Illegal immigrants -- they’re money
DAN STEIN, the premier American nativist and president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, is shocked, shocked. He’s mad at Bank of America for issuing credit cards to illegal immigrants. He says that to BofA “and other large corporations, illegal immigrants are a source of low-wage labor and an untapped customer market.” You bet they are, and that’s the American way.
Sure, I’m proud to be a citizen of a nation that portrays itself as a refuge for the “tired,” “the poor” and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But let’s face it, Emma Lazarus, the poet who wrote those words, may have laid it on a bit thick. The truth, no less beautiful in its way, is a little more crass and self-serving. But it wouldn’t have sounded nearly as poetic to say, “bring us your able-bodied, poor, hardworking masses yearning for a chance to climb out of poverty, establish a credit history and.... “ We all love to rhapsodize about immigrants’ embrace of the American dream, but it’s more like a hard-nosed American deal -- you come here, you work your tail off under grueling conditions, and you can try your damnedest to better your lot over time.
In their generational struggle for acceptance and security, from outsider to insider and, dare I say, from exploited to exploiter, immigrants could avail themselves of those inalienable rights that stand at the core of our national political philosophy -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But that, of course, was before the invention of illegal immigration.
Until the early 1900s, pretty much anybody who wasn’t diseased, a criminal, a prostitute, a pauper, an anarchist or a Chinese laborer could gain entrance to the U.S. Between 1880 and 1914, only 1% of a total of 25 million European immigrants were excluded from this country. But after transatlantic crossings had already been halted by World War I, Congress buckled to anti-foreign sentiment and closed the proverbial Golden Door by passing a series of restrictionist laws in 1917, 1921 and 1924.
Yet even as the historical front door of the nation was being closed, business interests were busy prying open a new side-door. Only three months after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, which required all newcomers to pass a literacy test and pay a head tax, the U.S. secretary of Commerce waived the regulations for Mexican workers. Thus began America’s dishonorable relationship with Mexican immigrant labor.
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FOR THE NEXT several decades, Mexican workers were brought in when the economy expanded and kicked out when times got bad. They were recruited in the 1920s, only to be deported in the 1930s. They were brought in again during the labor shortage in the 1940s. By the 1950s, one branch of the government recruited Mexican workers, under the illusion that they were “temporary,” while another sought to keep them out.
The piece de resistance in the creation of the illegal immigrant is the Immigration Act of 1965. Although touted as a great piece of liberal legislation that ended discriminatory immigration barriers, it imposed an annual cap on migrants from the Western Hemisphere that was 40% less than the number that had been arriving yearly before 1965. A decade later, Congress placed a 20,000 limit per country in this hemisphere.
In other words, after importing millions of Mexicans over the decades, particularly during the bracero guest-worker program from 1942 to 1963, and establishing well-trod routes to employment north of the border, the U.S. drastically reduced the number of visas available to Mexicans. This reduction, of course, coincided with a rapid rise in Mexico’s population. And guess what? When jobs were available on this side of the border, Mexicans just kept coming, whether they had papers or not.
Clearly, today as ever, mass migration to the U.S. is being driven by economic need -- the immigrants’ and our economy’s. But the hard-nosed American deal has become unfair because, on top of the handicaps we have always imposed on new arrivals, we’ve added a rather brutal one -- criminal status. Good luck with that pursuit of happiness as you engage in backbreaking labor when your place in society is summed up with that one cutting word, “illegal.”
No, I’m not advocating open borders. Nor do I believe that immigrants should be guaranteed anything but a chance to achieve their end of the nation’s cruel bargain. For hardworking illegal immigrants who’ve established roots here, we should uphold our end of the bargain and give them a chance to achieve their piece of the American dream. BofA is not wrong to give illegal immigrants the tools with which to compete legitimately in the marketplace. We as a nation are wrong for treating all these people as illegitimate.
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