- Are you a commuter snagged in burgeoning traffic? Are
you a member of a young family desperately seeking affordable urban housing?
Or are you, perchance, a low-skilled, low-wage worker wishing your job
would pay a living wage? If the answer is yes, welcome to the club: You've
just been had by President Bush. This isn't a partisan jab. Democrats are
equally culpable. Neither party represents or fights for the rights of
the common man (or woman) on immigration policy. U.S. immigration policy
is a scandalous mess as a result.
-
- The president's "guest worker" plan unveiled
last week is a boon to two groups of people and scoffs at the rest of us.
It's a giveaway to the largest criminal class in America: the 8-12 million
illegal aliens now living in the United States. It's cause for celebration
for the law-bashing managers of corporations that thrive on their exploitation.
It's an expensive burden for taxpayers, for city- and suburb-dwellers,
for low-wage legal U.S. citizens and for just about everyone else.
-
- President Bush proposes to grant a form of "work
amnesty" (although the White House avoids use of the term, "amnesty,"
as if it were a contagious form of late-term cancer) to foreign citizens
living and working here illegally. He would have them apply for three-year
work visas, renewable up to six years, with the possibility of applying
for permanent residency status. Foreigners living abroad could also apply
for visas to fill hard-to-fill jobs in the United States that would be
posted on a government-run database.
-
- Bush's plan funnels a deluge of unskilled, desperately
poor (and therefore underpaid) workers into the U.S. economy. Politicians
brag "guest" workers contribute dramatically to our Gross Domestic
Product (GDP). They ignore their attendant costs: higher taxes to pay for
these workers' (and their families') health and education services; greater
competition for scarce and pricey housing; a greater drain on state and
county infrastructure (more traffic and use of roads, etc.) and the driving
down of wages at the lowest end of the pay scale. Dan Stein, executive
director of Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform, says, "Employers
will never again have to compete for workers by offering better pay or
benefits. They will simply have to look across the border or across the
ocean to find an unlimited supply of workers willing to accept whatever
they are willing to pay."
-
- Then there's the never-discussed trade deficit issue.
Conservative Los Angeles community activist Fernando Oaxaca writes that
illegal workers make obvious contributions to the GDP, but, "........in
their totality, the illegal work force members and their children probably
cost local and federal taxpayers untold billions of dollars annually......there
is the leakage from the GDP of many billions of dollars which the illegal
workers earn but don't spend in the U.S. Instead, they send these dollars
to their home country as remittances ($14 billion to Mexico in 2003). This
share of their "production" must then be subtracted from their
contribution to the American economy." And when you do the math, poof,
the contribution is overwhelmed by costs.
-
- The United States should be a haven for those from abroad
who are politically persecuted by despotic regimes. We should selectively
allow in highly educated immigrants with important and rare skills (i.e.,
scientists, doctors and the like). We should work with poverty-stricken
countries and teach them to educate and employ their own underclasses.
But we should not serve as some sort of overrun spigot to absorb and care
for the overpopulation other countries produce but cannot support. We're
destroying our own environment and quality of life in the process.
-
- The best thing that can be said about the president's
proposal is it will probably die in Congress this year. Let's hope he takes
the concerns of average Americans into account in any future proposals.
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- http://www.courierpress.com/ecp/gleaner_opinion/article/0
%2C1626%2CECP_4480_2576298%2C00.html
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