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

[jla]

Further words of wisdom from the epitome of rational conservatism, the inimitable Mrs. Schlafly.

[Puppage]

promoting legislation to grant some kind of amnesty/guest-worker status to millions of illegal aliens residing in the United States

Nothing like rewarding those who are proficient at Hide N Seek.

[angkor]

All good points from Schlafly, but here's one more:

What is the alleged morality (and I direct this specifically at GWB) of adding 15 million lawbreaking illegal aliens to an immigration system which is currently backlogged with millions of legal and law-abiding applications?

And what is the morality of elevating lawbreakers above the legal applicants who go through years of waiting and then a rigorous process of medical checks, background checks, and financial requirements?

[angkor]

Forgot to add:

The utter failure of the administration to address the complete brokenness of CIS (nee INS) and at the same time to suggest adding 15 million illegal aliens to its workload is duplicitous at best, insane at worst.

Everyone on Capitol Hill knows that the immigration system is completely broken - not to mention at the White House - so to imply that CIS can handle this new workload (a magnitude above its current capacity) is completely dishonest.

[zerosix]

bump for ?"Iron Lady II"

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

If only Bushbots could read.

[untrained skeptic]

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.

That's lumping a pretty wide variety of plans together as one. Not exactly a thoughful discourse on the subject.

I agree that simply making illegal immigrants here in this country legal is the wrong thing to do.

However with our low unemployment rates it should be obvious that our economy can support more workers than are legally in the United States.

Just don't allow anyone to apply for the program from within the United States that isn't here legally, and the issue of it being an amnesty program goes away.

This has been proposed, yet it gets ignored by isolationists who will call any plan to allow more legal immigrants to come and work an amnesty plan.

I'm sick of people mischaracterizing things. If they have to lie to me to get me to support their viewpoint, their viewpoint doesn't deserve my support.

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.

Why don't we let them decide for themselves what message it sends and let them decide if it benefits them.

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.

Spoken like a true elitist. The guest worker plans I've seen have a provision that allows people that have proven themselves to be a benefit to our society a path to residency and citizenship.

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.

Some care does need to be taken to not flood the labor market with unskilled labor. The rational plans that have been proposed do address this.

We have a free market economy. Wages are determined by supply and demand. We need enough workers to allow our economy to grow. If we have too large a supply of workers, unemployment goes up, and wages get unreasonably low.

We are sitting at 5% unemployment right now, even with the huge number of illegal workers here in the US. The unemployment rate historicly doesn't stay much lower than that.

Right now we don't really need a large influx of legal immigrant workers, however if we start being successful at curbing illegal immigration and deporting illegal immigrants, we are going to need to increase legal immigration or we are going to harm our economy. We will put ourselves into a recession as our economy shrinks.

The construction industry is a decent example of this.

There is a lot of contractors in construction that hire illegal immigrants, though many times the employer has a limited ability to find out they are illegal. They provide SS numbers to the empolyer, and the IRS never notifies them that the numbers are invalid or belong to someone else.

Some employers likely conspire with the illegal immigrants to hire them, others likely don't but just do their best not to get sued over some equal opportunity regulation.

If the IRS suddenly starts doing their job and reporting all these illegal immigrants workers and they get deported, builders have a harder time getting subs to do the work. It takes longer to get things built. The tight labor market drives up labor costs. Less houses being built also drives up prices in the housing market.

Inflation goes up. Our money buys less.

Less houses being built means that less building materials are sold.

Inflation goes up. The economy shrinks. Welcome to a recession.

American workers lose their jobs. Those that still have jobs find their wages buying less.

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.

So is she recomending not having time limits on how long guest workers can stay and work in the US? Or is she recomending that they have more mobility in jobs once they get here? The plans I've read require matching a worker with a job, but I don't know how hard it is for them to switch jobs. It didn't seem that difficult for people here on H1B visas to switch jobs, why would the guest worker plan be different?

Between job mobility and a possible path the citizenship, I would think this concern is being addressed in some of the plans.

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.

France and Germany has too many socialist protections built in for workers. That is what is keeping people from having job mobility. When conpanies cannot get rid of bad workers and hire better ones it causes such problems.

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.

Yes, the government of Mexico is corrupt and it exploits their people.

You can argue that a guest worker program would give their people a chance to see a different form of government and raise their expectations for their own government and force change.

You can argue that it helps prevent economic colapse and helps keep money flowing into that country that helps the Mexican governemnt.

In the end, the purpose of a guest worker or visa program is to help our country grow economicly. At the same time it benefits the workers who come here.

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.

If the guest worker program provides for amnesty this is true. If it doesn't this in untrue. Lumping all the plans together doesn't help address this issue, it distorts it.

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.

I have seen no provisions that would exempt employers who payed any workers under the table from being prosecuted for violating the law. This one is pure B. S.

We need to enforce those laws better. We need to enforce our immigration laws better. However a guest worker program is legal immigration, not illegal immigration. It requires that the immigrant have a job to remain here. If they aren't getting paid over the table and paying taxes, they aren't part of the program.

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.

Amnesty would be.

A guest worker program that does not include amnesty would not be. 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.

I agree.

The rest of the article was about the need to enforce immigration law and close our borders, which I agree with.

I also believe that there is an immediate need to close our borders and step up enforcement while a guest worker program or revised system of work visas could follow. However, I do believe that if we are successful in enforcement, we will harm our country's economy if we don't address the need to people to work.

[A. Pole]

If the IRS suddenly starts doing their job and reporting all these illegal immigrants workers and they get deported, builders have a harder time getting subs to do the work. It takes longer to get things built. The tight labor market drives up labor costs.

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

[Prime Choice]

It's been shown that whenever labor gets too costly, Americans have a knack for automating the process to make it more affordable.

With that in mind, the demand for illegal labor is doing nothing but stalling true American progress.

[RFT1]

A recession is WELL worth the price to be paid if it means the long term stability of the nation. If you want to see the future of the US if this is not stopped, just look at the change that has taken place in California. 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.

The US is FAR more than just an market economy, and what is good for short term economic gains is often not good for the nation as a whole.

[Paul Ross]

However, I do believe that if we are successful in enforcement, we will harm our country's economy if we don't address the need to people to work.

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

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

And what we should have kept, but were deluded into trading away for a mess of pottage.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: "IRS never notifies them [employer] that the [SSN] numbers are invalid or belong to someone else."

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.)

RE: "If the IRS suddenly starts doing their job and reporting all these illegal immigrants workers. . . ."

That should easy enough to do. The IRS likely assigned the ones who asked for one an Individual Taxpayer Identifaction Number.

These ITINs of course do not match the SSA's Earnings History File -- I don't know what was done about it except to put the mismatches in the Earnings Suspense File. Once the worker is legal s/he can transfer everything to a valid SSN. Lots of work ahead for the SSA.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: "If they aren't getting paid over the table and paying taxes, they aren't part of the program."

I was sure the McCain plan said, pay a fine and pay back taxes. If you worked with a bogus SSN or had an ITIN it's likely you paid taxes.

Under-the-table folks likely did not and they would have to file back tax returns and that would be good for them because they'd likely get earned income credit refund checks. What a deal!

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: "However with our low unemployment rates it should be obvious that our economy can support more workers than are legally in the United States."

Many stop at the unemployment rate. There's more to this.

Typically the BLS Employment Situation says each month that the "employment-population ratio also was little changed over the month at 62.8 percent, and the labor force participation rate held at 66.1 percent." [End]

"The employment population ratio is the ratio of employed to the working age population."

"This is the percentage of the working age population which is employed. A high employment/population ratio can mean that an economy is creating jobs and employing a large percentage of its working age population."

One definition for labor force participation rate is

"the fraction of the working-age population that is employed or seeking employment"

Not surprising the Employment-Population Ratio is higher now than when single-income-households were common and attending college was less. It along with the number of employed went up during the 1980s. I believe that's when many women entered the labor market.

IMO if we could drag workers into the labor market starting from a Employment-Population Ratio of around 56 percent from the late 1940s to where it hit 60 percent in 1980, peaked during the dot con (yes con) years and today is in the 62 to 64 percent range, we can still do it.

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

Now, what will bring 'em into the labor market? Well, I've often cited three labor studies one each by Pew Hispanic Center, Northeastern University, and the Center for Immigration Studies. 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.

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.

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

Goes without saying, I am no expert.

Failing to convince anyone about the Employment-Population Ratio I will fall back on my oft-repeated modest proposal.

Red China has 800 million citizen peasants. They're left out of the booming special economic zones, trouble's abrewin'.

Many of those 800 million would come here, work unlimited hours for a dollar or so an hour and a clean place to sleep on premises. I am sure the Chi-coms would be happy to pay their way.

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

[Archangelsk]

Good reply, but Americans need to get serious about their education for this to happen. (A good start would be to burn every TV in the land and focus on what's important. I know, I know, that's way too hard for the average member of the herd).

[janetgreen]

All this common sense by this true conservative Phyllis Schlafly will go over the heads of the Bush worshipers who think he can do no wrong. With them, it's party over principle.

[untrained skeptic]

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

Read the rest of the post instead of cherry picking one statement.

If wages become artificially high due to too tight of a labor market it makes it so that the products those workers create become to costly for people to buy.

It causes too much inflation and while it helps a very small portion of the population that is receiving those wages, it harms many more people than it helps.

I don't believe that we should allow unlimited immigration.

I do believe that we should make it so that employers should have to first try and find an American worker to fill a job before hiring someone in a guest worker program.

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.

This is something they can detect and have detected in other VISA programs, such as the H1B technology VISAs.

The key to any work visa program is matching immigrant workers with necessary skills with job openings in a competitive market.

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

[Xenalyte]

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, we salute you!

[A. Pole]

If wages become artificially high due to too tight of a labor market

What is artificial about market raising the wages? If there were no cheap Third World labor, would US job market be artificial? Would US economy decline?

There were civilizations with plenty of cheap labor like ancient Egypt and they were quite stagnant.