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gringogirl · Joined: 29 Jun 2006 Posts: 187 Location: gone

This is one of those NY articles so the bias is for illegals but some interesting parts
Salon - Apr 20, 2006
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/20/debate/print.html

The left splits over immigration

Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches. But some
leading progressives say illegal immigration hurts American workers.

By Michelle Goldberg

Apr. 20, 2006 | Britt Minshall is a United Church of Christ pastor and a
proud member of the religious left. A former civil rights Freedom Rider, he
heads an interracial Baltimore congregation of 200, which has ministries
that care for recovering addicts and for prostitutes. He also works in
Haiti, and has written a self-published novel "to expose the pernicious
effects of American foreign policy" on the people of that country. He calls
the current administration "evil, wrong, treasonous ... a pack of monsters."
And yet as he watched hundreds of thousands of immigrants march through the
streets of America's biggest cities in the past few weeks, he found himself
agreeing with some of the most right-wing Republicans. Most liberals are
"dead wrong" on immigration, he says, arguing that social justice demands a
crackdown on the undocumented. "I'm afraid the Minutemen have a point here,"
he says.

Most liberals have celebrated the recent pro-immigration marches, seeing in
them a new kind of civil rights movement. They've supported calls to
legalize many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the
United States. Many have delighted in the fissures opening up on the right,
where nativists are pitted against laissez-faire business interests hungry
for cheap labor. Yet there are fault lines on the left as well, with a small
but notable number of progressive commentators warning that by championing
rights for illegal immigrants and expanded legal immigration, liberals are
working against the interests of low-skilled American workers. "I'm
instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration," New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman wrote last month. "But a review of serious, nonpartisan research
reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration
.. [W]hile immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the
worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration -- especially
immigration from Mexico."

Minshall says he sees the pain every day. Baltimore, he says, is full of
young, black men who are "unemployable because they won't work for $4.50 an
hour." The influx of immigrants, he says, "is tilting everyone's wages down,
except for the upper class." He says that one member of his church, the
owner of a roofing business, recently fired his entire crew and replaced
them with immigrant contractors. The man felt "pushed up against a wall,"
Minshall says, because he couldn't compete without using illegal labor. "The
customer will always buy the $2,000 roof and not the $2,500 one," Minshall
says, adding, "We've gotten so addicted to cheap goods."

As people like Minshall illustrate, the liberal debate over immigration
isn't simply one between the left and the center. It cuts across ideologies.
There are conservative Democrats, civil rights activists and leftist
multiculturalists calling for legalizing undocumented immigrant workers,
while figures including antiwar Air America radio host Thom Hartmann, writer
Michael Lind and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., are urging much tougher
restrictions. The central question is whether the interests of working-class
Americans and those of immigrants, legal and illegal, are necessarily in
opposition, and if they are, how progressives -- and the lawmakers they
support -- should deal with it. What does it mean if the inspiring words
inscribed on the Statue of Liberty -- "Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed, to me" -- can't be reconciled with the needs of this
country's workers?

There are two bills at the center of the debate, though it goes far beyond
them. The recent pro-immigration protests were galvanized by a stringent
measure recently passed by the House that would criminalize illegal
immigrants and those who help them. Many of those at the demonstrations
supported a competing Senate bill put forward by Ted Kennedy and John
McCain. That bill would create 400,000 temporary visas for low-skilled
foreign workers, and would allow illegal immigrants who have been in the
country for over five years to gain legal residency and start a path to
citizenship after paying fines and undergoing background checks. A Senate
compromise on the bill collapsed last week after Republicans failed to
toughen it enough to make it palatable to some reluctant conservatives, and
it's not clear whether any immigration reform legislation is going to pass.
But the debate is almost certain to keep boiling, with another big day of
nationwide pro-immigrant protests planned for May 1.

So far, the immigration protests have drawn support from both civil rights
leaders and labor leaders. Some liberals, though, are urging progressives
not to align themselves with a movement that could ultimately hurt Americans
workers. Plans for a guest worker program are especially contentious because
opponents argue that it would create a permanent underclass of
disenfranchised labor.

In a March 29 column posted on the progressive Web site Common Dreams, Thom
Hartmann described the fight between supporters of the Senate and House
bills as one between "corporatist Republicans ('amnesty!')" and "racist
Republicans ('fence!')." "Working Americans have always known this simple
equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages," he wrote.
"If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the
minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to
confront and fix their corrupt ways. Between the Reagan years -- when there
were only around 1 to 2 million illegal aliens in our workforce -- and
today, we've gone from about 25 percent of our private workforce being
unionized to around seven percent. Much of this is the direct result -- as
Caesar [sic] Ch&aacte;vez predicted -- of illegal immigrants competing
directly with unionized and legal labor. Although it's most obvious in the
construction trades over the past 30 years, it's hit all sectors of our
economy."

As Hartmann notes, Cesar Chavez, the legendary founder of the United
Farmworkers Union, was at one point so opposed to illegal immigration that
he was known to call the INS on the undocumented. "What he was trying to do
was to stop growers from using immigrants to break the strikes," says Nestor
Rodriguez, co-director of the Center for Immigration Research at the
University of Houston.

There are, of course, many factors besides immigration leading to the long
decline of labor unions. Globalization, the deindustrialization of the
American economy and the antilabor policies of the GOP, at both the state
and national level, have all played profound roles. But there is data to
back up the claim that immigration drives down working-class wages. In a
2004 study, Harvard economist George J. Borjas wrote that by "increasing the
supply of labor between 1980 and 2000, immigration reduced the average
annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $1,700 or roughly 4
percent." High school dropouts were more severely affected -- their wages
were reduced 7.4 percent, Borjas found. "The reduction in earnings occurs
regardless of whether the immigrants are legal or illegal, permanent or
temporary," he wrote. "It is the presence of additional workers that reduces
wages, not their legal status."

"What immigration really does is redistribute wealth away from workers
toward employers," Borjas told the Washington Post last month.

Borjas' conclusions are not universally accepted; UC-Berkeley economist
David Card challenged them in a 2005 paper titled "Is the New Immigration
Really So Bad?" He declared that the wage gap between American dropouts and
high school graduates has remained nearly constant since 1980, despite the
rise of immigrants in the workplace. "Overall, evidence that immigrants have
harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant," he wrote. A
recent analysis in the New York Times, "Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be
Less Than Meets the Eye," pointed out that the wages of high school dropouts
in California, who face a lot of competition from illegal immigrants, fell
17 percent between 1980 and 2004. But the wages of high school dropouts in
Ohio, where there are very few illegal immigrants, fell 31 percent during
the same period.

Nor is it at all clear that illegal immigration is to blame for high
African-American unemployment, as pastor Minshall supposes. "No academic has
really been able to make the direct correlation," says Doris Meissner,
commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President
Clinton and a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
African-American unemployment, she says, "obviously has something to do with
a broader set of sociological and racism issues. It leads people to say if
you didn't have the immigrants here, legal or illegal, then those high
unemployment rates among African-American males would come down. But that's
not been the case."

Still, there is a general consensus among most experts that immigration has
at least some negative effect on the wages of low-skilled American workers.
"Nobody's been able to really pin it down with hard data, except to the
extent that there probably is a slight depressing of wages," Meissner says.
"We know from economic theory overall that if you have an unending supply of
labor, you're going to make it more difficult for the workers at the bottom
to compete effectively."

Conservatives, eager to deflect attention from their own schisms, are
glorying in the dilemma that immigration economics seem to create for
liberals. Writing in the National Review, Rich Lowry evinced a newfound
reverence for the noble legacies of Chavez and "great labor leader" Samuel
Gompers, both of whom supported restrictions on immigration. "Democrats
opposed the ratification of the Central America Free Trade Agreement last
year for fear that it would undercut American workers made to compete with
cheap Latin American labor," he wrote. "The problem the Democrats must have
had with this effect on American workers was that it was too indirect. The
party now favors importing lots of that same cheap Latin American labor
directly into the United States."

Why, then, did so many union officials support the April 10 marches? Both
the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO were involved in
organizing the demonstrations, and labor leaders spoke at several rallies. ( the following is total bull pure and simple):
"This is a moment of historic decision for the United States of America,"
AFL-CIO president John Sweeney told the crowd in Washington. "Do we reaffirm
our welcome to families fleeing poverty and oppression, who come here
seeking a job, a home, a chance at a better life? Do we create a path to
citizenship to all who have earned it with their hard work, to all who love
and respect America? Or do we reject our heritage and put up signs that say,
'The American Dream belongs only to the few?'"

Lowry sees the union support as a cynical attempt to recruit immigrants in
order to make up for unions' failure to organize American workers. But for
some progressive analysts, there's a more optimistic explanation, one rooted
in the old ideal of solidarity.

One way for liberals to transcend the ideological impasse over immigration
is to take on the larger problem of the upward distribution of wealth in
America. As things stand now, American high school dropouts and illegal
immigrants are essentially fighting over scraps at the bottom of the
American pay barrel. But by cooperating in a reinvigorated labor movement,
some progressives say, both Americans and immigrants can elevate the pay
scale and receive a decent wage.

Nathan Newman, policy director at the Progressive Legislative Action
Network, points out that right now, the poorest fifth of Americans earn a
mere 3.5 percent of the national income. Rather than accepting the status
quo and then fighting over their small shares, Newman argues, American and
immigrant workers need to join together. Turning that 3.5 percent into 7
percent, he says, would have a far more salutary effect on wages than any
crackdown on immigrants(illegal aliens there are no crackdowns on those here legally what bias!).

"The reason most workers, civil rights leaders, et cetera, are supporting
the idea of immigrant rights is that they know the best way to keep [labor
policies] the same is to allow conservatives and others to pit different
groups of workers against each other," Newman says. As he sees it, support
for the immigration movement isn't a betrayal of America's working class;
rather, it's the key to a class-based political realignment. The movement
that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets this month has
"the makings of new political alliances that are far more stable and far
more likely to create broader social change," he says. "Which is again why
you see many black civil rights leaders supporting these marches. This is
the alliance they want. They think it's an alliance that can deal with these
much broader issues."

The broader issues are about economic justice in a country where the gulf
between rich and poor seems to widen by the day. "If people are worried
about wage standards in the U.S., let's deal with that," Newman says. "Let's
really deal with the issue of what's happening with the enforcement of our
labor laws, with the complete collapse of the minimum-wage rate. Those are
far more significant issues for most workers than the ones everyone is
wringing their hands over."

Some union leaders argue that legalizing undocumented immigrants( illegal aliens) -- and thus
giving them the same rights as other workers -- will stop employers from
using them to undermine organizing drives. "It is bad for American workers
to have any worker in this country without any rights and subject to
exploitation," says Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the SEIU, the
country's fastest-growing union. "Immigrants (illegal aliens they are not immigrant)are going to continue coming.
The question all of us should ask ourselves is under what condition should
they come. Most people would say better they come with full rights and
protection so they're not exploited and used by employers against American
workers."

Immigrant workers, after all, aren't just working in the underground economy
-- many of them are on the books, working in industries that unions hope to
organize. "In about 50 to 60 percent of the employment circumstances,
employers are actually reporting those workers and paying into the Social
Security system," Meissner says. ( and this isnt viewed as a crime? does everyone know that if your card is stolen you have to pay the thousands of dollars to straighten it out?) "A very large share of these workers are
either using somebody else's Social Security number, or they're using fake
Social Security numbers." Some even use 000-00-0000, which, she says, thesystem accepts. Despite the perception of illegal immigrants as an absolute
drain on public resources, Meissner points out that hundreds of billions of
dollars have been paid into Social Security from untraceable accounts,
indirectly supporting American workers.

Agriculture used to be the main industry employing illegal immigrants, but
that's no longer the case. Now, Meissner says, the dominant fields in which
they work are construction, landscaping, healthcare, elderly care,
hospitality and restaurants. Because there are so many illegal immigrants in
the service economy, union leaders say that securing their rights is key toorganizing that growing sector. These are not, by and large, jobs that can
be outsourced, so if employers are forced to stop underpaying service
workers living in America, they'll have to raise wages.

Currently, somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of SEIU's 1.8 million
members are immigrants, Medina says. He doesn't know how many are illegal,
but says, "I think it's fair to assume there are a lot of undocumented
workers among that number." Yet organizing undocumented immigrants presents
specific challenges. Right now, illegal immigrants serve as a kind of safety
valve for employers who want to thwart union drives. Legally, employers
can't fire workers for trying to start a union -- unless they're
undocumented. In the 2002 decision Hoffman Plastic Compounds Inc. v. NLRB,
the Supreme Court ruled that the National Labor Relations Board could not
order back pay to an illegal immigrant who was let go for trying to organize
his workplace, reasoning that the wages would have been illegally earned in
the first place.

Thus threats to crack down on undocumented workers can dissuade organizers.
"We see it every day," says Medina. Sometimes it's blatant -- an employer
will threaten to call the INS. "Other times, all of a sudden they'll start
questioning their [employees'] papers, their Social Security numbers and all
of that. The message is pretty clear. This all of a sudden begins to happen
during an organizing drive."

Quote:

(THis part is BS pure and simple_)
If immigrants had access to work permits and a path to citizenship, Medina
says, it would be harder to exploit them, and working conditions could be
improved across the board. "Immigrants understand if they want to improve
their lives, the labor movement is their best bet," he says. "And if the
labor movement wants to improve the lives of American workers, immigrants
are the best bet for accomplishing that." This is a vision that most
progressive thinkers can embrace. Whether American workers will do so is
another question entirely.

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