March 28, 2006--How Will You Keep Them Down On The Farm Now that They'e Seen North Carolina?

While Hillary Clinton is claiming that the new immigration bill working its way through Congress is so severe that if would turn Jesus and the Good Samaratin into felons, something very different is worrying business leaders--if that law is passed it will require many businesses to fire their illegal workers, and as a result there will be no one available to hire.

Senator Clinton is engaging in just one kind of political posturing. Republicans in the House of Representatives are riding the wave of nativist anger that has historically reared its ugly head in America whenever “native” citizens (really the children or grandchildren of previous waves of immigrants) are feeling economically pinched—“Let’s get rid of all them foreigners who are taking away the jobs of Real Americans.” The House’s version of the immigration bill is strong on prevention and especially punishment, making it a felony to hire an illegal.

In the Senate, even conservative Republicans who one might expect to be into the criminalization business are being pulled between two constituencies—the hard right that wants to seal our borders and send home all 11 million illegal immigrants, and big business which recognizes that without these illegals many industries would be hard pressed to find workers willing to do the work presumably Real Americans don’t want to do—wash dishes in restaurants; mow lawns in Beverly Hills; and, most significant to the national economy, work on America’s farms.

According to the NY Times fully 70 percent of the 1.2 million hired farm workers are illegal immigrants (see article linked below). The Times quotes Kendall Hill who grows tobacco on 4,000 acres in North Carolina, “If not for Mexican workers, this country would be in chaos.”

So the Senate version of the bill includes provisions for a large “guest worker” program through which immigrants could sign up with the Feds and thereby become eligible to be hired legally. The only problem with this is that we for more than a decade have had a guest worker program and it isn’t, well, working. The government is so inefficient that only 25,000 workers were certified in 2004, the last year when figures were available.

So we have a problem here. Do we want to put America’s farms out of business, one of the few remaining industries where there is a positive balance of trade since many of our agricultural products are in demand worldwide? Or do we want to build a 2,000 mile-long fence along the US-Mexico border as many are clamoring for?

On this latter point, maybe there are some hidden opportunities—we can have our Israeli allies help us with this after they get finished building their fence to keep Palestinians out of Israel; and if we are worried about what Halliburton could do after we pull out of Iraq, these kinds of massive infrastructural projects are just the kind of thing needed to keep them busy.