Are Illegal Immigrants "Makers" or "Takers"?
The always controversial debate over illegal immigration is once again churning on Capitol Hill with a fragile new coalition of lawmakers putting forth their latest attempt at a bill to legalize the more than 11 million illegal immigrants living in America. The issue divides factions of both parties, but the tug-of-war this past week highlights the fact that it divides Republicans most, leading to a rhetorical sparring match in which both factions are being disingenuous.
The opening salvo was fired by the Heritage Foundation, which released a study saying that legalizing undocumented Americans will open them up to accessing our social programs, and that the math works out to something like 6 to 1 in terms of government outlays likely to be spent on newly legalized immigrants versus what they pay in taxes. The return volley came from the Chamber of Commerce wing of the GOP, personified by antitax ideologue Grover Norquist, who said that Heritage's argument could just as easily be an argument against having children, and when asked what impact it would have on the economy if the illegal immigrants were to go away, he responded that "GDP would go down".
They're both right...and they're both wrong. And that dichotomy underscores how desperately the immigration debate needs some context. I'm not sure about the 6-1 ratio Heritage is peddling, but I suspect they're right that if legalized, these mostly low-skill immigrants will consume more public resources than they contribute to the Treasury. But Norquist's carefully parsed words about "GDP going down" without the immigrants speaks volumes about the real dynamic here, in which the economic contributions of these immigrants does grow the economy, but that all of that growth is being consolidated by the richest of the rich...the people whose interest Norquist is guarding. Thus the economic contribution of the immigrant worker is understated by the artificially small figure on their W-2s. If they were compensated proportionate to their economic contribution, they would be net contributors instead of net "takers".
It's basically the same cynical shell game from the last Presidential campaign, in which Mitt Romney spent his entire professional life stripping the working-class and its communities of as much equity as he could squeeze out of it and passing those resources on to the corporate boardroom.....and then having the unmitigated gall to point his righteous finger at the very people he mugged and bemoan the "47% of Americans dependent on government". The immigration issue exposes the extent to which the factions of the Republican Party have to balance their conflicting goals of turning America into a nation of low-income Americans while simultaneously reducing dependency on the government. I submit that those goals cannot both be achieved in a democracy, where an undercompensated peasantry will seek an alternative financial livelihood through the government when the reward for work keeps diminishing, and immigration adds another layer of complexity to the issue.
Last week, David Frum wrote the best column I've read in years on the immigration issue.....http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/05/06/david-frum-a-nonsense-consensus-on-immigration.html.............Frum is a former Bush speechwriter, but a moderate Republican who speaks more sensibly on class-related issues than most left-leaning columnists who haven't given two passing thoughts on the impact of immigration on working-class wages. When this issue had a national hearing six years ago, the pitchforks overpowered the elites and despite the country evolving some in recent years to a more pro-immigration mindset, I still suspect the pitchforks are gonna win the fight again in 2013. The extent to which the Republican Party of 2013 has shifted from upper-middle-class suburbanites to white working-class Southerners--the very people who will be most negatively impacted by the economic forces Frum describes--has created an extremely lopsided political advantage for illegal immigration's critics. While the party's power base still lies in its Chamber of Commerce money interests, the GOP has become so dependent on the votes of bubbas earning $20,000 per year and whose blood tends to boil the most about immigration that the prospect of them sitting out elections and denying the GOP victories will undoubtedly tilt the playing field towards the opposition.
And we're already seeing the origins of this playing out with the immigration bill heading to the Senate, and Republican critics such as Jeff Sessions and Chuck Grassley filing dozens or even hundreds of poison pill amendments to make the bill untenable to a majority of lawmakers. The guy with the most on the line is Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose advocacy for immigration reform is pitting him against the very Republican base most likely to punish him if he plans to run for President in 2016...and you can be sure there will be a large field of opponents willing to take advantage of a Rubio vote looked upon as a mistake by the party's base. The fear, even among nervous supporters of Rubio's position, is that he's gonna get rolled by Chuck Schumer and other Democrats who are not negotiating in good faith, particularly as it relates to the language of immigrants only being able to become citizens if they pay years worth of back taxes and "get in the back of the line". Most people don't expect the road to citizenship will be anywhere near that onerous and they are probably right, as you can be sure Democrats will continue to leverage this issue to get the Hispanic vote even if and when immigration reform passes, only now moving the goalposts to "heartless Republicans are slowing down your path to become citizens" by actually wanting to follow the contours of the law just passed.
But there's a danger for Democrats of stepping into a trap with this legislation as well, as it's a good bet the current configuration of the bill will look a lot different after thousands of Senate amendments and after the more conservative House of Representatives gets done molding it. Democrats could easily find themselves in a position forced politically to accept ANY immigration reform bill, even one framed by Republicans with a frontloaded "guest worker program" and a backloaded "path to citizenship". I consider a guest worker program to be apartheid and could never vote for any immigration reform bill that contains that provision. And I suspect a lot of the Democratic base is with me on that, meaning the Democrats could demoralize many of their existing voters by signing on for a bad law without creating a wave of new immigrant voters to replace them anytime soon due to Republicans' successfully slow-walking the citizenship process.
Clearly there are a lot of obstacles here and what's most intriguing is that the contours of a good-faith immigration reform law are widely popular with voters of both parties. If legislation could be crafted to legalize current undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship, coupled with assurances that the border will be sealed and slow the influx of new illegal immigrants down to trickle, bipartisan majorities would support it. But as Frum's article acknowledges, the elites in both parties have an entirely different agenda when it comes to immigration reform, and that is a means for their corporate campaign contributors to reduce labor costs and keep them reduced for the rest of eternity. The more the debate drags on, the more obvious it will become to voters than their cynicism about politicians' handling of the issue is warranted and public support is likely wither away just as it did in 2007. The biggest issue of our time is the fact that wages are at an all-time low as a percentage of GDP and keep getting lower, and the larger the public hearing is on the immigration issue, the more working-class voters of all political stripes will recognize that the endgame of this legislation is for Grover Norquist's clients to continue "growing GDP" and pocketing all of that growth for themselves.
The opening salvo was fired by the Heritage Foundation, which released a study saying that legalizing undocumented Americans will open them up to accessing our social programs, and that the math works out to something like 6 to 1 in terms of government outlays likely to be spent on newly legalized immigrants versus what they pay in taxes. The return volley came from the Chamber of Commerce wing of the GOP, personified by antitax ideologue Grover Norquist, who said that Heritage's argument could just as easily be an argument against having children, and when asked what impact it would have on the economy if the illegal immigrants were to go away, he responded that "GDP would go down".
They're both right...and they're both wrong. And that dichotomy underscores how desperately the immigration debate needs some context. I'm not sure about the 6-1 ratio Heritage is peddling, but I suspect they're right that if legalized, these mostly low-skill immigrants will consume more public resources than they contribute to the Treasury. But Norquist's carefully parsed words about "GDP going down" without the immigrants speaks volumes about the real dynamic here, in which the economic contributions of these immigrants does grow the economy, but that all of that growth is being consolidated by the richest of the rich...the people whose interest Norquist is guarding. Thus the economic contribution of the immigrant worker is understated by the artificially small figure on their W-2s. If they were compensated proportionate to their economic contribution, they would be net contributors instead of net "takers".
It's basically the same cynical shell game from the last Presidential campaign, in which Mitt Romney spent his entire professional life stripping the working-class and its communities of as much equity as he could squeeze out of it and passing those resources on to the corporate boardroom.....and then having the unmitigated gall to point his righteous finger at the very people he mugged and bemoan the "47% of Americans dependent on government". The immigration issue exposes the extent to which the factions of the Republican Party have to balance their conflicting goals of turning America into a nation of low-income Americans while simultaneously reducing dependency on the government. I submit that those goals cannot both be achieved in a democracy, where an undercompensated peasantry will seek an alternative financial livelihood through the government when the reward for work keeps diminishing, and immigration adds another layer of complexity to the issue.
Last week, David Frum wrote the best column I've read in years on the immigration issue.....http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/05/06/david-frum-a-nonsense-consensus-on-immigration.html.............Frum is a former Bush speechwriter, but a moderate Republican who speaks more sensibly on class-related issues than most left-leaning columnists who haven't given two passing thoughts on the impact of immigration on working-class wages. When this issue had a national hearing six years ago, the pitchforks overpowered the elites and despite the country evolving some in recent years to a more pro-immigration mindset, I still suspect the pitchforks are gonna win the fight again in 2013. The extent to which the Republican Party of 2013 has shifted from upper-middle-class suburbanites to white working-class Southerners--the very people who will be most negatively impacted by the economic forces Frum describes--has created an extremely lopsided political advantage for illegal immigration's critics. While the party's power base still lies in its Chamber of Commerce money interests, the GOP has become so dependent on the votes of bubbas earning $20,000 per year and whose blood tends to boil the most about immigration that the prospect of them sitting out elections and denying the GOP victories will undoubtedly tilt the playing field towards the opposition.
And we're already seeing the origins of this playing out with the immigration bill heading to the Senate, and Republican critics such as Jeff Sessions and Chuck Grassley filing dozens or even hundreds of poison pill amendments to make the bill untenable to a majority of lawmakers. The guy with the most on the line is Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose advocacy for immigration reform is pitting him against the very Republican base most likely to punish him if he plans to run for President in 2016...and you can be sure there will be a large field of opponents willing to take advantage of a Rubio vote looked upon as a mistake by the party's base. The fear, even among nervous supporters of Rubio's position, is that he's gonna get rolled by Chuck Schumer and other Democrats who are not negotiating in good faith, particularly as it relates to the language of immigrants only being able to become citizens if they pay years worth of back taxes and "get in the back of the line". Most people don't expect the road to citizenship will be anywhere near that onerous and they are probably right, as you can be sure Democrats will continue to leverage this issue to get the Hispanic vote even if and when immigration reform passes, only now moving the goalposts to "heartless Republicans are slowing down your path to become citizens" by actually wanting to follow the contours of the law just passed.
But there's a danger for Democrats of stepping into a trap with this legislation as well, as it's a good bet the current configuration of the bill will look a lot different after thousands of Senate amendments and after the more conservative House of Representatives gets done molding it. Democrats could easily find themselves in a position forced politically to accept ANY immigration reform bill, even one framed by Republicans with a frontloaded "guest worker program" and a backloaded "path to citizenship". I consider a guest worker program to be apartheid and could never vote for any immigration reform bill that contains that provision. And I suspect a lot of the Democratic base is with me on that, meaning the Democrats could demoralize many of their existing voters by signing on for a bad law without creating a wave of new immigrant voters to replace them anytime soon due to Republicans' successfully slow-walking the citizenship process.
Clearly there are a lot of obstacles here and what's most intriguing is that the contours of a good-faith immigration reform law are widely popular with voters of both parties. If legislation could be crafted to legalize current undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship, coupled with assurances that the border will be sealed and slow the influx of new illegal immigrants down to trickle, bipartisan majorities would support it. But as Frum's article acknowledges, the elites in both parties have an entirely different agenda when it comes to immigration reform, and that is a means for their corporate campaign contributors to reduce labor costs and keep them reduced for the rest of eternity. The more the debate drags on, the more obvious it will become to voters than their cynicism about politicians' handling of the issue is warranted and public support is likely wither away just as it did in 2007. The biggest issue of our time is the fact that wages are at an all-time low as a percentage of GDP and keep getting lower, and the larger the public hearing is on the immigration issue, the more working-class voters of all political stripes will recognize that the endgame of this legislation is for Grover Norquist's clients to continue "growing GDP" and pocketing all of that growth for themselves.
posted by Mark at 10:24 AM
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