrant sentiment doesn’t pay much attention to the distinction, and is overtly racist and xenophobic. On the other hand, it is true that employers have exploited illegal employment to pay lower wages in the low end of the labor market than would otherwise be the case with a purely legal workforce. People seeking jobs in that sector are in fact being harmed by the illegal employment, and the low wage paying employers are passing the costs of that low wage employment on to the government as Timex was talking about in another thread.
And all the studies that show immigration as a net positive full stop are not distinguishing between legal and illegal immigration. Legal immigration is a strong net positive. Illegal immigration, because it’s driven by illegal employment, is a mild to moderate net negative, with the negatives concentrated on the low wage sector of the economy. When the two are combined in studies, the overall net is positive. However, if illegal immigration / illegal employment is looked at in isolation from legal immigration, it’s clearly a system of exploitation by employers against legal workers.
Our system is so F’ed up it makes me uncomfortable to even make this argument b/c the vast majority of people saying illegal immigration is negative are racist asshats. And of course they are not parsing the fine distinctions between legal employment, illegal employment, etc. But the reality is, unregulated illegal employment, which draws upon an illegal labor pool, is bad for Americans in the lower wage sector of the labor market. Now of course, that reality then gets magnified by the racism and xenophobia to create the current exaggerated immigration hysteria on the Right.
Part of me knows that I’m going to get flamed for this (by people who IMO aren’t actually reading what I’m writing) b/c I’m making an argument that could be interpreted as a “fellow traveler” to the arguments made by racist asshats. However, the low wage business lobby has essentially been using the repugnance decent people feel for the racist anti-immigration arguments as political cover to keep on exploiting loopholes and diluting enforcement of labor laws for decades.
The answer has also been clear for decades: comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for people already here and a big increase in employer level enforcement to reduce or eliminate illegal employment.
Unfortunately the right wing in the US has gone so far off the rails, and our media and institutions are so pathetic, that it’s hard to see the reality. The racism on this issue taints all discussion of the issue.
So, yeah, some workers probably have been displaced by illegal immigration. But that’s b/c the employers are hiring illegally and exploitatively. The proper targets of blame are the illegal employers. However, due to racism and xenophobia, the illegal immigrants end up being blamed by the right. It astounds me: all that rage at poor people seeking work and almost no rage at all for the profit-takers exploiting that illegal employment.
