Well, there does seem to be a LOT of heat out there, and not so much light, about whether or not to give drivers licenses to "illegal" immigrants. It’s shaping up to be another one of those emotional hot button issues that regularly distort our elections. With the debate coming up tonight on CNN (which, dammit, I won’t be able to watch live), I want to get a progressive analysis of the issue out there. I’m tired of seeing Democrats with that deer-in-the-headlights look on their faces, as they get hit with questions to which they have not thought through a good, progressive answer.
This is a framing problem. Thanks to the efforts of George Lakoff, Drew Westen, our own Jeffrey Feldman, and a thousand others, we are (hopefully) coming to understand that the frame within which we discuss an issue has a powerful influence on the outcome of the discussion. We need to get control of the frame within which the discussion of drivers licenses for "illegal" immigrants takes place.
If you ask people what the problem is with "illegal" immigration, the answers will tend to fall into two categories. One is a lot of racist xenophobic crap that needs to be called for what it is. We already know how to do that, and we should not be at all shy about doing it. It is deeply offensive to American values, and the great shining achievement of the Democratic Party over the last two generations has been to establish that racist intolerance is completely unacceptable in our country. Democrats should respond with righteous fury to any debate question or Republican talking point that even hints at racial, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural intolerance.
The second category of concern re "illegal" immigration is an economic argument. They are taking our jobs, they are depressing our wages. In the comment thread to this diaryfrom yesterday, the diarist eventually crystallizes his concern, which he attributes to "illegal" immigration, as follows:
Lower standards of living for American workers.
OK, now we’re getting somewhere. This is a valid concern, and it is exactly the kind of issue for which Americans should turn to the Democratic Party for a solution.
Notice what just happened—we have reframed the issue. We don’t have an immigration problem, we have a problem of lower living standards and greater insecurity for ordinary Americans. Regular middle- and working-class people are having a harder and harder time making a go of it. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared, income is stagnant, prices are rising, health care is out of reach, retirement security is evaporating, and our kids can’t afford college. Meanwhile, the richest 1% are making out like bandits, and our Republican friends are desperate to give even more special tax advantages to their CEO and oil industry pals. No wonder people are anxious and angry!
But tell me please, do we really think "illegal" immigrants caused all that?
If the problem is that wages are too low, then go after that. Let’s have the minimum wage be a living wage. If the problem is workplace conditions, then go after that. Every American job can and should be a safe and humane experience, and allow enough time off for a decent family life.
If every American job paid a decent wage and offered safe and humane conditions, and if we had a real national health care system that is not connected to employment, then there would be no "jobs Americans won’t do", no market of jobs that only an "illegal" immigrant would take. And there would be no incentive for employers to seek out "illegal" immigrants, who don’t have rights or leverage, in preference to American workers, who do. If we eliminate the unfair advantage that employers seek when they hire easily exploitable "illegal" immigrants, we also eliminate 90% of the "illegal" immigrant problem.
As progressive Democrats, we already agree that these are things this country needs anyway. Adequate wages, decent working conditions, access to affordable health care—who is against those things? If there is anyone out there like that, they are welcome to vote for the Republicans as far as I’m concerned. We’ll be moving on without them.
I used to think that we should crack down hard on employers who hire "illegal" immigrants, but then I changed my mind. The reason is the difficulty of distinguishing "legal" from "illegal" people. We don’t want to create a situation where employers are so terrified of hiring someone who might be "illegal" that they wind up discriminating against Americans who look or sound like they could be of Latino heritage. This is a real problem, folks. It’s hard enough growing up in East LA already, without us having to invent additional barriers against our Mexican-American brothers and sisters becoming productive members of society.
Overall, my main point is that it is pointless to blame the exploited for the actions of the exploiters. It makes no sense to blame a guy for taking a job that he needs and has been offered, or to blame an employer for offering a job that he needs done to the only guy who will take it. The problem is that the rules of the economic game encourage unconscionable levels of exploitation. We can fix those rules, it is within our power, and it is an appropriate function of government to do exactly that.
A further problem is that no matter what the rules are, some people will try to cheat. This is where the drivers license thing comes in (finally). The big penalties should not be for employers who hire "illegal" immigrants, but for employers who try to cheat on the rules governing living wage and decent working conditions regardless of the legal status of their workers. Workers, even if they are "illegal", must be free to report exploitive employers without fear of adverse consequences. This means that we have to let them come out of the shadows, and the drivers license thing is a small but significant part of that.
Let me tell that story in reverse, to see if it makes the logic clearer. If we don’t let our "illegal" immigrants come out of the shadows, some employers will continue their exploitive practices of low pay and unacceptable working conditions. This creates competitive pressure on all employers to do the same, resulting in a lot of jobs that Americans won’t do, and that therefore can be filled only by "illegal" immigrants. And now we’re right back where we started, with lower wages, crummy working conditions, and a flood of "illegal" immigrants.
The other big piece of this puzzle is the question of why people want to leave their home countries in the first place. Maybe this is the time to point out that we have a major global problem of over-population, and that for 30 years now, perverse Republican attitudes against family planning and birth control in less-developed countries have been making that problem a whole lot worse. We have also had a bi-partisan problem of thoughtless devotion to Free Trade dogma, which values the enrichment of huge trans-national corporations over labor rights, the environment, or the viability of the local economy of any country. The same Free Trade dogma that has shipped our manufacturing jobs overseas has also made life nearly unlivable for tens of millions of people in Mexico and Central America. When life is unlivable in their home countries, a lot of those people are going to try to come here—and the answer to that cannot be that we’re going to make it hell for them here too. If we seriously want to do something about immigration, then the priority focus of our international trade and foreign relations policies has to be on creating healthy economies and humane living conditions in the countries from which immigration comes.
Conclusion
We have a choice between two approaches to the immigration situation.
Here’s the right-wing program: 1) Build an Iron Curtain on our border with Mexico. 2) Create a massive force of blue-eyed Immigration Police to glower menacingly at anyone who looks like they might be Hispanic, or who employs people who look Hispanic. 3) Create a national ID card system, as if we don’t already have enough government surveillance, supervision, intrusion, and control in our private lives. 4) Completely ignore (or actually exacerbate) all the root causes that lead to "illegal" immigration in the first place.
It's a pretty good plan, except for two things-- every part of it is morally disgusting and pragmatically futile.
Here’s the progressive program that I think we need instead: 1) Living wage and decent working conditions for all American jobs. 2) A real national health care system. 3) A legal environment that allows any worker, even an "illegal" immigrant, to report exploitive wages and work conditions without fear of reprisal. 4) Vigorous US support for family planning and birth control worldwide. 5) Reform of the Free Trade regime and other foreign policies, so as to foster economic vitality and humane living conditions for ordinary people in countries that are the source of immigration.
This plan preserves American values, fixes the things that legitimately bother people about immigration, and gives us a whole bunch of stuff that we want and need anyhow.
Hmm... which plan shall we choose?