The Biggest Non-Issue in American Politics

You know what? I don't care about illegal immigration.

Neither should you.

Do you really think people sneaking over the border are a threat to your way of life? How so? 

When you eat dinner, take a long look at what's on your table. Undocumented workers likely picked the fruits and vegetables on your plate. Do you eat meat? The steak or chicken on your plate was likely processed by undocumented workers. Undocumented workers probably worked in the vineyards that produced your California wine. 

Do you travel? Do you stay in hotels? Do you ever wonder who is cleaning your room?

Do you eat in restaurants? If you have issues with undocumented workers, I suggest you don't go back into the kitchen.

Do you use professional landscapers on your lawn? Have you ever asked the owner of the company about the immigration status of men doing the work?

Do you want their jobs? What kind of wage would you want to have these jobs? What kind of working conditions would you settle for to have these jobs? Would you want benefits?

Back in the Eighties and Nineties, the government - the same administrations that are heroes to the current anti-immigrant Americans - quietly accepted undocumented migration. After all, they were easy to exploit. Undocumented workers were flying under the radar of government regulations. They don't have to be paid minimum wage. They don't have to be paid health benefits. They aren't required to have safe working conditions. Businesses can exploit them to their heart's content and get away with it, because the workers have no legal recourse. Employers can force long hours and horrific working conditions on their workers because they can say, "Do what I say or I'll report you to ICE and have you deported."

(I wrote a post about the horrific human rights abuses undocumented workers suffer years ago. Here is a link to that post.)

The twenty-first century brought some new issues for politicians. Republican politicians typically run on fear. They create issues to stir up anxiety in voters, and then claim they will assuage the situation causing the fear. Some of those fears are based on personal safety. When I was growing up, The Cold War created the biggest political fearmongering. When the Cold War ended, the fearmongering shifted to Islamic terrorism for a while, but that could only be sustained for so long. 

The rest of the fear was cultural. This political strategy centered on the fear of white Americans' fear of becoming culturally irrelevant, or a statistical minority, or even of being disenfranchised altogether. I am too young to remember Nixon's Southern Strategy, but I remember Reagan's "Welfare Queen" mythology. There is also the fear centered on the shift to secularism in this country because that means rejecting traditional Christian beliefs such as LGBT rights and abortion. Savvy politicians turned that fear of cultural into a fear of being barred from practicing one's religion.

The problem is the cultural zeitgeist always shifts and that means "culture war" issues comes and go. As our culture becomes more aware of the presence of institutional racism the US (or, as we like to say, "woke") it has become harder to run on those issues. When the former president buddies up to the Russian dictator, it's hard to worry about Russians dropping nuclear bombs on our cities the way we did in the late twentieth century. Bin Laden was killed in the Obama administration and we don't have a presence in Afghanistan anymore, so the post-9/11 fears were lessened. The current situation in Israel causes alarm, but I don't think most Americans see it as an existential threat yet. Roe v. Wade was overturned and the panic now comes more from the left than the right. It's also becoming harder to run against the "threat" of gays to our way of life as gays from all across the political spectrum are coming out, and right wing politicians find out they have gay children. 

We are left with two "scare issues" for politicians to run on. The first is transphobia. That has been effective in some circles, but since transgender people are less than 1% of the population, it can be difficult to maintain the scare. The second is illegal immigration. In some ways it is the perfect issue.

First it takes advantage of the middle class feelings of disdain for poor people. We like to see poverty as a character flaw, rather than a flaw in our economic system. Undocumented workers tend to be poor, and we love to be able to say they deserve it.

Second it plays upon racism and white discomfort with the empowerment of minorities. Immigrants from Central and South America tend to be of mixed race. They have heritage that is both European and indigenous, and I'm sure some of them have some African DNA as well. European Americans have never been kind to the indigenous. Latinos don't look like your stereotypical, middle-American, white, European Americans. Plus they don't have all the same cultural practices. They share much of the global culture we do, but they may have different food or language or music. What if their culture begins to creep into European culture? 

Politicians have been running with the issue for the entirety of the 21st century and it works. Fear buys votes. However, it's an issue that comes up during an election year, and dies down by the time a new president is installed. Congress may attempt to to pass some bills, but the enthusiasm dies. Our government, and the corporations that own the government, know our economy runs on the cheap labor of immigrants and to do anything to stop the flow might drive labor costs up. Besides, if nobody does anything about the "problem", it becomes an issue to run on in the next election. The recent border bill that Trump prevented is only the latest and most blatant example of this.

So why don't we have to worry about this problem? It's because we have been fed a plethora of lies.

The border is not "open". If you think the border is open, take a trip to Canada or Mexico and leave your passport behind. See how open the border is. We have illegal border crossings precisely because the border isn't open. If it were open, it wouldn't be illegal to cross it, would it?

The number of illegal immigrants waxes and wanes. The current panic that millions more are coming over the southern border since Biden was president doesn't hold any water. There was a strong uptick at the end of 2023.  Every night on the news we saw footage of migrants crossing a river into the US. News outlets trying to drum up panic showed that same clip over and over for months afterwards (and savvy people noticed there were never any different news clips). Currently border crossings are at an all-time low since 2020. This may change for any number of reasons, probably most of them will have nothing to do with the actions of whoever is president of the United States.

An increase in number of illegal border crossings doesn't mean more people are flooding into the country. It means this many people were caught. If more migrants are counted during one administration over another, it doesn't mean more actual migrants came. It means more of them were apprehended. 

The largest percentage of undocumented US residents comes from people who entered the country legally and overstayed their visas. If you're panicked about the southern border, you are panicked for the wrong reason.

Undocumented immigrants don't commit more crimes than US citizens. I know there have been recent horror stories about undocumented residents committing atrocities. I keep hearing about the same crime over and over. There are no new stories. These people don't want to commit crimes and risk being deported. The worst terrorists in this country are white, male, Christian conservative citizens. I'm not making that up. This is straight from the FBI.

Undocumented immigrants are not taking millions in government handouts. In order to receive any sort of government assistance, you need a Social Security number. Also, if you want to fly under the radar to avoid deportation, you don't walk into government offices and ask for money. Yes, children born in the US can receive benefits as they are citizens, but do you really want the government to have power over which citizens are entitled the rights and benefits of US citizenship and which ones aren't? When you consider the enormous amount of work these people are doing behind the scenes, I think it can be said they give far more to the economy than they take away.

Speaking of what they give to the economy they pay taxes. They pay sales taxes and property taxes. They can even file income taxes using an Individual Tax ID Number. 

Migrants on the southern border are not at the forefront of the illegal drug trade. Most drugs (including ninety percent of fentanyl) come into the country through legal entry points.

Migrants are not bringing weapons into the country. The United States is one of the most well-armed countries in the world. We have the highest ownership of guns per capita. The gun trade is going in the opposite direction. Criminals in the US are illegally exporting guns to the drug cartels in Mexico and not the other way around.

Kamala Harris is not the "Border Czar". There never was such a title. Her job was not to patrol the southern border and halt migration. Her responsibilities were to seek diplomatic solutions with the countries migrants are coming from. They are leaving because of the socio-economic conditions and political persecution in their native countries. Harris was tasked with getting to the root causes of illegal immigration, rather than create a Band-Aid solution of blocking them at the border. Those root causes are often the result of US foreign policy. The US government will support - militarily as well as economically - whatever government will best serve the country's economic interests. Americans want their cheap coffee, fruit, metals, and petroleum products (plenty of oilfields and mines in Latin America). The dictators who serve the American economy are not always serving their own citizens. The result is that citizens leave their native countries and go where they can have freedom and steady jobs. In the United States we allow foreigners who are being persecuted by repressive governments to seek asylum. Do you want cheap goods or do you want migrants to want to stay in their own countries because life it too good there to want to leave? If you think you can have it both ways, you should be thanking Vice President Harris for making the effort on your behalf. 

I started to wonder if there was some merit to the idea that migrants are driving up the cost of housing. Is the demand too large given the amount of available housing? 

I decided to look it up. The first hits I saw on Google confirmed migration was a factor in the housing crisis, but those hits came from right wing organizations like The Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundations. Think tanks are merely lobbying groups painted with a thin veneer of intellectualism. Their studies weren't there to help me. They were there to confirm right-wing biases. I needed to look elsewhere.

One reason for high housing costs has to do with draconian zoning laws in many communities, limiting the construction of multi-family housing. Communities will complain about the high cost of housing and then fight building affordable housing projects for fear undesirable people will move into them. Even Donald Trump himself mentioned this in his speeches, trying to drum up fear of undesirables staining a perfect suburban neighborhood. Rich and middle class people don't want to live near poor people.

Another reason is the corporate ownership of housing. Commercial real estate companies are buying properties and fixing rents. Even small units are not immune to this. Residents of small multi-family dwellings are seeing their rents doubled when the owners sell out to these corporations.

Then there are the private equity firms buying property that they neither sell nor rent, but use as "piggy banks". A great example of this is the hideous toothpick building that currently serves as a blight on the NY Skyline. 

Finally, short-term rentals such as Airbnb are driving up the cost of housing in major tourist areas. Property owners find it more profitable to rent for the short term than have full time residents. This means full-time rentals are harder to find. There are apartments for the taking for tourists, while locals are pushed out (another reason why I stay in hotels when I travel, which might be corporate-owned, but at least hire local people).

(This video is a great explanation of how corporate property ownership is ruining housing for all of us.)

None of these reasons for high housing costs have anything to do with illegal immigration.

I also want to say if you believe the government is giving free gender reassignment surgeries to any immigrant who wants one, please go back to school and take some classes in critical thinking.

Let's move on from the myths of illegal immigration and talk about solutions. I have talked about this before, but we can revisit.

First, an easy way to halt illegal immigration is to punish the companies that hire them. This will never happen. Republicans don't want to do it because their donors include the giant agribusiness, meatpacking, and hospitality and they rely on this labor. Democrats don't want it because they will lose  votes locally from the small business owners who depend on immigrant labor.

The second way, and to me the obvious way, would be to make legal immigration easier. Stop creating all these expensive hoops foreigners have to jump through to live and work in the United States. I wrote another post about this as well. Encouraging migration will only help the economy. Migrant workers need housing and food. They will have to pay for it. That puts money into the economy. Migrant workers are doing jobs most Americans won't do. The economy would come to a screeching halt if we didn't have their labor. We would need to build housing and infrastructure, which would create more jobs. There are no downsides to allowing more migrants into the country. The only downsides are the fact that corporations will have to pay workers on the books and start treating them well. Also European-Americans will freak out when they have more neighbors who don't look like them.

We saw the greatest example of this with the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. While Donald Trump went on semi-coherent rants about them "eating the dahwgs" they were doing badly-needed work in the local factory. It's true there was a spike in both public assistance and housing costs in their early years of their arrival, however, this spurred new construction. Derelict buildings were revived and repurposed, bringing property values up in any neighborhoods. New businesses have sprung up. These immigrants are making money and putting it back into the community. They are there because they were needed and their presence has made a net positive difference.

This is a big country. There is room for everyone. We can have this kind of revitalization everywhere. The US birth rate is shrinking. We can say that the fewer people we have in the country, the fewer people taking from it, but it also means there are fewer people giving back to it. Why not allow people from other countries fill that gap and have a chance to live the American Dream at the same time?

Are there problematic elements to immigration? Of course there are. There are problematic elements of all areas of society. Poor people are poor people and will do what it takes to survive and feed their children. Poor people will make choices that middle class people don't understand. That's as true of American citizens as it is of undocumented migrants. 

As long as average Americans have someone to hate, someone to blame, and someone to be afraid of, they will vote against their own interests. It's time for us to place the blame where it belongs. The real takers are the people who keep taking even though they have all they need and more. Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy six times. Giant banks received massive government bailouts. CEOS of giant corporations pay less in taxes even though they make a hundred times more than their hardworking employees. They take as much as they give. The people at the top want the middle class to hate poor people. They want poor white people to hate poor immigrants and poor people of color. If they are too busy hating each other they won't pay attention to who is really picking their pockets and holding them back from success.

Here is one last thought for the day. Trump wants to deport everyone currently living in the US. How will that be done? Who will pay for it? If these deportations happen, I don't want to hear you complain about the tax increases.