Imagine that it is June 1964 and Congress is getting set to vote on the Civil Rights Act. What do you think will happen if the New York Times sends a reporter to Greenville, South Carolina to gauge the mood of public opinion? The South has changed since then, of course. For one thing, most white folks have the good sense these days not to espouse open racism. If they don’t like the idea of creating a path to citizenship for the people who pick their vegetables, clean their motel rooms, and look after their children, they attribute their reluctance to the rule of law, not their distaste for brown people or their desire not to see them vote. You aren’t as likely to hear people throw around terms like “spics” and “wetbacks.” Instead, you get stuff like this:
“The people who are coming across the border — as far as I’m concerned, they are common criminals,” said Bill Storey, 68, a retired civil engineer from Greenville. “We should not adopt policies to reward them for coming into this country illegally. I have all the regard for them in the world if they come through the legal system, but not the illegal system.”
It’s a simple idea that seems to make perfect sense. If you entered the country illegally, then you broke the law, and you are therefore a criminal. Why should your crime be ignored? Why should you be rewarded with citizenship? I get the sentiment. But it’s just too simplistic.
To see why, all we have to do is look at what happened in neighboring Georgia when they passed a harsh anti-immigrant law.
Georgia’s tough anti-illegal-immigrant law drove a sizable fraction of the migrant labor pool out of the state, and as a result, “millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops [are] unharvested and rotting in the fields.” The jobs the migrants did paid an average of $8/hour, without benefits, a wage that is so low that the state’s probationed prisoners have turned it down. Guest-writing in the Atlantic’s economics section, Adam Ozimek doesn’t believe that the farms would be viable if they paid wages that legal American workers would take: “it’s quite possible that the wages required to get workers to do the job are so high that it’s no longer profitable for farmers to plant the crops in the first place.”
Georgia farmers were put at a competitive disadvantage because they could no longer rely on cheap undocumented migrant workers who were still available to pick the crops in other states. They couldn’t attract American citizens to do the job at anything near the pay rate they had been giving the migrant-workers. Even probationary prisoners quit after a day or two of poorly-compensated hard labor. The result was rotting produce and an inability to compete.
Now, there are a lot of ways you can look at that situation, but one thing you really need to keep in mind is that these workers are needed, and if they hadn’t entered the country illegally, they would have to be invited. When you think about it that way, it makes a lot less sense to think of them as common criminals. If we don’t want to pay a lot more for our produce, we need immigrants to do this work. We should be allowing them to immigrate legally and become citizens and earn the minimum wage.
There is an underclass in this country that is making motel beds and doing landscaping and picking fruits and vegetables, and the low pay they receive serves less to depress wages than to provide a subsidy to people who pay directly or indirectly for their services.
If the Republicans don’t like these folks because they are Latino or because they don’t think they will vote for the conservative ideology, maybe they can find some white people in the former Soviet Union to do these jobs. Otherwise, they need to stop bitching and accept economic reality. These undocumented workers are here because there is a demand for their work. If we recognized that and legalized their entry into the country, we’d have a much fairer system. But you won’t see ANY Republicans calling for that.
People shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives like a system where brown folks work the fields but don’t have full citizenship rights and the ability to vote.
