Saturday, May 20, 2006

Coyote Ugly

It has been going on behind the ascenes to a great extent, as you seldom hear about it on the national level, but there has been an uptick in reetn arrests of illegal immigrants, with the prospect of heavy fines for those who employ them. I can only assume this to be the case, as there have been a number of such arrests lately. Not in Arizona, not in Colorade, not in New Mexico, not in Califoria, but in-Kentucky. Northern Kentucky, to be exact, right across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio.

I can only assume it is going on in other locales, as I received this news from my local Lexington NBC affiiate, WLEX, Channel 18. No mention of it yet on the national news. Yet, the recent arrests involved Mexican immigrants, undocumented, who were working for home construction contractors.

Ding Ding! So there you have it. The reason for the heretofore, up until just recently, housing boom. It cost contractors appreciably less to build these homes than it would if they hired American workers. Were they dependant on the latter, wages would on average of necessity be higher, and in addition there would be social seurity, etc.

Yet strangely enough, this has not seemed to translate into lower prices for houses, certainly not in a great many areas. You can only assume that in California, for example, the percentage of undocumented workers would be greater than is the case in Kentucky. Yet I can promise you the price you would pay for a five bedroom, three bathroom home in Kentucky, with a basement, bricked, with a surrounding stone wall fence and an attached two car garage, on two acres of land,with a heated back yard swimming pool and tennis courts-would probably buy you a little five room total unbricked, unfenced cottage, no basement, no garage (attached or otherwise), no swimming pool, on a quarter acre lot-if you were lucky enough to find one already buildt in a neighborhood that would doubtless be of dubious quality at best.

Nor by any means does this mean that such a house would be cheap by Kentucky standards. What it does mean is that, in most cases, the benefits of hiring undocumented workers does ot seem to have “trickled down” from employers to the public at large-at least ot in the housing market.

It is, or has been, legalized slavery. And we have all benefited from it. Nor will it change if it is allowed to continue. What a lot of liberals have been advocating in the way of open or semi-open borders seems to be in the hopes that an influx of immigrants will eventually necessitate a gradual improvement of the standard of living in Mexico, and eventually lead to more votes for Democrats, who will then hopefully increase the wages of the undocumented, soon to be legalized, immigrants, and then all of us. The immigrants who come over legally, from Mexico and other nations, will just have to stand in line a little bit longer. After all, they obviously aren’t as desperate, therefore their need isn’t as great. Or, if we insist on fairness, we can just let them all come in. After all, we are now living in a global village, remember-a “New World Order”.

I call it putting the cart before the horse. I call it insanity.

And I smell a big Democratic Party disapointment. Oh, they will likely win the up-and-coming elections, maybe even take over one or even both houses of Congress. But not by enough of a margin to really exercise any meaningful control. Certainly by not enough of a margin to impeach Bush, as a lot of liberals would like and will probably demand, reality be damned (as usual).

A clue for members of both parties who are obstinatwely refusing to be firm on this issue, for thir own self-serving reasons. Americans care first and foremost about their own futures and, more importanly, about the potential future welfare of their children. And they don’t like the smell of what is going on.

But for the time being, they are playing at being tough. Just yesterday evening, border control agents, acting on tip from a citizen informant, attempted to pull over a suspected human smuggler-a coyote-who refused to pull his SUV over, and in fact tried to ram the agent between his vehicle and the slowed traffic in the far lane of the road at one of the busiest border crossings in the south. He was repeatedly arned, and then finally shot dead, after another border agent broke in with a baton his right front passenger window. He was shot five times, and five men were taken into custody.

It might in time get even more violent, more ugly. But if it does, blame first and formeost those in power who have allowed this situation to deteriorate to this point to begin with

7 comments:

Rufus said...

Yes, I see your point. But, isn't this sort of a weak argument? Like "I believe X. So, people who don't believe X are either:
1) Insane, or
2) Liberal (American slang for insane).

I really don't know any liberals who are calling for an open border. Who are they? Something like 90% of the country is calling for tighter border security right now. The only people I know who want one are myself, arguing essentially the libertarian position, and well, the libertarians. And everyone knows that libertarians are just Republicans who take drugs.

I mean, I think your argument that the situation now amounts to legalized slavery is much stronger. I don't necessarily agree because I believe that legalizing the labor would make it easier to flush out the black market. But, at least this is something we can discuss.

SecondComingOfBast said...

I know there aren't a lot of people openly calling for open borders, yet there are a lot that seem openly hostile to the idea of strengthening border security, or even for that matter of enforcing the existing laws on the books. So it amounts to pretty much the same thing.

Legalized slavery of Mexican immigrants, by the way, is the least of it. It's no different than an old time Southern plantation owner. Naturally, those foks of the time would prefer the use of slave labor over that of paid employees who they could not work as cheaply, nor nearly as hard. So a poor white kid who needed employment had a lot of strikes against him if he couldnt afford a real good education.

Similarly, a poor, hard scrabble dirt farmer in the South couldn't begin to compete with the large landowners. If they were lucky enough to scrape enough money together to buy one or two cheap, relatively inferior quality slaves, these were usually the cruellest of all slaveowners, and at times literally worked and/or beat their slaves to death.

I see no difference here, not even by degrees. Slaves might actually have had it better in some ways. After all, a slave owner was obliged to provide food, clthing, and shelter tohis slaves, and iof he cared about his investment, then he had to see to their basic medical needs as well.

Yes, this is a real problem. In fact, I worry about it more than I do about the defict, national debt, the war on terror, the mess in Iraq-you name it. Because this is going to turn us into the Neo-Con dream world-a fuedal nation.

It's also why to me men like Hugo Chaves and Evo Morales are not the evil villains this administration likes to portray them as. Not at all. They are heroes, because they want to build their country and their people up. As oppossed to letting globalization force them into poverty for the benefit of cheap market and cheap labor racketeers.

Rufus said...

But, the Hillary Clintons of the world are not calling for an open border, and honestly, we can't just keep pushing the goal posts farther and farther to the right on this one. Judging by what I've heard (and remember that I don't really watch TV), it seems like the official "liberal" position is "I want a huge concrete wall", the "moderate" position is "I want a huge concrete wall, and I want it to have troops along it", and the "Conservative" position is "I want the wall, the troops, and mass deportations of anyone who's here illegally". It's like an optical illusion- to the rest of the world, it looks like the US is having a debate between the right and the far right, while in the US, it seems like there are "liberals" who are hostile to "security". At what point does this one-uppsmanship stop?

As for legalized slavery, if this is the case, why in the world are people talking about arresting these theoretical slaves? And you really see no difference at all? Most illegal labor isn't just voluntary, it's on a day-to-day basis. Certainly slave trading is still very illegal. And actually, hiring aliens is illegal. So, what's changing here?

And as for Chavez, well I just don't like authoritarians. He may be doing a lot of great things, but he's also using the laws against people who disagree with him for the crime of disagreeing with him. I don't think he's as bad as he's being made out to be either, but he's not a hero of mine.

Lastly, I have very mixed feelings about globalization. On the one hand, it's very uneven and exploitative. On the other hand, why is is not "globalization" when I buy records over the Internet from a Japanese punk band, for example?

Rufus said...

Incidentally, this is the libertarian argument for an open-border:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cavanaugh23may23,0,6429773.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

SecondComingOfBast said...

Yeah, I get the open difference between actual slavery and the use of illegal immigrant labor. Bu what I am talking about is the practical similarities and potential results.

Hilary Clinton, by the way, is not a liberal on this issue, or a great many others, including overall national security or the war on terror, Iraq, etc., she's is actually somewhat right of center on these issues. But a lot of at least the Far Left seem to be very adamantly oppossed to any border security enforcement.

And while I'm not particularly fond of the idea of arresting all these people, it's one thing to give them this much of a break, as most of them probably don't deserve to be arrested, and yet it's another thing all together to insist they be given a fast tack to citizenship over others who have come here legally, from Mexico and other places. The bottom line is, we can only afford so many immigrants at a time, so why should they get peferential treatment?

At the same time, the proponents of amnesty, both Republicans and Democrats, seem to insist this should happen at the same time if not before the border is secured, and of course this will result in the same thing as under Reagan, a massive tidal wave of even more immigrants hoping to take advantage of the situation before the border is finally secured. McCain, Kennedy, et al know this full well, and are being very disingenous in denying, actually ignoring, this aspect.

About globalization, I am not against trade, I am just in favor of return to bi-lateral trade.

Rufus said...

Sure, it's more fair to put people like my wife ahead of the illegal immigrants in the line for citizenship. No argument there.

The problem is that, okay, we decide it's unfair and that illegals have no amnesty. Now what? How do we get rid of them? The anti-amnesty people have suggested ID cards for all legal workers, including native-born. The problems with this idea are:
1) It would require billions of dollars to implement,
2) All ID cards can be forged, so it likely won't work anyway,
3) In addition, it would require growing a huge government bureaucracy,
4) And we would all be even more regulated by the state. Having to show your papers at the demand of state agents at any time? Yuck.

So, maybe we forget the ID cards. Okay. But, nobody has a solution to this problem that doesn't involve spending billions of dollars, growing the state bureaucracy even larger, the likelihood that it won't work, and increased state intrusion into all of our lives. (All of these are things that Conservatives used to have a problem with, once upon a time.) I see this turning into another War on Drugs- a huge government waste of money that accomplishes nothing, aside from curtailing civil liberties and producing a massive entrenched bureaucracy.

Nobody's going to argue that it's fair that illegal aliens get the spots that legals don't. But, the cure seems to be a lot worse than the disease. And as someone who's currently going through the labyrinth of immigration law, I have no belief whatsoever that any of this will make it any easier for us.

SecondComingOfBast said...

You make a lot of good points. And actually, the main thing with me is, I want to see the problem stopped at the source, namely the border. After that situation is brought under control, then as far as I'm concerned the problem is well over half solved.

And incidentally, I'm not really that impressed with the idea of the wall, I think it's more a symbolic gesture mant to appease the various policial factions.

What I really, truly want to see happen is enough of a presence, including the military if necessary, to put a stop to this problem, bring to a total halt any further illegal immigration, at least reduce it to where it really is a very minor problem at best.

Once that is accomplished, then the remaining problem can be solved gradually, sensibly, though it will probably take a period of many years. It won't go away overnight, but at least it will be a manageable problem, not the chaos we have now.