The Necessity of Immigration:

It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. I can’t say that is absolutely accurate until some explains the spork, but I will admit it is a major impetus. What is missed most often is even truer in my estimation, that greed is the evil step-mother of all innovation.

Cheap labor is a vagabond that moves to the area of most acceptance. It has created economies where only subsistence existed before and because the populace in place saw it as better than what they had. You can track the shifting sands of manufacturing and labor intensive value added business geographically throughout the world’s history based on that premise. A case in point is the Oriental rug, all the rage at the beginning of the 20th century as there was a perceived value to the quality in the Western World and the makers of those rugs in Persia, Turkey et al found the compensation received acceptable. As they became the rage, market forces created an increasing value as limited supply struggled against increasing demand. Those who purchased the rugs in the Middle East had to compete against other exporters for the limited supply, increasing the amount paid to the villages and small cooperatives that made them. Changing the expectations of those villages and cooperatives for the value of their work and permanently shifting upward until the price/value relationship neutralized. Well Joe the rug guy looked at this opportunity and shifted his looms to making rugs that resembled Oriental rugs in style and could be made at a much lower price. The marketplace then had options, if one deemed the handmade nature to have primacy then the price was paid, if however, it was the style of the rug that was most important to the purchaser they would buy one of Joe’s lesser made facsimiles.

These shifts happen everyday, the cause and effect of supply and demand. If Californians did not have access to cheap labor to care for their landscaping would not the nature of their landscaping change to meet their Oriental rug tastes? The argument that is made that we need illegal immigrants because there are jobs that Americans in general will not do. I say that the argument is circular and that if we did not have people willing to work at sub-standard wage, because they produce outside the system, the needs would change to fit the available labor. If Frank the lettuce farmer had to produce without the use of inexpensive labor, then the marketplace would innovate in order make mechanization viable. If new construction was made more expensive because of labor cost, then old homes would become more valuable and we would not see the shifts from older neighborhoods and the blight that follows.

I am for immigration but legal immigration, if the process needs to be streamlined then let’s do it. The idea that we are changing the very make-up of the society as a work around for those that are here illegally is…….I am searching for a word…..stupid. It may be the most cynical thing that I have ever seen manifesting, the idea of creating a permanent sub-class by allowing those that are in this country illegally to not have to learn the language of that country. Secondly, by allowing immigrants to have no sense of ownership, no right of passage to become a US Citizen they are in course diluting the very society that they deemed attractive to begin with. It is a descending spiral to which pandering politicians and racists hang their hats of tolerance. The United States made no such allowances for Italians, Chinese, Russians and all other groups of immigrants. So why are we now saying that those that come here from Central America are less valuable, less viable, because they do lawn work? Many of those that did manual labor that came from Western Europe and Asia assimilated, saved and then brought their families. Those that are coming from Central America and Mexico are allowed to do it differently, they sneak across the border, then create a family and use technicalities to claim the rights of citizenship.

It is time for Americans to not adopt the failings of other countries as our original sin. If Mexico cannot care for its citizenry and provide opportunity and care how did it become our problem? The Inter-American Development Bank sponsored a poll that came out in August that estimated that 11.4 billion dollars was remitted back to Mexico in the first half of 2007 from Illegal Immigrants. They also stated that was a slowed amount due to new banking restrictions. Extrapolated out to represent the total year 2007, that would be some 22 billion dollars, if we then assume conservatively that figure represents 20% of their total income generated and a 15% tax rate, we see some 16.5 billion dollars in taxes not collected that could have gone to healthcare and schools in support. It must be understood that this is an estimate of Illegal Immigrants that are sending money home, many are not.

The United States needs immigrants but it needs them as citizens, what it does not need is to subsidize the guy that grows a lawn he won’t mow. The general public is paying for the fruit pickers, landscapers and carpenters every day, just in a convoluted way. It may save us a nickel on an Orange but cost a dime in social services for that savings.

No amnesty. We need to put up the fence and stop the flow first and then develop a way to integrate and assimilate those that are here. They need a cost of entry, a hurdle to ownership of the society to which they came for opportunity. Does a person appreciate more a car given to them or a car they have purchased through there own efforts? If they don’t understand what made this country the land of opportunity how can we expect them help pass on those principles to their children or our children.