Agreed. Help the poor of the world where they are, not by moving them to America.

RE: Control the borders and punish employers of illegal immigrants now. With all due respect to the author, and to the posters who agree with this proposition, I submit simply that I believe it to be an impossible task that will lead only to more bloated bureaucracy and ineffectual control either of the borders or the marketplace. Would it not make more sense for all parties concerned to concentrate instead on improving the situation for all workers, new and old, and to find ways to achieve full assimilation of the new without harming the status of the old? More big government is not the answer. RG

But Michael, where do you stand on the proposed legislation which would make illegal immigration (and aiding immigrants) felonies? You've been dancing around these questions.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

We need to do something about immigration, and soon. But I'd rather see Congress fail to agree on anything this year than have it rush into ill-considered legislation that betrays our moral and democratic principles.

And that is the touchstone - our moral and democratic principles.

So what I am to make of the argument advanced by Hispanic religious leaders now on their way to Washington that immigrants in Texas do not receive adequate social services or that children of immigrants cannot realize the fruits of good scholarship in high school because they are denied admission to college or the fundamental critiissm of the House bill which sparked this past weekend's mass protests?

The point is that immigration cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader problem of globalization wherein corporate power unresponsive to democratic governance , as Krugman's criitique of the Bush guest-worker program illustrates, is slow but surely leading us to a WorldSweatShop economy in which growing income disparties will only accelerate to perilous speeds

If I were to speculate on the motives of immigration restrictionists, I would speculate that deep inside, they see what I just described as threatening, not positive. They think that our European-derived culture is responsible for the accomplishments of Western civilization, and they find the prospect of going to an American city and seeing all these persons of color speaking a foreign language very threatening to their place in this world.

Read the Op-Od. Krugman admits that the issue is more political than economic. He allows that Bush's Medicare plans cost more than immigration. And how about the tax breaks?
As someone who's lost money as a result of immigration, I'd still choose my tacos de carne enchida, dim sum, samosa and all that they imply, over what is no more and no less than my pocketbook. If people want to get pissed off while refusing to accept the real problems, then it's someone's job to remind them what those real problems are.
Don't read Michael Lind, read paul Krugman... with a skeptical eye.
Then decide how to respond.

"In dreams begin responsibilities."

Do you want both?
Or neither?

If I were to speculate on the motives of immigration restrictionists, I would speculate that deep inside, they see what I just described as threatening, not positive. They think that our European-derived culture is responsible for the accomplishments of Western civilization, and they find the prospect of going to an American city and seeing all these persons of color speaking a foreign language very threatening to their place in this world.

 

The cultural argument against immigration, articulated by Samuel Huntingdon in his latest book, is patently absurd.  It strongly echoes the ridiculous nativist talking points of the early 20th century, that claimed that the "non-white" Italians, Poles and Jews couldn't become true Americans.  

Still, progressives need to acknowledge that cultural unease is very much at the root to the backlash to immigration.  Addressing the most reasonable of those concerns - e.g. English fluency - will peel off the moderates from the hard-core racists.  There is nothing wrong with an ideal of cities full of fully bilinigual Americans of diverse backgrounds.   The point needs to be driven home that the current immigration regime and the draconian reform proposals being proposed prevents precisely the assimilation that Middle America wants to see.  

If Lind doesn't believe this, he should say it, rather than hiding behind some of the few liberals who opposed immigration.

 

As dyspeptic as Lind's style is, at the end of the day, he is advocating for amnesty, which pretty much sets him at odds with the nativists.  I think he has made it clear that his main problems with illegal immigration is the downward pressure it puts on the labor market as well as the dilution of the concept of American citizenship.     

Corvid

So in the end you conclude that Lind is probably a xenophobe. I've read quite a bit of his work, and I don't think he is. Rather, he seems to have a deep belief in the full meaning of citizenship.

As for the mariachis and taco stands, I suppose that's nice. I once lived in Los Angeles and have a different take on it. One day while on the freeway my old beater of a car blew a radiator hose, and I had to coast off into what turned out to be a Hispanic neighborhood. As I got out of the car and lifted the hood, several Hispanic guys began to approach, yelling that I didn't belong there and making threats. One appeared to pick up a rock.  That's all I saw before I hopped in the car and took off, hoping the engine wouldn't seize before I got back onto the freeway.  So the charms of Hispanic culture somehow elude me.

Granted, that's just one incident. But I'm also a native of the Midwest, where there were once whole industries that provided excellent union jobs that enabled many of the 2 out of 3 Americans who don't get college degrees to have a decent, middle class life. Those industries have been utterly ruined, and not by outsourcing or offshoring but by illegal immigration. If you don't believe me, read the chapter in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas" on the meat processing plant in Garden City, just one instance of many across the region. For every vibrant, modestly prosperous inner-city neighborhood that you can point to that has emerged from blight due to the energies and entrepreneurship of Hispanic immigrants (a genuine plus, I agree, if you don't count the enormous burden the immigrants place on local schools and hospitals), I can point to 10 once-vibrant and once-modestly prosperous Midwestern and Plains towns that have been ruined either directly or indirectly by the tide of immigration from Latin America, whether legal or illegal.

If you want Lind to step forward and plainly state his feelings about  "persons of color," then the liberals who favor the huge influx of immigration from Latin America should also step forward and say honestly that when they advocate humane immigration, what they know they'll really get is just the immigration without the humaneness, leaving the rest of us who actually have to live in the towns and neighborhoods devastated by these disastrous policies to clean up the mess.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Do you get the feeling that BushVillian "experts" are out of touch with reality - again?

Yes I live wacky Cahleefohnia, and worse, I live in the Capital of the Blue States of America...

So what.  I am here to tell you - Washington you've got a problem - another one.

Protests Over Immigration Bill Continue

By ROBERT JABLON, Associated Press Writer 4 minutes ago

Thousands of students walked out of class in California and Texas, and crowds in Detroit marched toward downtown Monday as immigrant supporters continued nearly a week of street protests against proposed immigration reforms.

In Washington, where lawmakers were discussing immigration legislation, about 100 demonstrators wore handcuffs to protest a proposal to criminalize aid programs for immigrants.

The Senate Judiciary Committee rejected that proposal Monday, approving an amendment that would protect charitable groups, but it also approved more than doubling the current force of 11,300 Border Patrol agents over the next six years.

Protesters organized by immigrant supporters including the Catholic Church have rallied in cities across the country, loudly objecting to legislation that would make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally, impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants, and build fences along part of the U.S.-Mexican border.

More than 500,000 gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, and tens of thousands rallied in Phoenix and Milwaukee last week.

On Monday, California's Cesar Chavez Day, at least 800 students walked out from eight Los Angeles-area schools ranging from the San Fernando Valley to the wealthy coastal enclave of Pacific Palisades, said Monica Carazo, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

By midmorning, the protests spread to downtown, where hundreds more students were walking the streets and chanting.

Officials at Huntington Park High School, south of downtown, locked the gates after classes started, but the students climbed over a chain-link fence and joined marchers in their heavily immigrant community.

Hundreds of teenagers also walked out of several high schools in Dallas and headed for a rally at a park, some carrying Mexican flags and others posters calling for Congress to recognize immigrant rights.

In Detroit, protesters waving Mexican flags marched from the southwest side of the city where many Latinos live toward a federal building downtown.

"We are illegal immigrants if you trace our heritage all the way back, but we are here and we are working and we are living the American dream," said Janet Padron, a 22-year-old Allen Park, Mich., resident who was raised in California.

"Do you see the community," Padron asked, pointing to the thousands of people surrounding her. "Do you see how many people didn't go to work today?"

Legalization as articulated in Kennedy's bill (incorporated with enforcement of employment of legal workers and more money for border policing) will not drive wages down... these workers are already here earning depressed wages.  Giving them legal status will remove the employer's ability to tell them he can't pay them much because he's taking a risk of a fine.  That is what happens today.  Also many illegals are members of families whose other members have legal status.  Consider the effect on these families if their father, mother or grandparent is deported. 

 As for the loss of manufacturing jobs, don't blame this on illegal immigration ... it is pretty obvious that that is a result of offshoring.

Scratch a liberal and you'll find a cheap labor conservative with pretensions of caring for their fellow American.

This is the Nathan Newman fallacy.  The whole reason illegal immigration exists is that these people are willing to work for sub-standard wages and they won't complain.  How are you going to "improve the situation for all workers" when there are hordes of workers who are so desperate that they don't care about "improving the situation?"

This also doesn't do anything to address the supply and demand issue.  Simply put, the more workers there are willing to do a given job, the lower the wage will be.  If we're really serious about raising wages for poor people, a good place to start would be by reducing the supply at the low end.

Some Republicans are salivating over the prospect of more cheap labor and some Democrats are greedy for future votes. Meanwhile, the more farsighted in both parties are concerned about the long term health of our country. We can never invite all of the world's poor to come and join us. If they did, we couldn't help them. I grew up on the Texas border and am very comfortable with hispanic culture. It's the prospect of a billion people living in this country that makes me uncomfortable.

On the purely political front, for Democrats, there was a little paragraph that struck me in this A.P. article Saturday:

The Los Angeles demonstration led to fights between black and Hispanic students at one high school, but the protests were largely peaceful, the authorities said.

I may be bordering on sophistry implying more from that than a simple LA. gang thing, but it made me wonder what a lot traditional Democratic "base" thinks on these issues.  I'd sure be interested in seeing more poll data on it. It's not that it would change my own mind that more broad-based mixed legal immigration, and various crackdowns on illegal Central American immigration would be good for this country, but I think it might be crucial to understand what class/culture dynamics are going on, for tactical reasons, for figuring out the best way to approach the problems and solutions. I think this is truly an issue that crosses classic party lines in astounding ways.  (Obviously the U.S. Catholic Church is one institution who isr trying to breech some of the divides, but being someone raised in Vatican II ethos, I wouldn't put my hopes up as to them having a clue about actually accomplishing anything.)  All the old inflammatory wounds about the whole "Latino" thing are being resurrected, I think, about lack of a desire to assimilate and share in American culture--I even see that HBO keeps replaying their film about Latino high school students protests on their various channels.

This is not an easy issue for either political party.

In regards to manufacturing jobs its a mixed bag. On one hand illegals are taking manufacturing jobs in many sectors because they work cheap and are disposable.  I know of dozens of medium sized companies in Valencia, CA(where I live) that hire almost exclusively illegals and where OSHA and INS are told to take a hands off approach to these businesses.

Then there is the construction/housing trade that is almost been totally taken over by illegal aliens. Basically all you have now are white bosses and hordes of illegals doing the grunt work. These jobs used to pay good. That is until construction bosses figured they could hire these illegals and pay them 1/10th what their white counterparts were getting.

If you pay a decent wage, you won't last long in this business now. You are forced to hire illegals in order to stay in business. 

And yes off-shoring has also hurt the manufacturing sector. So the  average American worker(not your typical liberal) gets hammered from both side. And to make matters worse liberals are also proponents of off-shoring. The American worker just can't get a break from either party.

Your post is nothing but stereotypes and unreliable anecdotes. So you have one bad incident with several Hispanic guys (who could have, for all you know, been descendants of the Mexicans who lived in Los Angeles before it joined the United States and not immigrants at all, or third or fourth generation Americans), and that proves that there's something bad about Hispanic culture in Los Angeles?!? That's the worst sort of hasty generalization.

It is true that there are areas of industry that used to hire working class whites and now hire Hispanics. But you can't really separate that from the general transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. Industries no longer hire working class whites for any number of reasons. For instance, some plants move to Mexico-- and more will if we restrict Mexican immigration to the United States. Some close entirely. Some have automated. Guess what-- you can't repeal the laws of economics, and the expectation that there will be the same number of good paying industrial jobs for high school graduates as there were in 1950's, despite the advancement of technology in both the manufacturing process and the ease of moving people and products across borders is a completely ridiculous assumption. To single out the Hispanic labor force, which is only a small part of this story, as being to blame for these developments is ethnic scapegoating and may be a sign of prejudice.

And this "enormous burden" on schools and hospitals? Where's the evidence of that. Every statistic I have seen is that while first generation immigrants have more children, second generation immigrants assimilate. So the costs you talk about are pretty well contained (and are probably outweighed by the huge economic benefit of immigrants in the community-- remember, we pay only 40 percent of our income in taxes, with only a couple of percentage points of that paying for social welfare programs, and the other 60 percent are paying prices that are significantly lower because of immigrant labor).

In any event, the American working class burdens schools and hospitals too. Indeed, white working class Americans are the most likely recipients of welfare. And they are disproportionately among the uninsured, so they burden hospitals. And they send their kids to public schools, paid for by your taxes. Do I think there is anything wrong with that? No. But again, you are assuming that Hispanics are the ones who are costing all the money that we spend on education and health care in this country? Why? Because of stereotypes and prejudice.

Finally, with respect to the "towns and neighborhoods devastated by these disatrous policies", I think that goes back to my earlier point. If a plant shifts from a white or black workforce to a hispanic workforce, you see it. You don't notice, in contrast, what the prices you pay in the market are vs. what they would be if everyone were forced to hire Americans in a tight labor market. But look up "cost push inflation" in an economics textbook, and you will see that this can be devestating.

What you really have is towns and neighborhoods that can't guarantee the economic security they could in the 1950's, which is a bad thing, but where even a person working at a low level service job can afford a much better standard of living than they could 50 years ago, which is a very, very good thing. But hey, if all you see is a mass of angry Mexicans throwing rocks at your car, maybe you won't see that.

How hard is it to set up a tip line (and publicize it) so that workers can report their employers for hiring illegals?  It would be totally self-policing.  We're going to spend a ton of money in America criminalizing some portion of the population.  It might as well be crumb-bum employers rather than nickel-and-dime pot dealers.

The real reason it won't happen is that the people most affected by this have given up on expecting either party to really do anything about it.  The Democrats abandoned the working poor long ago and the blogging left is not threatened by immigration.  The blogging left will continue to hide their disdain for Mexicans-as-workers-who-deserve-just-compensation behind their appreciation of Mexicans-as-cultural-artifacts.

As I've commented elsewhere, I'm not worried about immigration per se.  It's the generalized attempt to turn America into a neo-peasant society--albeit a racially polyglot one--that worries me.  Many of the jobs filled by Mexicans should be increasingly replaced by automation--not simply by higher-paid Americans (at least not over the long run).  High wages drive technological innovations for labor-saving devices.  Einstein recognized this about America when he emigrated here.  Innovation is the lifeblood of a society that progresses, grows wealth, and moves people toward more engaging and fulfilling work.  Let's quit romanticizing low-skill/hard-work labor.  It's like a strange form of liberal-professional self-loathing.

---

Are you ready for A New Departure?

Karl Rove is a genius.

He's got liberals calling liberals the worst names in the book.  We can't stay focused and we viciously turn on each other at the drop of a hat.

They think that our European-derived culture is responsible for the accomplishments of Western civilization,

What is the distinction between "Hispanic" and "European-derived"? Is Spanish no longer a European language? When did that happen? 

It is even a bit more complicated than that.  In the 1980s I renovated small buidings in Brooklyn.  We did not have a union crew but we did not pay substandard wages.  Our electrians were all Poles with advanced degrees in chemistry.  They were making so much more money working as electrians that they could afford to live in the outer boroughs, send dollars back to Poland and try to get their families to the United States. They told us they could never make that kind of money in Poland.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Lou Dobbs Tonight - May 6 - 2005 CNN
Jose Quinonez (bluelatinos.org): What I have issues with, Lou, is that your tone, your rhetoric is actually inciting a lot of fear in America. You know as a civic leader I think you are using a lot of dangerous speech that can incite to violence. Let me tell you why. Many times you depict immigration, immigrants as disease carrying, you know, criminals are invading this country. Sometimes you do talk about immigrants and terrorists in the same breath. [...]
Dobbs: We are talking about illegal immigration....Don't underestimate this audience, or Americans, Jose. We don't scare easily.

Well, a lot of liberals do feel that it's hard morally to oppose practices that are bringing jobs and wealth to the poorest countries in the world. And DLC Clinton liberals feel that it doesn't hurt America to make American corporations more profitable and competitive with foreign ones by sending their labor to the countries where it's cheapest.

"Lind and to some extent Krugman fall into the trap of compartmentalizi ng the debate and by distoring its parameters, preclude a resolution."

Excellent point. How you frame a question determines its meaning.

All I'm seeing here are people who basically just don't want anybody else in this country because they think we've got enough problems. We do - but they weren't caused by the immigrants, they were entirely caused by the state and its supporters  - and not just the state in the US, but the state in Mexico and everywhere else in the world.

Everybody here sounds like my father who used to bitch about "foreigners" - and this was back in the 1950's and '60's, in a town like Bristol, Connecticut, which is about as European in origin as it gets (I think there was maybe one or two black families in the whole town of 50,000, or so it seemed.)

Sorry, everybody, you're just reaping the rewards of your own incorrectness about just about everything. And anything you try to do about it without correcting your incorrectness - well, it just ain't gonna work.

Immigration policies are so far down on the totem pole in connection with what is wrong with this country that I just can't get interested. But I can see from that half a million man march in LA that if the Republicans OR the Democrats try to make it an issue on the backs of the immigrants, they're ALL gonna lose.

And that would be a good thing - unless of course we end up with concentration camps for immigrants, which wouldn't surprise me in the least given the way most of the people on this site think. It's obvious to me that the liberal elites and the Republican thugs here both agree that the state can do no wrong.

Richard Steven Hack

www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com 

Cheap labor liberals.

Job security. Benefits. Retirement. Work place safety. Work place environment.

Exactly.  The best way to stop uncontrolled illegal immigration is to look inward and make those supposedly demeaning and backbreaking jobs that Americans won't take attractive and secure.  The demand for cheap foreign workers would dry up. 

Whatever effect that would have on prices and the competitiveness of American goods and services in the world market is another matter entirely.  But what price does one put on protecting the sovereignty of a nation, its laws, and its traditional way of life?

We have been played badly by politicians in the hip pocket of multinationals, who recognize only too well how nativist fear of the "Other" and "terrists" vastly outweigh any popular acknowledgement of the real dangers to our continued welfare and independence.  Unions are marginalized, the middle class grows smaller, physical and mental health become subject to insurance and drug company profits, tax cuts continue to favor  the rich. 

Free trade and free movement across international boundaries ought to follow, not lead, what happens inside this country.  The only way to achieve a natural balance is to restore value to our own workplace, even if it means a shrinking dollar and a need to curtail imports across the board.  The American experiment with empire needs to be ended.

RG

"And that would be a good thing - unless of course we end up with concentration camps for immigrants, which wouldn't surprise me in the least given the way most of the people on this site think."

On behalf of everyone who posts on this site, give me a freaking break.   

Primetimer wrote............

"Free trade and free movement across international boundaries ought to follow, not lead, what happens inside this country ".......If then......................

Whatever the theoretical arguments for free trade (Keynes believed that "modern mass production processes can be performed in most countries ....with equal efficiency") how much sense do they make for us ? Does anyone believe that if the rest of the world ceased to exist we couldn't  feed ,clothe and otherwise take care of ourselves very well ?. ..........As an exception by providing lower tariffs to Latin America we can create jobs in the countries from which most of our uncontrolled immigrants come so they can work and live among their own families and people who speak their language. But for that to work we  need to have higher tariffs to the rest of the world.

Calling Robert Reich a "DLC Dem" is bit of a stretch, but I take the point - centrist Democrats do not believe in messing with globalization.

And there's a reason why people of all political persuasions do not have an answer to globalization, outsourcing and offshoring - there is none.  Or more precisely, there are no answers that do not entail unintended consequences that are worse than the problem they are trying to solve.

Like all technological innovations, this one will be disruptive to a small group of American workers and we should do what we can to help those affected find new jobs.  But let's be clear about a few things.  First, the number of workers affected by outsourcing is small relative to the size of the workforce.  Projections that the whole middle class will be out of a job as their work moves to China or India are completely ridiculous.  Second, technology is still a far, far greater disruptive force in the economy.  Way more people lose their jobs to technological change than to globalization or outsourcing.

It is neither right, nor politically wise to simply throw up your hands and say there's nothing to do here.  Clearly, while the economy as a whole benefits, those benefits are very unevenly distributed and there are many losers in the process that need to be helped.  That's where progressives should focus their efforts, and it has to do with helping people become more flexible in their career choices, and more adaptable.  The issue of inequality is a thornier one, but is also worth of attention.

You can't just say stop the world, I want to get off.

The growing prescence of Japanese carmakers in the United States is a bad thing?   The notion that globalization is a one way street is not realistic.  globalization is not just a function of treaties but of technology, such as the one that makes TPMCafe possible.  Also global finance pretty much requires other countries to acquire dollars. 

There is also the rise of China, India, Poland and Brazil to name just four.  They have people entering the middle class and who want goods at the losest price.  Americans have for so long dominated the world economy alone we are not really used to seeing other nations rise and compete with us not as low cost producers but as consumers.  This likely to mean that it will be in producers to locate near those consumers as well as in the United States. 

Lastly what we now call globalization has in a sense been going on for a long time.  Shoes, textiles and other manufacturing was done in the Northeast.  For the last century those industries have disappeared from there.  The first place they disappeared to was to the American South. 

I believe you are wrong that globalization is merely cyclical.  It ebbs and flows that is true but as the creation of the EU, and other blocs it is hard to see how you stop a process that makes more people better off. 

Daniel A. Greenbaum