I'm glad to see Hanson speaking out on this issue. He has earned the right to, with his long experience in running a family farm and his recent compassionate book on the migrant experience.
A great man.
Posted on Mon, Feb. 23, 2004
Get a grip on the border
IT'S TIME TO STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
By Victor Davis Hanson
The Bush administration's proposed guest worker program might seem to be a good beginning -- splitting the difference between open and closed borders, and between amnesty and deportation.
Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico, counts on the $12 billion in worker remittances sent his way -- and he can either encourage or discourage millions more of his citizens to head north in lieu of needed radical reform at home.
But what about the hundreds of thousands of workers already here who either cannot or will not participate? Will illegal immigrants outside the program be stopped at the border, requiring more guards or an extensive wall? Or once here, are they now to be deported without their requisite papers?
Escape from Mexico
The proposed solution also assumes that illegal immigration is fueled solely by too many jobs in the United States and too few workers. Yet thousands of other Mexicans come north as preteens, or when they are elderly or sick. The draw was not necessarily immediate employment, but understandable amelioration from the landscape of central Mexico where they cannot be sure of finding food, housing or health care.
The guest worker program also assumes that the traditional remedies of the free market for scarce workers -- mechanization and increased wages -- ceased to work around 1980; that it is hard to sleep or eat out or find a cut lawn in an Iowa or Maine where there are not tens of thousands of illegal workers; that the social experience of guest workers in Germany and France provides encouraging analogies for importing cheap labor; that Californians or Texans once did not do most of their own work before the influx of industrious aliens; and that it is economically beneficial and morally sound to use foreign workers when millions of Americans remain unemployed.
There is a life cycle for the typical teenage worker from Oaxaca, whose backbreaking labor is said to be essential for the economy. For a laborer of 18, it may be a good bargain for all involved -- but for too many people, these jobs turn out not to be entry-level or rite-of-passage, but remain dead-end. Tragedy then ensues when an aging, unskilled worker becomes ill, is injured or laid off and is the sole breadwinner of a large family. Only the public entitlement industry -- health, housing, education and maintenance subsidies -- can come to the rescue to provide some parity with Americans that his job or former job could not. His employer, in the meantime, looks for a younger, healthier and foreign successor. Thus the sad cycle continues.
Testing the melting pot
Illegal immigration cannot be looked at in a vacuum in an age of growing ethnic chauvinism that sees unassimilated and often exploited foreigners in the shadows as an oppressed constituency needing group, rather than individual, representation. Ethnic studies, separate college graduation ceremonies predicated on race, bilingual education, state-supplied interpreters and groups like La Raza (``The Race'') are all force-multipliers to massive illegal immigration, and thus present us with a litmus test of the viability of the melting pot itself.
Instead of arguing over piecemeal legislation in an election year, rolling amnesties or the return of bracero, we might as well bite the bullet and return to an immigration policy that worked well enough for some 200 years for people from all over the world. We can set a realistic figure for legal immigration from Mexico. Then we must enforce our border controls, consider a one-time citizenship process for current residents who have been here for two or three decades, apply stiff employer sanctions, deport all those who now break the law and return to social and cultural protocols that promote national unity through assimilation and integration.
Long-term gains
Under such difficult reform, we of the American Southwest might initially pay more for our food, hotel rooms and construction. Yet eventually we will save far more through reduced entitlements, the growing empowerment of our own entry-level workers (many of them recent and legal immigrants from Mexico), and the easing of social and legal problems associated with some 8 millioon to 12 million illegal residents.
More importantly, our laws would recover their sanctity. Without massive illegal immigration, Americans would rediscover their fondness for measured legal immigration. At a time of war, our borders would be more secure. And we all could regain solace, knowing that we are no longer overlords importing modern helots to do the jobs that we, in our affluence and leisure, now deem beneath us.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of ``Mexifornia: A State of Becoming'' (Encounter, 2003). He wrote this for the Mercury News.
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