Amnesty/Guest-Worker is Immoral

EagleForum.org ^ | Dec. 14, 2005 | Phyllis Schlafly

[jla]

Amnesty/Guest-Worker is Immoral

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by Phyllis Schlafly, Dec. 14, 2005

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President George W. Bush, Senators John McCain, Edward Kennedy, and several others are promoting legislation to grant some kind of amnesty/guest-worker status to millions of illegal aliens residing in the United States, as well as to an indefinite number of additional foreign workers. All these bills should be rejected because they are immoral.

Inviting foreigners to come to America as guest workers is equivalent to sending the message: You people are only fit to do menial jobs that Americans think they are too good to do. We will let you come into our country for a few years to work low-paid jobs, but you have no hope of rising up the economic and social ladder.

The various bills differ in whether or when the guest-workers will be expelled back to the poverty they came from, but the bottom line of all is to create a subordinate underclass of unassimilated foreign workers, like serfs or peasants in corrupt foreign countries. That's not the kind of economy that made America a great nation.

America is a country that welcomes immigrants who want to be Americans, who come here legally, who obey our laws and our Constitution, and speak our language. They start with entry-level jobs, but they have the opportunity to rise into the middle class and realize the American dream.

France and Germany have already demonstrated the folly of a guest-worker economy. They admitted foreigners to do low-paid jobs, and now both countries have thousands of foreign residents who do not assimilate, who burden the social welfare system, and who become more disgruntled and dangerous every year.

Amnesty/guest-worker would help to perpetuate Mexico's corrupt economic system, which keeps a few people very rich and most Mexicans in abject poverty. Mexico is a very rich country with enormous quantities of oil, but the oil is all owned by the government, and the wealthy Mexicans are glad to get rid of some of their country's unemployed.

Amnesty/guest-worker would reward lawbreakers. The guest-workers would be exempted from punishment for breaking our laws in entering our country illegally and then using fraudulent documents, and employers would be exempted from punishment for hiring them.

The employers commit a double offense if they pay the illegal workers with cash in order to evade paying payroll taxes and providing benefits to the workers. For our government to tolerate the vast underground economy is unjust to honest businessmen who pay their taxes.

Amnesty/guest-worker is unjust to the millions of people who complied with our immigration laws, stood in line, and patiently waited their turn to win legal residence in the United States.

Some people say that leaving our borders open to people who want to sneak into our country illegally is the compassionate and Christian thing to do. On the contrary, it is uncaring and immoral to close our eyes to the crime on our southern border.

Failing to close our border to illegals means giving up on the war on drugs because most illegal drugs come over our southern border. Mexican drug cartels are even running illegal marijuana farms in our national parks, protected by booby traps and guards carrying AK-47s.

The smuggling of human beings over our border is an organized criminal racket that ought to be stopped, and the number of illegal crossings has significantly increased ever since the President began talking about his amnesty/guest-worker plan. That's no surprise; the amnesty we granted in 1986 quadrupled the number of illegal aliens.

The smugglers charge thousands of dollars for the promise to bring people across the border, and then often hold them for ransom until additional payments are made. Hundreds die from thirst and dehydration when crossing the desert or in locked trucks without air or water.

How many people will have to die before our government closes our border so smugglers and their victims won't believe the illegal racket is worth the risk?

Legal immigrants must be healthy to be admitted, but nobody is giving a health exam to people sneaking across the border. Illegal aliens are bringing in diseases that were formerly unknown in the United States plus bedbugs and diseases we had eradicated decades ago such as tuberculosis, malaria and even leprosy.

Failure to close our border to illegals means that Arizonans live in fear of the aliens who cross their land every night, tearing down fences and killing their animals. American citizens cannot go outside their own homes without a gun and a cell phone.

The most moral and humanitarian thing we can do is to erect a fence and double our border agents in order to stop the drugs, the smuggling racket, the diseases, and the crimes.

President Theodore Roosevelt left us some still-relevant words about the folly of valuing people only for the low-paid work they do. "Never under any condition should this nation look at an immigrant as primarily a labor unit."

Continuing with TR's wisdom: "We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than 50 years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being."

Eagle Forum • PO Box 618 • Alton, IL 62002 • phone: 618-462-5415 • fax: 618-462-8909 • eagle@eagleforum.org

Read this article online: http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2005/dec05/05-12-14.html

[untrained skeptic]

A recession is WELL worth the price to be paid if it means the long term stability of the nation.

I don't disagree with that statement. However, causing a recession will not fix the problem, and will seriously harm the Americans taht are competing with the illegal immigrants for jobs. They will get hit hardest by a recession.

It is not necessary to cause a recession to address this problem.

What was once a moderate-conservative state that despite the fact it had many unionized industrial workers, went GOP in 9 out of 10 presidential elections between 1952 to 1988 to being a solidly Democratic state that even has trouble electing RINOs to statewide positions. Immigration is what led this political change.

Sorry but I don't believe the evidence is there to support that statement. The liberal leadership has definately embraced the illegal immigrant population. However, the liberal buying of the urban poor though entitlements and the media's attacks on conservative values have had much more to do with the spread of liberalism.

Elitism among the rich has also spread liberalism through California.

We don't need immigrants to have the poor and the elitists. liberal socialism does a fine job of creating both without immigration.

[Euro-American Scum]

What is wrong with wages being higher? Should American workers be poor?

Of course they should. They should have their guts stomped out without so much as a moment's hesitation. Don't you remember how much we hate working Americans on FR? Shame on you. They are not merely primitive, they are positively feral. They do not deserve to live, except as slaves for the Fortune 500 corporations (the only real Americans, as it turns out).

/sarcasm

[untrained skeptic]

We need a measure of the economic stress requiring people to work two and three jobs...when frankly one should be enough.

Society has changed a lot in the past 45 years.

However, while there is some truth to what you're saying, I think that to a large extent you're deluding yourself.

We have a different view on poverty now then we once did.

Now our poor families have two cars. They have cable TV. Lots of video games, and can afford to smoke 3 packs a day of cigarettes at $3 a pack.

They eat fast food on a regular basis. Their standard of living is also reduced by having to pay interest on their obscene amount of debt.

You can't just restrict the labor market and drive up wages and make everyone richer. You can't shut off relatively inexpensive imports and still maintain people's standard of living when all those things suddenly cost more.

What has changed since 1960?

A lot of financial irresponsibility on the part of people running up debt.

A feeling of greed and entitlement that people use to justify spending on things they don't need and then having to work to support that lifestyle.

A huge tax burden placed on people funding inefficient government programs that never help people rise above poverty, but make poverty more comfortable instead.

And the return of sufficient income so that single bread-earners can provide for a stay-at-home parent who wishes to do so to take care of their children. This would be ideal. This is the way it used to be up through the 60's. And it would represent a VASTLY stronger economy than we possess today.

I agree. However, you're criticizing my comments without suggesting a way to reach your ideal state.

Massive internal contradiction, based on your own deluded notions as to the strength of the U.S. labor market.

You didn't point out any contradictions in what I said. You merely pointed to an ideal you think we should reach for, but didn't provide any way for us to get there.

Our country likely would benefit from a very slight tightening of the labor market at the low end. However, we can't go back to a time where transportation costs limited compitition from outside small areas and unless we find a way to dramaticly shrink the size of the government taxes are going to make it hard to have single wage earner households without sacrificing the luxuries that most of us have become accustomed to having.

You want a good example of how things have changed, go to the grocery store. Look at all the prepackaged foods that people buy instead of spending the time to cook meals on their own at much lower cost.

People are paying for conveience, including those people working three jobs.

I've worked three part time jobs to make a living. When I graduated from college in a recession. It wasn't much fun. It inspired me to get more education and work hard to make myself valuable to my employer.

Fifteen years later I make a good living, but I had to work hard to get here and I had to learn to not spend what I didn't have.

[untrained skeptic]

They never get SSA employer "no match" letters? Could be. The employer has to have 10 percent mismatches on its W-2 data submitted to the IRS. IRS also sends out "no match" letters but I don't recall the criteria. SSA sends out about 130,000 employer "no match" letters a year (as of a couple of years ago, maybe they've given up, I don't know.)

My statement was based on a newspaper article I read. However, there's little said on the subject of immigration that you can trust without verifying. I guess I need to look into this more.

[Archangelsk]

However, we first need to enforce our immigration laws, or it's pointless.

Then who's going to build the McMansions?

[untrained skeptic]

First point: We don't need a large "guest workers" program based upon ILLEGAL immigrant numbers.

We need a program that matches workers with jobs after the employer has made a reasonable attempt to hire an American worker.

The beaucracy of the government process will add some expense to slightly encourage hiring Americans, but the govenment will have to watch out for employers that are just underpaying and then when Americans are unwilling to do the work, hiring guest workers. However, since they already have state unemployment programs, widespread abuse won't be that hard to catch.

It's important to keep a reasonably tight labor market to prevent us lowering our standard of living to that of other countries rather than simply meeting real labor needs.

They all show that since 2000 "recent" immigrants are getting huge numbers of jobs, more jobs than established immigrants and citizens if I remember correctly.

I don't think I understand your point.

Is it that recent immigrants are more motivated to look for work and are willing to work for lower wages?

Additional jobs brought more into the labor force in the 1980s. Without the influx of "cheap" labor I sincerely believe that the Employment-Population Ratio would be higher today.

Possibly.

During the dot-con economic expansion jobs were created through dramatic growth in the economy. People were drawn to the workforce by better wages and benefits due to a tight labor market caused by growth.

If we can maintain growth without increasing the labor pool, and that growth can overcome the slowing factor of inflation caused by increased wages, then you will end up with a higher employment-population ratio. However, it takes strong growth to do that.

I would categorize our economy as stable but we hardly have that kind of strong growth.

Much of the growth in the dot-con era was illusionary. It made a lot of people rich, but it came crashing down when people realized that it was based more on hype than on substance.

Removing illegal immigrants may help growth by removing people from welfare rolls and getting more Americans part of of a productive economy while removing liabilities being placed on us by foreigners.

However, that really only helps the economy if the goverment returns the tax dollars to the people instead of spending it on something else, which isn't very likely.

Second point: The labor glut is government created -- no enforcement. That ain't free market economics, it's government interference.

Actually if the government were enforcing immigration law they would be interfering more in a free market. A lack of action isn't interference.

However, I don't suggest we go toward a totally free labor market with open borders. We don't need to import the world's problems. Immigration should be done for the benefit of our country, not the benefit of other countries and other people.

Third ponit: The current crop of ILLEGAL immigrant labor is uneconomical. Econ 101 says send jobs chasing after cheapest labor.

There are many reasons why not enforcing immigration law is bad for the country. I'm also not suggesting that we allow unlimited legal immigration.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: "I don't think I understand your point [concerning the statement that "recent" immigrants getting huge numbers of jobs]."

"Recent" immigrants is the description used in the studies done by the three organizations I cited. In all cases the description includes ILLEGAL immigrants -- and yes they are motivated to work for any wage, W-2 or under the table.

Since 2000 "recent" immigrants are getting huge numbers of jobs, they are taking jobs away from established immigrants and citizens.

E.g., the Northeastern U. study, "New Immigrants in the Labor Force and the Number of Employed New Immigrants in the U.S. from 2000 through 2003: Continued Growth Amidst Declining Employment Among the Native Born Population," Center for Labor Market Studies Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts

"Findings of the CPS household survey indicate that average civilian employment of persons 16 and older during the first seven months of 2003 was 894,000 higher than in 2000 (Table 7). The number of new immigrant employed in 2003 ranged from 1.757 million to 1.985 million, accounting for more than all of the net growth in civilian employment over this three year period. This implies that the number of employed native born and established immigrants must have declined by 900,000 to 1.1 million over the past three years."

I am old enough to remember Harry Truman looking for that one-armed economists, the one who could not say, "On the other hand. . . ."

What do I mean by that? This study acknowledges the problems in CPS / BLS data (it attempts to account for it) and such things as the household survey v. the payroll survey. However, it does not back down from its findings.

The 1990s also had a similar trend.

Is this free market or government interference (by non-enforcement and encouraging people to get here by any means possible). Well, I for one remember the immigration reform promises of the 1986 law.

We were BS-ed. We (Americna workers) were told, "We're from the government and we're here to 'hep you."

I vehemently disagree that this is free market forces within a sovereign country -- the only way it could be free market is sans borders.

Perhaps why there is a divide over immigrant labor is expressed by this description of where that labor is:

The new immigrant workers were overwhelmingly employed in wage and salary jobs in the private sector, but a variety of informal evidence suggests that many of them were employed as contract workers and in the informal economy rather than on the formal payrolls of these firms. New immigrants were substantially under-represented among the self-employed and in the public sector. New immigrants were over-represented in agriculture/fishing, construction/manufacturing, and leisure/hospitality industries while they were under-represented in finance, professional/business services, and public administration industries. Nearly one-third of new immigrant workers held jobs in blue collar occupations, and another 30 percent were employed in service occupations, especially food service and building cleaning and ground maintenance occupations. They were substantially under-represented in management and management support, office, and sales positions.

It's easy to guess who's for it and who's against.

BTW, I am old enough (Boy! am I old) to remember the entire history of affirmative action. It was easy to guess who was for it and who was against it when it affected only blue-collar type jobs. As it spread into the professional sector affirmative action became unpopular.

[Bella_Bru]

What is wrong with wages being higher? Should American workers be poor?

Seems to be the current rallying cry lately. In some circles, companies such as Costco take heat because they are "too good" to their employees.

[Bella_Bru]

If there is a pool of available American workers, yet the employer is trying to hire immigrants because none of the Americans are willing to do that job for that wage, then they are not trying to hire American workers.

So...it's ok to hire illegals for next to nothing because you cannot find some poor dimwit American to accept the pittance offered.

There used to not be a problem finding Americans to take low paying jobs because they weren't so low paying that they were impossible to live off of.

[A. Pole]

There used to not be a problem finding Americans to take low paying jobs because they weren't so low paying that they were impossible to live off of.

Freetraders/freemarketeers tend to think in response - "but it is possible for the immigrants to live off it!". And they ask question, "why American workers are unwilling to do the same?"

Instead of dismissing these points, we should address it for two reasons. First, this is the key argument on which the freetraders/freemarketeers base their claim to their moral high ground (they blame laziness and greed of American workers while praising the supposed frugality and stamina of immigrants) and second a close look will reveal the mechanism of the scam.

The passage below is intended as a rough sketch, the proper response needs to be worked out, and I am sure I missed a lot:

I would mention the social/family constraints for an American considering moving into crowded room, peculiar cost calculation by illegal alien who might intend to bring his family in future (so he might be willing to work even at a loss for a while). I would point to the fact that employers use the perspective of permanent stay and bringing of relatives as a PART of the pay package they provide - selling common good for private gain. In many cases the supposed hard working aliens are fleeing even worse conditions at home - freetraders want American workers to become equally desperate.

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

... We have a different view on poverty now then we once did.

Now our poor families have two cars. They have cable TV. Lots of video games, and can afford to smoke 3 packs a day of cigarettes at $3 a pack.

They eat fast food on a regular basis. Their standard of living is also reduced by having to pay interest on their obscene amount of debt.....

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When I was young the poor(I was as poor as you could get) had to buy their own tv's fast food, cigarettes, etc. If you could buy a car, you were no longer poor.

Now we are forced to buy the all the goodies for them.

We need a two pronged approach.

Close the borders for our national survival and stop supporting those who would be better off working for their junk food and toys.

Give the foreign invaders incentive to reform their own damned hellholes, and give our domestic poor the incentive to work two crappy jobs, learn to plan and save and get their own lives together.

True poverty and the fear of starving are great motivators.
I speak from experience.

Open borders and welfare are the path to destruction.

Yes, I know, neither one will happen.

Prepare for the consequences.

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

Eventually, the Bots will throw Reagan himself under the bus.

[A. Pole]

True poverty and the fear of starving are great motivators. I speak from experience.

It depends what are the perspectives of improving ones own life. If the perspectives are good, the poverty and insecurity will motivate people to work hard. If the perspectives are not so good or very uncertain, the poverty and insecurity will motivate people to change the political system and to help strong leaders who promise security and better life to get into power.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: laziness and greed of the American worker and our future.

A modest proposal.

We as Americans are used to public campaigns to promote responsible, good citizen behavior.

It is time for Hollywood, the MSM, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and Washington to launch "It Takes Sharing!"

Yes, good American families share apartments, houses, appliances, toiletries, toys -- everything. Only by three, four ot more families sharing homes can the American corporations cut labor costs and help the American economy compete and survive -- it's up to you, Good American!

About the need for stem cell research and all those children. . . .

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

I recall that when I didn't know when I was going to eat next or how I would pay the rent, I never gave a thought to who was in office. I was too busy.

The steps required to reclaim the system are simply not going to happen.

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

We'll likely see your slogans adopted in the future.

Sarcasm has a way of evolving into reality.

[Paul Ross]

Eventually, the Bots will throw Reagan himself under the bus.

They do already, when they know we Reaganites are out of the loop of their conversations.

Occasionaly, though, they inadvertantly let their true attitudes slip, when they call us "paleos" and other such derisively-intended characterizations.

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

The only President I ever voted for, (twice!) and didn't want my vote back a year later.

[untrained skeptic]

So...it's ok to hire illegals for next to nothing because you cannot find some poor dimwit American to accept the pittance offered.

Did you actually read my post? You took the one part where I was saying that could be a problem, but it could be addressed and act like I condone it.

[untrained skeptic]

I agree.

I've been fortunate enough to never have been truely poor, though I grew up below what is considered the "poverty" level.

We were close enough to poor that I learned that I didn't want to spend my life being poor, and I learned a very good work ethic from my father.