Hello, world! Long time lurker, first time banger-on-keyboard.
When everyone knows good is good,
this is not good
-Laozi
Lately, an altogether distressing trend has emerged among liberal voices, including Dear Leader Kos: deriding supporters of legal immigration because we need undocumented immigrants to work the crap jobs that American citizens who have a perfect combination of dignity and entitlement are smart enough to avoid:
Who could have predicted that Americans wouldn't want to work these shitty jobs in brutally hot fields for crappy pay, no benefits, and seasonal. Instead, crops are laying in the fields, rotting away. Brilliant work, Lamar!(Source)
Roger Ebert wholeheartedly agrees:
Few people have any problem with the immigration of the best and the brightest from India, China and anywhere else in the world. Here the focus is on undocumented aliens from Mexico. Yet it is a fact that our economy needs and employs them. The agricultural industries of California, Arizona and New Mexico depend on them. Every salad you eat, every fruit juice you drink, inescapably involved an undocumented worker at some stage of its journey to you.(Source)It is not true that these workers "are taking American jobs," because there seem to be few Americans willing to perform such labor at the prevailing rates. Nor would we be willing to pay the price at the produce counter. The more measured and humane approach of the Obama administration is a wiser one. I also believe most Americans understand why the children of such laborers might be allowed into American schools: Do we want a sizable population between 6 and 16 of children with no education?*
Ebert, at least, points out the self-serving hypocrisy of our immigration system: the young, intelligent, skilled, and ambitious get the front door, and the poor, uneducated, unemployed and looking for a better life get the back one, to work year in and year out in sweltering heat, following the crops up and down the country, with no prospects of advancement, not enough pay to stockpile for retirement, and no benefits from the social safety net that many a writer here on DailyKos is howling about losing.
Such language conjures to mind an old Southern gentleman, stroking the yellowing, tobacco-stained hairs of a stately walrus mustache and drawling out "Sure, we can free the slaves, but who'll harvest the cotton? It's brutal out there in the fields - look how slow those lazy heathens are working. Fact is, if we paid them real wages the price of cotton would go through the roof and nobody would buy it anymore. They'd go back to wool or just strip the bark off trees and wear that." Although some of my audience (should I come to acquire one) would accuse me of gross hyperbole, or, at the very least, cheap rhetoric, there are more similarities than differences here: the current state of the agricultural system is unsustainable. Gigantic agribusinesses plant huge monocultures in the same tired fields year after year, causing the soil to be depleted of essential nutrients that aren't being replaced by the gratuitously over-applied NPK fertilizers, just as cotton was busy wrecking the South in the 19th century. These fields of crops are way to big to be manageably harvested by any but the most desperate of laborers, who work frequently because they have no choice (for additional parallel, I refer my readership to the peach barons in Grapes of Wrath). An abundance of unpaid slave labor kept labor costs artificially low, just as agribusiness is fattening its bottom line at the expense of its workers. What's more, in something my imaginary bewhiskered colonel would be incapable of comprehending, the harvests crops are then shipped halfway around the country (sometimes the world - strawberries from California show up in New Zealand every Kiwi winter), burning up massive amounts of fossil fuels.
"But," Kos and Ebert both argue, "we must preserve the status quo or else produce shall rot on the vine! Food prices will skyrocket and farmers will be ruined! Economic disaster awaits!" But there are always consequences. Ending slavery required a bloody, four-year war and created generations of gormless young men who slapped Confederate battle flags on the bumpers of their pickup trucks, right above the fake plastic bull testicles. And yet, forcing plantation owners to page wages to cotton pickers failed to produce a collapse in the cotton industry, as your wardrobe can attest. Prices will rise initially, but Americans already pay the lowest prices in the industrialized world for food. Food is expensive to produce, and continual turning of blind eyes to migrant laborers is one of the plethora of bad policies that keeps prices artificially low. But I can see multiple routes the food industry can go to recover. Perhaps technological innovations will be spurred. Perhaps all that land in the suburbs currently going to waste will become gardens. Perhaps more people will buy into CSA's, which are much better for everyone anyway, or perhaps we, like the rest of the world, will learn to cope with the fact that receiving 300 channels on our plasma screen televisions is not a fundamental right.
While I can't say I agree with Alexander's methods (I'm for blanket amnesty, for one), I am completely behind his thesis: undocumented labor distorts the market, and, much worse, is exploitative of human dignity and makes hypocrites of us all. Ebert is right when he says that the food I've eaten recently has been harvested by an undocumented laborer. However, his argument that because this is the way things are, this the way they must be, is completely disheartening. The idea that those who fight against the disenfranchisement of the oppressed insist that the exploitation of undocumented labor is the only thing that makes our society possible makes the American way of life as utterly repugnant now as it was in the 19th century. We have a moral imperative to at least try to change the situation as it exists or else renounce our perceived rights to anything better from those who have power over us. If we can't pay the price for food, then why should we be allowed to eat?
*Of course! Migrant laborers burn out early, so we need a fresh crop of desperate people with little to know employability in the regular labor market. Let 'em go to school and they'll just compete with the people who actually belong here. Ebert's not seeing the big picture here.