Illegal immigration is the biggest problem facing the United States right now you guys. I have never seen any firsthand evidence of that, but the fact that it seems to be the only thing any of the candidates on the stage at the second Republican Presidential debate wanted to talk about must mean that it’s super important, right? The only subjects that came close, in terms of time spent on them during the debate, were Who Hates Planned Parenthood The Most and Who Will Be Quickest To Bomb Iran. The Republican frontrunner has made illegal immigration the centerpiece of his campaign and it’s lifted him to a wide lead over the rest of the field, so that means this is what Americans (or at least Republicans) are worried about, right?
People are coming from other countries and stealing American jobs! Even worse, they’re sponging off of the infrastructure and services that American tax dollars pay for without making any contribution themselves!
It’s a very serious problem, and the Republican candidates have a lot of Big Ideas about how best to handle it. Should we build a big giant gold-plated wall along the Mexican border? Should we spend $400 to $600 billion dollars to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country? Should we dig a really big hole in the middle of the desert and point an arrow-shaped sign reading “DRUGS AND FISH TACOS” at it and push them all in? Should we just nuke San Francisco?
I know what you’re saying: That’s not why we should nuke San Francisco!
I have to admit, I have always been a little bit baffled by this issue, because as candidate Carly Fiorina pointed out to Donald Trump during the debate, Trump is not the first Republican to talk about it. Republicans have been tearing their hair out over illegal immigration for 25 years, but no one has ever proposed a policy to deal with it that doesn’t sound outrageously cruel or insanely expensive, so the status quo remains.
It just goes to show why I am not qualified to be a U.S. Senator or to run for president, because to my admittedly addled mind, this looks like a pretty simple problem to solve.
If the problem is that we have 11 million people in this country who aren’t paying into the system, we want to a) stop them from coming in in the first place, b) turn them into taxpayers, or c) get rid of them altogether. Since a large portion of these people are elderly or children, and because as mentioned it would cost up to $600 billion (not to mention violate just about every conceivable conservative principle by sending stormtroopers house-to-house demanding that occupants show their papers), one assumes that options a) and b) are the most attractive. Unless we just hate brown people who speak other languages. Ha, ha! I was just testing you. That couldn’t possibly be it.
There is a reason that employers hire undocumented workers: Since they’re not citizens or taxpayers, an employer can pay them as little as possible and the workers can’t report him (because doing so would be announcing the worker’s own illegal status). From the employer’s point of view, who cares if the worker isn’t paying into the system? He’s got an army of people drilling holes in sheet metal for slave wages and profits have never been higher!
Last summer, my wife and I noticed that all the plants in the flower bed in our back yard were dying, because the tree that we’d planted back there had grown so much that it was shading the whole area. So my wife ripped all the dead plants out, saying she’d plant some new shade-friendly ones next year. It had an unexpected benefit, which was that once the plants were gone, the mosquitoes that had made it impossible to sit back there for longer than 30 seconds disappeared too, and it’s now a lovely place to hang out for hours at a time.
On a similar note, I spent 14 years working as a bartender in New York City. One place I used to work at had no security or other staff on site when I closed up on Saturday nights; it was just me and between 20 and 50 drunk people. When 4am came and it was time to clear the place out, I did not yell at the customers, or even go around telling them it was time to go. I didn’t even yell “last call.” I simply turned off the music, turned up the lights, stopped serving drinks, turned my back on the room, and started counting the money, and the place would quietly clear out within ten minutes. It’s amazing: when you take away the things that make the bar more appealing than home, people leave the bar!
I know it sounds like I’m comparing immigrants to mosquitoes or drunks, but stay with me: if there are no sub-minimum wage jobs enticing workers to cross the border, or to stay in the country illegally, mightn’t workers stop crossing the border, or go back home?
If illegal immigration is the existential threat to this country that the Republicans say it is, then why not focus our effort on the employers who are taking advantage of these people by using their undocumented status to pay them less than the minimum wage? It would be much easier, as there are far fewer employers than workers, and we know where to find them, and thus more effective. Penalize employers caught employing illegal immigrants with onerous fines, and suddenly Immigration Reform is a self-funding issue. Meanwhile, employers stop hiring undocumented workers, and the workers will either stop coming or do what they need to do to get documented and start paying taxes. That is what we want, right? More taxpayers?
There must be some reason none of the Republican candidates has proposed anything like this, and I’m sure my tiny intellect can’t possibly comprehend why they prefer to play whack-a-mole with poor people than force Big Business to pay every worker the minimum wage or better.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think that this exact solution is as obvious to everyone in Washington as it is to me, that it’s a nonstarter with the donor class, and that nobody really cares about it at all, except as a way to rile up conservative voters and distract us from their real agenda. But I’m sure there’s more to it than that.