Let’s take a look at what a progressive Immigration Sanity (IS) project might look like, along with some possible principles:
1. Junk internationalism. Obviously, an IS project has to be nationalist, not internationalist. This in spite of the fact that all Communist regimes in history locked down their border and were very careful about who they left in.
Not one Communist or even progressive government anywhere engaged in a project to allow unfettered immigration of cheap labor into the state so that national workers could be fired and replaced by cheap labor immigrants.
Not one progressive regime ever subscribed to a policy of allowing massively exploitable immigrant labor into the nation, to be worked under horrible, sweatshop-like, abusive conditions, untaxed and unregulated, with the Sword of Deportation hanging over their heads, as a preference for brassy and sometimes defiant national workers who stood up for their rights, unlike submissive immigrants.
2. A clear condemnation of cheap labor immigration. Low wage, submissive, exploitable immigration is antithetical to every progressive value and must be condemned across the board. The fact that the Western Left is lining up with the most crooked capitalist interests on this labor-crushing issue is frankly despicable.
3. A notion that revolution begins at home. Read Marx and Lenin and tell me where they say that the way to wage revolution in a backwards country is go invade some developed country and then work as a submissive, ultra-exploited, captive worker. What a joke! If your country is the suffering from the typical wreckage of failed Third World capitalism, you need to fix up your own country, not invade mine.
We have our own hands full dealing with our own rightwigners, who are in power and progressively ruining America. We don’t need the added problem of a peasant invasion on top of that.
4. A recognition that unfettered immigration is contrary to all environmental values. As a radical environmentalist, it is clear to me that population growth is driving the present extinction crisis. To pretend that population growth is not an issue, and open the borders to 50% of Mexico (50% of Mexicans want to live in the US) and 1/3 to 1/2 of the world (polls show that 1/3 to 1/2 of the world wants to come to America) is environmental insanity.
With half of Mexico in the US, not to mention 2 to 3 billion new Americans, we can kiss the natural environment goodbye.
5. A principled opposition to H-1B and all other forms of cheap labor immigration, legal and illegal. There is no sense in automatically opposing all forms of immigration as “taking jobs from Americans”. There are all sorts of immigrant physicians working in the US; this is not a problem since they work for prevailing wage and do not drive down salaries of US physicians.
Immigrants willing to work for prevailing US wages should not be automatically opposed, and they do not “take jobs from Americans”. The only time immigrants “take jobs from Americans” is when they work for lower wages, tolerate worse working conditions, are more likely to work under the table, and display more submissive behavior than US workers.
If they work for prevailing wage and are as unwilling as US workers to tolerate abuse, they don’t take a job from a soul. They add one more worker and consumer, which helps create more jobs.
6. A recognition that the mass importation of poor Mexican workers to the US as illegal immigrants is part of the elite project of reactionary capitalist elites in both the US and Mexico. Obviously, there is no reason that any progressive should get in bed with these scoundrels or support them in their backwards game.
Mexico needs to feed and house its poor, not create more Carlos Slims (Slim just passed Bill Gates as the world’s richest man).
7. A hardheaded recognition of the anarchy, crime, disease and elevated costs than millions of poorly educated peasants and urban poor bring to America. The children of Mexican immigrants have a higher illegitimacy rate than either US. Hispanics already have a 42% illegitimacy rate.
The link between illegitimacy and fatherless upbringing and a variety of ills, including sociopathy and criminal behavior in the offspring, is scientifically proven. Almost 1/3 of young Hispanic males have been arrested and 25% have been imprisoned. I’ve been arrested a few times myself, but these are serious figures.
The children of the illegal immigrants are forming Hispanic street gangs in large numbers. There is no progressive reason to apologize for, make alliance with, or defend a bunch of criminals.
No Communist state fetishized or coddled its street criminals, and no progressive state ever allowed them to run loose Clockwork Orange-style, to destroy the fabric of the land. No sucking up to crooks! No sucking up to sociopathic street gangs! By virtue of their poverty and the fact that they frequently work under the table, illegal immigrants contribute very few taxes.
At the same time, they flood various social services such as schooling and correctional facilities. They get emergency treatment at hospitals for free. This itself is not a problem, except that the federal government demands this emergency room treatment and then refuses to reimburse local governments for the costs of it.
We demand that the federal government reimburse the states for the costs of treating illegal immigrants in the emergency room.
Fully 60% of Hispanics in Los Angeles are failing to graduate from high school. Of those that do graduate, only 20% are qualified to go right into college. These facts are partly responsible for the explosive growth of remedial classes at our universities.
For a variety of reasons, Hispanic illegal immigrants are not performing well in education, have a high crime, contribute little in taxes while taxing government funds. The upshot is crumbling government services for all, including poor and working class American citizens.
It is not important, nor is it our place to inquire or understand why Hispanic illegal immigrants are performing rather poorly, but there is evidence that it is based more on class than race. Poor workers and peasants in many societies have tended to have high crime rates and to be poorly educated.
It is dubious we would be having these problems with our recent Hispanic arrivals if, say, 40% of Hispanic immigrants, legal or illegal, had, say, advanced degrees. Hence we reject racialized explanations for poor Hispanic performance.
Sadly, for a variety of reasons, it may be unlikely that new illegal Hispanic arrivals follow in the footsteps of, say, the Italian immigrants of a century ago. The reasons for this are likely complex and ultimately not as important as recognizing that importing an army of impoverished unschooled peasants is not a good bargain for America.
8. The progressive project is based on development. Aside from some strange movements like the Khmer Rogue, all progressive movements have been based on the transition of society from underdevelopment to development. Control over population growth was essential to these movements.
China’s huge population was one of the near-impossible tasks that Mao faced in feeding the Chinese people and bringing them out of feudal serfdom. Mao could not have accomplished many of his great accomplishments with a continuous invasion of vast numbers of poor, uneducated peasants. He had his hands full with the Chinese.
Allowing continuous unfettered immigration is antithetical to our goals of sheltering, employing, feeding and providing medical care for our citizens, especially our poor citizens. It makes a difficult job downright impossible. The open borders movement is a movement to take a First World country, the US, and “underdevelop it” back to Third World status.
There are too many 3rd World countries as it is. The trajectory of the world should be forward towards progress, not backwards towards underdevelopment. We are committed to moving the 3rd World forward towards the developed model, not the reverse.
9. A rejection of anti-Hispanic racism. Recognizing that US Hispanics have various shortcomings and problems as a group is not racism. Nevertheless, the IS movement is shot through from top to bottom with racism, typically of the White Nativist variety at least. It is populated largely by the some of the most ignorant and backwards segments of the US White population, the Yahoos of H.L. Mencken fame.
While this does not mean that the movement is immoral, we need to recognize the racists in the movement and somehow keep our distance from them. One step is banning any semblance of actual (not imagined) racism from our fora. At the same time, we recognize that cultural critique is in the finest progressive tradition, one we continue to uphold.
10. Kindness towards illegals. I do not feel that illegal immigrants or low wage legal immigrants are bad people. I socialize with Mexican immigrants almost every day, hang out in Mexican bars and restaurants where scarcely a word of English is heard, shop in Mexican corner markets, buy food off their taco trucks and sit down and joke with drunken farmworkers relaxing after work.
I also speak passable Spanish. I like Mexicans on a personal level, even illegal immigrants. In many ways, I like them better than my own Whites. The principle of love the sinner, hate the sin, should be operative here. As a Christian, I believe in showing compassion towards immigrants, legal and illegal, in general, no matter why they are here.
Of course they are just trying to get ahead economically. Of course their home countries are a wreck. Nevertheless, it is logical that as illegals or low-wage legal immigrants, they should not be in this country.
We need to firmly and lovingly convince them to go home and wish them all the best on their journey. Hatred and contempt for immigrants of all kinds should be discouraged in our fora. They are not bad people; it is the system that is broken.
11. As noted, the anti-immigrant movement is largely the hardest rightwing sector of the US conservative movement. It shares many similarities with the Patriot, militia and Black helicopters nutjobs. Christian fundamentalism to the point of sheer lunacy is quite common. Ignorance is high, many activists can neither spell nor use proper syntax and you wonder when they last read a book.
This anti-intellectual redneck aspect of the movement is a reality that will not change. Most movement members are ready to march off and vote for Republicans. These Republicans are antithetical to us in every way but immigration. Ideally, it would be better to convert Democratic candidates to immigration sanity than to get into bed with these rightwingers and wake up with fleas.
We need to be very careful about making coalitions with White Supremacists, Patriot and militia types, hard rightwingers, and the racists in the movement. It is probably better to simply keep them at arms length and focus on growing an anti-racist IS progressive movement.
12. This movement is very much a work in progress. It hardly the work of one man or one blog. This blog welcomes your intellectual and theoretical contributions to the issues I have probed in this essay.
One of the main areas we should focus on is how we can possibly wean Democrats and liberals off the open borders movement and towards some sort of sanity on this issue. Let’s not let the nutjob right own this issue - it’s too important to leave it to the crazies.