Last year when the Bush administration first proposed amnesty, I wrote a response based on my personal experience with hiring a nanny. Since President Bush has not changed his opinion of American workers at all during this debate I feel that reposting this response is useful.
"People right here behind me are looking for somebody to ... lay roof, lay tile and they can't find workers here," he said. "If a builder back here can't find an American willing to do the job, they ought to have the ability to put somebody on the job who can do the job."
This is the argument that gets thrown down to trump any assertion that we should deport illegal aliens or punish businesses that hire them: Americans will not do these jobs! This argument is the BIG LIE that corporations and political elites of both parties keep trumpeting to convince us, without ever having to prove it, that open borders and the resulting terrorism and lawlessness is the price we must be willing to pay for a healthy economy.
What Bush and other pro-illegal immigration people never say is that illegal immigration guts the wage market in every sector that illegals are employed in. Wages in these jobs are held down to subsistence level or below by the very immigration that the elites demand for their own self-interest. I believe there are plenty of native and legal Americans who will take these jobs if they can make a decent, livable wage.
I have a personal example. When I hired a nanny in the early 1990's, I interviewed several young American citizens who were willing to work for one thousand a month ($12,000 a year, not exactly high pay). At the same time I was offered help in obtaining an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who would work for $400 (without of course Social security or unemployment taxes). When I asked them what they would do if their nanny who they brought from Guatemala got sick, they told me they would take them to the local public hospital for free (tax supported) care. I was appalled.
We chose to hire an American citizen and my experience disproves George Bush's assertion that no Americans want these jobs. They don't want them at the same rate paid to illegal workers and I don't blame them. We hired an American citizen, paid her a decent wage (even though it took about half of my middle-income salary) and paid all the required taxes because that was the right thing to do. George Bush evidently would think I was a fool for doing this. Indeed, at the same time that I paid a legal nanny a good portion of my salary, many extremely wealthy members of the political and professional elite were making news for hiring illegal nannies and refusing to pay the required taxes (remember Zoe Baird and nannygate).
Our nanny’s situation was made worse by the fact that her husband worked in landscaping and his salary was also held down by the competition of many illegal immigrants he worked with. Even on their combined salaries, they barely got by. They could not afford dental care for their son and rarely went to the doctor and, they told me, they were not eligible for any welfare type programs such as food stamps. Here were two citizens working in jobs that George Bush tells us no Americans want. The truth is that American citizens have been forced out of these jobs by low wages. Multiply this story by the millions of illegal immigrants and you see how open borders is destroying the ability of an entire class of Americans to become even marginally self-sufficient.
The political and business elites like to blame the refusal to do anything about illegals on ordinary Americans. They say that “we” will not pay the prices for goods and services that it would take to pay American citizens a decent wage. “We” demand mass quantities of cheap goods. I believe this is untrue and furthermore I believe it is a mass slander against most ordinary Americans who would not begrudge a fellow citizen a livable wage, even though they had to pay more for goods and services.
I think it is the very wealthy professional and corporate elites who are not willing to pay livable wages or sacrifice any degree of corporate profit to employees. As a substitute for the failure to create jobs that allow citizens to become self-sufficient, these elites of both parties gladly support welfare and income redistribution policies that spread the cost of their open borders policies to all taxpayers. They get the best of both worlds: cheap labor for their estates and businesses and votes from the millions of people they keep dependent on them for daily living. It is an outright scheme to create a permanent underclass to serve their personal and business interests and to prop up their hold on political power.
In the end, we are all deluding ourselves in thinking that the cheap goods and labor costs afforded by illegal immigrants are a good bargain. I think most Americans understand this. We are subsidizing this insanity with our very lives (as the families of those who died on 9-11 can attest), with massive crime rates and prison costs, with skyrocketing welfare, defense and education costs, and most importantly with the destruction of the very economic and social conditions (an independent and self reliant population) that are required to maintain democratic self-government. If we added all these costs of illegal immigration to the prices of the goods and services they are involved in providing I doubt anyone would consider us better off in the bargain
This is the second and , in my opinion , the more important reason why pro-open borders elites in both parties are wrong to oppose controlling immigration -- because it is destroying our ability as a people to maintain sufficient consensus about our own political creed to continue to maintain not only our liberty but our very existence. It has already resulted in a massive failure of democratic theory as illustrated by the fact that the two parties have imposed on us for decades an open borders policy that a vast majority of us have never supported. They have accomplished this by never offering candidates that reflect what the majority of Americans want on immigration and by a media campaign to smear any opposition to illegal immigration as racist. To many Americans, this proves that our democratic process does not work, that the majority cannot prevail against the will of the ruling elites.
We all know that a few high profile prosecutions of employers will put an immediate brake on the lure of employment and would do more than anything else to stop illegal immigration without the need for draconian law enforcement measures or “roundups.” But Bush and the majority of other politicians of both parties will not support enforcing even the light employer sanctions that already exist. Think of why this is happening. Congress gets the credit for passing the laws but their refusal to demand enforcement of them lets the executive branch off the hook. It is a perfect scheme to avoid doing what the vast majority of Americans want done -- stop illegal immigration!
The widening economic and philosophical divisions between the interest of these elites and ordinary Americans and the dwindling consensus about our own founding principles that result are illustrated perfectly by this problem of illegal immigration. Either we deal with this issue in a way that respects majority opinion and restores confidence in the principles of democratic self-governance and simple self preservation or we sit by and wait for the completion of the destruction of our political heritage of liberty.