In the last couple of days, both Dave (The Real Problem) and Neil (in a comment on my previous post) have made good points about the economics of the immigration problem. In fact, I’ll post some of Neil’s comment here, for anybody who didn’t follow that particular comment thread:
…Red state know-nothings don't know who the real enemy is.
The real enemy of the middle class is the priviliged corporate management elite and its huge deficit-financed tax breaks, its program of off-shoring American jobs, its abandonment of promised health and pension benefits, its attack on social security, its Walmartization of the American marketplace, and (yes) its exploitation of an illegal alien workforce.
It may be irrational for a frightened, insecure, and largely powerless (in Karl Rove's America) middle class to begrudge illegal aliens their consumption of increasingly limited social services, or their impact on local budgets, taxes, wages and benefits.
It might be more rational for the shitheads in the red states to figure out who the real enemy is. But you know, it isn't really hard to understand why the illegal aliens have become the scapegoat for the economic ruin of the American middle class...
The immigration problem in the United States is inextricably tangled up with the labor/minimum wage/cost of living mess this country is in. The Mexicans stream over the border because there are jobs here that Americans don’t want to do for the amount of money the employers are willing/able to pay. Mexicans are happy to work for $5.15 an hour, or even less. That five dollars is more than the average Mexican earns in an entire day.
Let’s say you work at a minimum wage job here in America (which few Americans do, because they can’t afford to. But I’ll revisit that later.) You earn $41.20 a day. If someone told you that you could go somewhere and make $41.20 an hour, and you could send most of that money back home to your family, would you go? Possibly not…because most Americans are not willing to live as frugally as Mexicans do when they come here, in order to maximize the amount of money they can send home. Then again, if we were used to living in the kind of poverty they know, it probably wouldn’t be a difficult choice at all.
Which brings me to why those American minimum wage jobs are so awfully available for illegals to come here and “steal.” It’s the same reason our jobs are sailing off to everywhere in the world but here: The American cost of living. A “cheap” apartment costs almost $1000 a month in some markets, barely habitable homes run $150,000 and up; a meal at McDonald’s for a family of four costs, what? $20? $30? More? How many $5.15 hours would it take to be able to afford all of this? Or any of it? The rich, of course, are in hog heaven; they can still have anything they want. And the more it costs, the more they can revel in the satisfying elitism of it all.
I’m not an economist. I’m sure there are official theories and factoids in the study of economics about which I am completely naive. I’ll even second Neil’s opinion and say it’s all the fault of the privileged corporate management elite. But it seems to me that as long as the American cost of living remains astronomical, this country’s workforce is not going to be competitive in a global marketplace. We are either going to have to forbid American companies to ship our jobs out of the country and live happily ever after in inflated economic isolation, or we are going to have to undergo a complete financial collapse in order to correct our inflated living costs. I think we all know which of these is more likely to transpire. Maybe it’s our trepidation of this event that’s making us so cranky at the illegal Mexicans doing the poor-paying, dirty jobs that are left, and none of us can afford to do.
This is just one layer of the onion that is illegal immigration in this country. It is a complex, nuanced, intricate issue that right-wing House Republicans attempted to reduce to only the negative emotions swirling around it—the fear, the bigotry, the outrage, the nationalism—for their own political gain. Sorry, my desperate for re-election Republican friends. I’m afraid there is no quick fix for this one.
