Friday, Dee Mayers of California posted a little noticed but provocative question relating to illegal immigration.
In part, her post went like this:
"Arizona's new immigration law requires the police to stop people on the street and ask for legal status if officers have reasonable doubt they are in this country illegally. On Wednesday of this week a federal judge blocked this part of the law and other parts of it from taking effect, is this the answer to the perplexing problem of illegal aliens? What is the solution?"
Here is my considered response. It expresses a view which I've only hinted toward on ActiveRAIN before. It is not a popular view in many varied places. But here it is:
The sole reason the United States has a large amount of illegal immigration is because of the great disparity in economic opportunity between the United States and Mexico.
In only two places in the world does greater disparity (in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person) exist across a land border: North Korea v. South Korea, Israel v. the Palestinians.
I would contend that it's not the immigration that is the problem, but the disparity itself.
We could fix the disparity in one of three ways:
1. We can reduce the growth of our own GDP per person.
We have done a great job of that by spending more than we make ...as a people, as a government, and as individuals. We've done it by teaching our children, for three generations, that they are too good to work in a factory.
Countries who have not done these things are moving ahead of us - and we are moving - year by year in a direction that will make us less desirable to Mexicans looking to better their lives.
2. We can increase the GDP per capita in Mexico.
We have been doing that by adopting such things as NAFTA...in an effort to improve investment and job creation south of our border.
But the same folks who now so vehemently condemn "illegal immigration" also hated that effort - nearly, but not quite, so loudly.
A weakness in this approach is that people in many other countries much farther away are willing to work for even less in factories in their home countries than are Mexicans in Mexico.
We have also been doing that (#2, above) by allowing Mexican immigrants to exhibit their extreme family values by sending billions in money home to their wives, children, parents....and communities.
If there is anything the nativists among us hate more than having Mexican immigrants here, it's that they send money back there.
The Latinos have such strong family values that they send more money home annually than the US government sends in non-military foreign aid ....to the entire world.
Still, tactics 1 and 2 have not reduced the disparity sufficiently so that Mexicans have stopped being willing to leave family and home behind - to come here in hopes of bettering their situation.
They still come - knowing that they will have to endure years of work in low-paying occupations, while they struggle to learn English and look over their shoulders at all times for the agents from ICE. They do it despite the price demanded by coyotes to help them come. They do it despite the very real chance of dying on the way here and the clear danger of sharing the desert trails with drug smugglers.
They remind me of the immigrants who came to America, largely - but not exclusively - from England during the 1600's and 1700's. Half of those long-ago immigrants were too poor to afford passage on the crowded, sickly, leaky little boats of the day. So they signed on as indentured servants, agreeing to work for seven years after arrival - receiving only room and board from the new employers that met them at the boat.
Of course, a huge fraction of them never had to live up to that agreement. They simply died in route and were pitched overboard.
(I'll not mention - in this argument - all the immigrants who came here in involuntary servitude. They had it worse by several degrees.)
3. We can choose a third alternative - in two parts.
A. We can go to Mexico to retire.
We can go not to Florida or Arizona or Palm Desert or cheap-living Texas, but down to Old Mexico. I mean not just buying timeshares. I mean buying houses.
Many Americans could live like kings down there - even when compared to our ordinary internal snowbirds.
This trend is beginning. If Mexico was a little smarter they would encourage and facilitate a decision to retire there big time.
It will take relaxed rules on taking retirement benefits down there. It will take more enlightened policies regarding ownership of real estate by non-Mexicans.
It will take time, but it will happen.
B. We can let a lot MORE Mexicans come here legally.
All we have to do is change our laws and presto-change-o, illegal becomes legal. It should be a lead-pipe political cinch.
Right?
Then all those Americans who now say they are in favor of legal immigration - but only oppose people coming here illegally - will suddenly be happy campers.
Right?
Remember: They insist they are not racists. They insist they are not anti-Catholic bigots. They insist they just want a nation of laws.
We all know that is a lie, of course. But let's pretend it isn't. Just of the sake of argument.
This, too, will happen. It may take time...but it will happen - because it simply makes sense.
The real question is not really "whether" or even "when" it will happen.
The real question is whether my fellow Republicans will fight it to the point of making family-values Hispanics into un-natural Democrats for the next half century.
When we let more Mexicans come here legally, two big things will happen:
1. They will send for their families sooner and/or they will continue to send money home. Either way the economic situation in Mexico will creep upwards to match our own much faster.
2. They will pay into social security under real Social Security numbers....helping us with our entitlements problem for at least 30 years.
They will also assimilate much faster: learn English more quickly, buy more homes from REALTORS, send their kids to do summer service down in the Old Country.
The world would be a better place.
You may think I'm only kidding.
But I'm not.
Why don't we just send them back?
The obvious answer is: We've tried.
The less obvious answer is this:
If the current "illegal" migrants had not left Mexico, the Mexican population would be perhaps 25% higher. It's economy would have benefited from the un-lost labor - but it would not have benefited anywhere nearly to the extent it has through the transfer payments being sent there from here.
The resulting income disparity between the two nations would be that much greater. The likelihood that we would truly need fortification on our border would be great. Peace would be even harder to keep.
Our need for troops on the border would likely be real.
A final word or two about language:
I love Spanish. I don't know much. I studied Spanish in high school and college, but remember little.
I know just enough about that to understand that learning English as a second language is hard.
Mexican schools don't teach English to Mexican kids to the extent that schools do in Germany, Poland, Finland, Japan, Taiwan...or even China.
We need all the foreign language speakers we can get. The fact that we have a lot of Spanish speakers can only help us sell to the bulk of our own hemisphere.
And selling is what we need to do a lot more of.
"You can buy in any language. But you can only sell in the language of the customer." --- the late Senator Paul Simon (D-ILL)
Like all previous immigrant groups, recent migrants from Mexico learn English as fast as they can...especially those who are of working-age.
But when they speak to one another in a grocery line, they do it in Spanish - often not because they don't know English, but because their knowledge is tentative. When spoken to, they respond in English.
The children among them all learn English.
In this, they have their parents encouragement and our society's insistence - from TV to teachers.
Children may speak to their parents in Spanish but among themselves they usually speak English. This is more true the younger - and therefore the less self-conscious the child.
It is even more true the farther from the border they live.
For example, on the Fourth of July, on the beach of the Columbia River in Hood River, Oregon - the small Latino children playing in the water chattered among themselves soley in English while their sun-tanning teen-age siblings bantered among themselves in both languages and the supervising parents chatted among themselves in Spanish.
In this language tendency they are just like other immigrant groups before them. Go any big metro area in America and you can still find people who speak something other than English or Spanish among themselves - but they are just as American as anyone.
***********************
Jim Hale
Principal Broker / Owner
Graduate, REALTOR Institute e-PRO
Member, Million Dollar Club of Lane County
Member, Real Estate Brokers Million Dollar Club
actionagents.net
1715 Linnea Avenue
Eugene, OR 97401-1962
Office: 541-484-0219
Direct: 541-543-9991
Fax: 541-485-8068
www.actionagents.net jim@actionagents.net
© 2010 All Rights Reserved
