Immigration debate snapshot

Okay, all,

Since Colbert's "mockery" of congress has brought this perennial issue back to the front burner, here's my distillation of one of the more salient arguments that needs to be considered (as Colbert did, I will focus specifically on immigrants who work in agriculture):

1 - "They're taking American jobs." Truth is, there is work available for any legal resident in the fields and packing houses. Any legal resident who shows up to work will be given a job. The UFW even offered the jobs already held by migrant workers to legal residents... so far only 7 legal residents have shown up to even try the jobs out for a day.

2 - "Well, that's because they're willing to accept such low wages and drive the salary down. If there were no illegals available to hire, then the law of suppy-and-demand would drive the wages up to a level legal residents are willing to work for." That's a great point! The question is: could the employers afford to stay in the agriculture business if they had to pay higher wages to all of their workers? Well, the easy answer is yes; they could raise their prices and since people have to eat, they'd just pay more for food.

The real answer, however, has to take into account the flooding of our country with cheap food products from abroad (like Mexico and Chile, where workers are paid so little that they risk their lives to come work here for wages to low for legal residents to consider) that local growers have to compete with. There are two ways to address this problem: limit cheap imports or impose duties to allow local growers to compete in the marketplace... or subsidise the local growers to allow them to pay fair wages and still compete. Ideally, some combination of the two would be the most helpful.

Ironically, it's the heavy subsidizing of some crops (especially corn) by our government that has made foreign crops unable to compete (like Mexico), costing agriculture jobs in Mexico and sending those workers... guess where... to look for work!

The current system is messy and complicated, and needs to be fixed, to be sure. Ideally, our policies would work in such a way that local farmers could afford to employ legal residents, and migrants would have less incentive to come since they'd be making decent wages at home. Comprehensive reform is needed to really address this issue in any sustainable way, but most of the reforms proposed only hit one area, threatening to destabilize the whole system and ultimately failing. We need to be stricter about imports (what about auditing foreign growers for human rights/fair wages to avoid being slapped with huge duties at the border? Keep the foreign produce at a price that American growers can compete with), stricter with American growers about hiring practices (what about tying subsidies to effective auditing practices to make sure that all workers are legal and hitting them with fines and/or witholding subsidies in excess of the amount they would have had to offer to attracte legal workers?), and create a legal category for migrant workers that is accessible and creates a way for us to collect taxes on their income (the current system has unrealistic caps on legal workers that doesn't take into account the actual numbers needed by growers. It also makes the workers traceable to the IRS, which neither the growers nor the workers want when they're being paid cash under the table at rates below minimum wage).

Okay, that's my first pass at this issue. Comments?

- "Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?"