Immigration is an anomalous issue. The “left” position is really right, and the “right” position is really left. Both parties publicly espouse positions contrary to many of their most important political contributors. Republicans are all up in arms about it. It makes Democrats sing encomia to their immigrant grandparents. But they’re both merely pandering.
Illegal immigration and some legal immigration (e.g. H1B visas) persist for a very simple reason: to keep down the pay of American workers. Republicans love to say that these are jobs that Americans won’t do. And they’re right: for what hotels want to pay their chambermaids, lawn services their gardeners, software companies their programmers, hospitals their nurses and techs, property managers their janitors, and packing plants their meatpackers, it’s hard to find US citizens who will fill the jobs.
Nationwide, low pay and long hours made it difficult for hospitals to find RN’s and techs. But rather than encourage more Americans to become health care workers or advance their skills with higher pay and educational benefits, many have simply decided to staff up with foreigners at much lower pay. Illegal immigration permitted meatpackers to shut down their unionized plants. Meatpacking is now done at feedlots, manned by illegals behind big fences. Many lawn services and property management companies haven’t even pretended to look for American employees for decades. Don’t want to pay American programmers and engineers what their education says they’re worth? Tell the Feds you can’t find enough Americans with those “special skills” and apply for a stack of H1B visas. Republican administrations (and the Clinton Administration) have always been very generous about this problem. You can see where the party of, for and by corporate wealth would actually favor porous borders. This is another issue where they will huff and puff, but Republicans with two brain cells to rub together are not going to blow any houses down.
There is no reason these jobs shouldn’t pay a decent living wage, and no reason educated workers shouldn’t make a good living. Every other economically advanced country in the world tries to protect the jobs of its workers. Not ours. We send as many production jobs overseas as we can, as quickly as we can. But some jobs just can’t be off-shored. It is not racist to protect the economic security of your citizens. Americans will take these service jobs if they pay a living wage. But they don’t, and the only way to make most of them pay a decent living wage is to unionize them.
And that’s where the rub for Democrats comes in. Of course Democrats want to make recent immigrants happy. They want their votes, and, right-wingers being who they are, want to make this about race, and not about economics. But it is about economics, and smart immigrants sure won’t want their kids to be chambermaids and gardeners and meatpackers at these wages.
The difference between the two parties is that, in the end, Republicans will not desert their real base, the profit-hungry corporations that hate unions. As with abortion, they will find a way just barely not to do what their voter base wants them to do.
Democrats on the other hand will betray their working class base faster than you can say Tim Geithner. Notice which unions left the AFL-CIO because it is too much in thrall to the Democrats: the unions representing the janitors and nurses like SEIU.
Racism confuses liberals. Don’t think smart Republicans don’t know this. It is nice to run to defend Mexicans and Filipinas and Indians from racism. But the American worker’s right to a decent wage is what is at issue here, and has been for 35 years and until Democrats start defending that rather than predatory corporations, expect more “racism” from precisely those Americans one of whose parents made a living wage at a service or production job, but who are themselves unable to attain economic security, even when both work.
