The Immigration Problem: Perceptions and Solutions
If I don’t go on any tirade against illegal immigrants it is because they are incidental to the fundamental causes of our current problems, almost all of which are global these days. Thus, countries cannot solve these current problems individually. If we could wrap up all the immigrants in this country and hang them (which would be merciful compared to just dumping them back into countries which want them even less than we do), none of the major problems we face would be solved. The cost of many items would go up in the absence of our major slave labor force. That is a relatively minor impact—but does raise the interesting question—-if we don’t want to grant all workers a livable minimum wage that goes up with the cost of living, as does social security for the old——because that would raise the cost of of goods produced by ‘slave labor’, then why would we want to get rid of people producing the goods and services at a wage below the existing minimum wage?
No, I am not personally going to blame our difficulties on immigrants, ethnic minorities, foreigners, cultural variations, genetical inferiors, bad parenting, etc. These are the usual scapegoats offered by any ‘empire’ in trouble. So before I address the specifics on a list recently sent me (the URL listed at the end) I need to repeat, what I always repeat, are the basic problems facing our country and most other countries also.
These problems are human overpopulation, the accumulation of way too much wealth in the hands of too few (and this disparity is growing faster in this country than any other major industrial country), the inability to provide all citizens good health care, good schools, good teachers, good job opportunities, safe communities, an inability to enforce responsible reproduction, provide good pensions, livable salaries, natural environment protection, climate change protection, medical centers for drug abuse rather than jails, medical centers for chronic high levels of stress hormones (especially for children), and an effective networks for all children to receive sufficient support from responsible licensed adults. These are the issues around which we are failing.
While immigration is not listed above, it is part of the consequences of the above failures. My stance on immigration begins with an ethical notation. Immigrants, for the most part are often those with the willpower and persistence to escape dire living conditions where they are living, or are part of the 75 million refugees escaping from military conflicts in their homeland, conflicts in which we have often been an invading force (for purported good reasons) the last 50 years. Thus, our invasions have in some cases contributed to the immigration hordes. More and more countries are being ruled by ‘thugs’ who thrive on religious and political conflicts. The successful thugs aren’t interested in coming to the U.S. and being a nobody, most immigrants today are the innocent victims of thug-like rulers.
Another aspect I need mention here before addressing the list is this: We have for years encouraged illegal immigrants. The very people who most want illegal immigrants out are also against any attempt to require official cards or fingerprinting for all legitimate citizens, which would be needed for any kind of employment. The truth is, we like using illegal immigrants to do the kind of work American citizens will not do. After all, unemployment benefits pay more than what many of these illegal immigrants make. If they can’t work in this country they will not come. The idea that walls will stop them is simply imbecilic. The point is we have always been two-faced about illegal immigration. For legal immigration we attempt, albeit sloppily, to attract those who will have good jobs here and not be a financial drain. We actually import huge numbers of foreign doctors simply because we will not build enough medical schools to supply the number of doctors needed. Americans these days are all about the bottom line. Where is the ethics that ensures some of the best jobs for our own citizens will by default go to foreigners? Thus, for self serving reasons, we have essentially two kinds of immigrants—those who can fulfill jobs which we don’t spend the money to train or educate enough of our own citizens, and those who serve as our slave labor force for many everyday products and services. Then, when all the major problems listed earlier above hit us, we suddenly claim these illegal immigrants are a major cause. This seems a tad preposterous to me.
In the broadest sense, maybe this will help my take on about all this: Back before the Civil War the South had a rather backward economy compared to the North. Some said if we could just get rid of all the slaves things would be better (they were the illegal immigrants I guess). So the problems were caused by the slaves themselves, these bastards who got into this country and personally ruined the economy of the south. What we need do is arrest them and deport them. Well, we didn’t arrest and deport them we just freed them. To do what? Most couldn’t read or write or had any special skills for employment. It seems that doing the right thing for the less fortunate, whether it be former slaves, or children trapped in violent ghettos, is expensive in the short run, but helps shrink the size of ghettos, thereby helping our society survive in the long run. Freedom today, for so many people, means nothing left to lose.
Justice for illegal immigrants is not just placing all the blame on them for coming here. We looked the other way because we were quite willing to use them as our modern day slave labor force. Now we have decided, and rightfully so, that having this huge population of poor people, living in the shadows, just exasperates all the social and criminal consequences that are associated with poor populations of any ilk.
If we are serious about reducing the population of poor in this country then we start addressing this issue on the basis of all the poor. We start by eliminating job opportunities for illegal immigration and this requires fingerprinting or carding (not sure carding would work) all legitimate citizens. Building a ridiculously expensive wall is not the answer. We implement a reasonable livable minimum wage for all workers and then treat the minimum wage as we do social security by increasing this wage as the cost of living goes up. We probably should do this with income tax rates also, increase them automatically as the cost of living goes up since the cost of governing goes up with the cost of living. We have trapped ourselves into the ludicrous situation where politicians can’t get elected unless they promise a tax reduction. Ironically, this opens the door for the wealthy to get huge tax reductions, tax loop holes, tax exemptions, while the average person gets a few hundred dollars, and the 43% who don’t even make enough money to qualify to pay federal income taxes, just remain even poorer with every cost of living increase.
Once we remove the possibility of gaining employment here, illegal immigration drops dramatically.For those we helped entice to come here for our modern day slave labor force, we deport only those with serious criminal records. They didn’t behave while here so they have to go. Period.
Even though I taught at a University which included students from one of our worst ghetto areas, I seldom had to deal with illegal immigrants. They worked too many hours and were too poor and often had poor English language skills. So like most Americans, my exposure to illegal immigrants was in domestic help, janitorial work, yard work, and so on. It has always been my nature to feel sad for their plight, while to the extent one could communicate with them, invariably they tried to be pleasant. I would not be opposed to mastering English as a prerequisite for citizenship.
It has always annoyed me that the severity of punishment on a job is almost always inversely proportional to the salary level of the employee. The lowest level employees get sometimes zero wiggle room for mistakes while higher level employees are entitled to hearings, second chances, demotions, no advancement and so on until they voluntarily move on. And if they are a high level executive, they get a golden parachute—a really huge one—provided they never talk about company matters with anyone (they know too much). This country is not mired in serious problems because of our low level employees including illegal immigrants. Individual members of our poorest rural, suburban, or urban ghettos are not the reason our ghettos have grown in size, have become unsafe, or for the absence of good health care, or good schools, or good teachers, or lack of job opportunities, and so on. The obscene discrepancy between the wealthy and the rest of working population is not the fault of the poor, whether they are native or illegal immigrants. We could throw every single illegal immigrant out of the country tomorrow and all of the major problems facing this country and most countries in the world, would still be there. Plus, the cost to do this would be astronomical, coupled with the rise in cost of many products and services. This would be like a child being being given the blame because of the poor parenting or environmental situation. Every nation is responsible for the kind of communities which exist within its borders. These millions of kids growing up in poor rural, suburban, or urban unsafe environments, with poor health care, with poor education, little job opportunities, are not the cause of their situation, but the victims. Most of the adults still trapped in these environments are not the cause of these environments but victims also. I suspect many of us would not recognize ourselves if we had grown up in such environments. I would have died young as I had just about every childhood disease during my formative years.
But we need be realistically concerned, even if we despise these ghetto inhabitants for what they have become. It is certainly questionable whether allowing all of them to become legally armed, having smart phones for communication with each other, and the recent acceptance of domestic terrorism as a weapon of mass destruction, is really something which bodes well for our continued neglect of their environment. Jailing the 43% of our population who do not make enough money to qualify to pay federal income tax is a lot of prisoners and would cost $30,000per inmate. We lose sight that when workers make a livable wage, they have money to spend, they actually pay federal income taxes, they have money to help pay some of their health insurance costs, they become less inclined to engage in violent criminal behavior, they become more contented individuals, more responsible individuals, better parents, less hostile individuals, generate more positive social interactions with others, and the list goes on. But the problem is, that to help them in any of these areas requires the ‘have’s' to be less greedy for themselves. Maybe CEO’s don’t have to make 150 times more than their employees, maybe the wealthy who earned their wealth really do have a responsibility to return a lot of that wealth, through progressive taxations and high inheritance taxes, back into the society from which they earned their wealth, rather than pass that accumulated wealth off to offspring who certainly did not earn it. It is the American way for all individuals to earn their own wealth, if that is their desire, not acquire it via welfare, whether the source of welfare be government or family, illegal means, or any other welfare mode. To the extent we can, every citizen deserves a level playing field. Of course a level playing field doesn’t make everyone equal in terms of how they personally will succeed, but it does give everyone a fair chance. More importantly, it enables that society to have a future. Every empire, with few if any exceptions, has imploded because the cost of maintaining foreign bases becomes too great, and the accumulation of wealth domestically in the hands of a few. That is exactly where America stands today with the added dire consequences of human overpopulation, climate change, and inadequate natural resources available for all humans to live the lifestyle that those of us affluent now live.
Now to the reasons used to blame illegal immigrants for our national debt. I will address these reasons by the number placed in front of each one. The original article sent to me is at the end of my responses.
1. When all citizens or anyone permitted to work in the United States are paid a livable wage, they aren’t on welfare. $11-22 billion is pittance compared to the cost of just the last Iraq war which was 1.1 trillion dollars.
2. $22 billion on food assistance etc to illegal immigrants. Well, the government loses $4.4 trillion dollars via just some of the tax breaks given to the wealthy. This includes having someone like Buffet point out that his secretary has a higher income tax rate than he. It also includes why Trump can make millions stiffing contractors and investors, declare bankruptcy several times and never have to pay any income tax for 18 years. It might be wiser to make it impossible to hire illegal immigrants than to waste money building a wall that will stop no one. What kind of logic is it to think people can’t get over or under a wall?
3.Ditto above, plus why do we allow illegal immigrants in and then suggest after we allow them in to be employed below minimum wages? Do we complete this idiocy by then watching them starve to death or die from lack of medical care? Maybe this scene could be a special 24 hr ‘reality’ show on TV where we watch them die from hunger or disease. Perhaps Christ could come back and be the moderator.
4. Ditto again. I would rather fingerprint every legal citizen and jail anyone who hires an illegal immigrant. And I would use the billions upon billions of money to build a useless wall to help provide universal health care for all citizens like all other advanced industrialized societies already do.
5+ 8. Ditto again. The total spent on all the services listed comes to $248 billion dollars. The total cost of the 2 Iraq wars, the Vietnam War, Afghanistan War, and some other 50Plus invasions of varied sorts in South America, Africa, and the Middle East comes to an astronomical amount. Just the Iraqi and Afghanistan Wars have totaled 4.3 trillion dollars. We have invaded 22 countries in the last 50 years, about the same number we invaded the other 188 years of our existence as a nation. Ironically, except for Granada and the Balkans, we haven’t won any wars the last 50 years. We simply go in, spend a fortune, destroy a nation's infrastructure with money that could have been used to update and modernize our own infrastructure, kill people, injure people, or generate millions of refugees stranded in other countries, then tire of the war, declare victory and leave. And which of these 22 countries is better off now than before we invaded them or supported rebels in some cases? The Industrial military complex is our biggest industry. Given all this why is it wrong to criticize our own refusal all these years to stop illegal immigrants, use them for slave labor, and then blame them for coming here to eke out bare survival, which of course includes all of the costs listed in this article sent to me. Slave labor always comes with a cost. Slavery was wrong, as is enticing poor suckers to come here to avoid even worse economic conditions where they live is wrong, and we never should have let it go on for so long. We have these expensive costs as listed (assuming the figures are right, which I am willing to do) because the alternative would be to let these people starve, or die from lack of medical care and let their children have no medical care or schooling at all. This just seems a cruel and totally unethical attitude toward innocent people struggling under terrible conditions.
6 and 7. Analyses of census data from 1980 through 2010 show that among men ages 18 to 49, immigrants were one-half to one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as those born in the United States. Across all ages and sexes, about 7 percent of the nation’s population are noncitizens, while figures from the Justice Department show that about 5 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons are noncitizens. Opponents of immigration often point out that in federal prisons, a much higher share of inmates, 22 percent, are noncitizens. But federal prisons hold a small fraction of the nation’s inmates, and in many ways, it is an unusual population. About one-third of noncitizen federal inmates are serving time for immigration offenses — usually re-entering the country illegally after being deported — that are not covered by state law.
Without adjusting for age, a total illegal immigrant population of 22 million would indicate an incarceration rate of 0.56 percent using Cato’s estimate of the size of the incarcerated illegal immigrant population. Illegal immigrants have a .85 percent incarceration rate, legal Immigrants have .47 percent incarceration rate, and native Americans have a 1.53 incarceration rate. Of course the incarceration rate is lower than native Americans. They realize getting arrested for a crime will likely get them deported. Not surprisingly, arrested illegal immigrants take a long time to actually get deported. At $30,000 per year incarceration, that is a substantial cost. Why, it might seem reasonable to ask, can’t the deportation process be speeded up? We need remember that the Judges are often the only professional persons outside an emergency room doctor, an illegal has had any meaningful contact. The Judge often sees before him/her a harmless but pitiful soul penniless, now homeless and is about to be shipped to a country where the person will be separated from all their friends, have no chance of getting immediate employment, and likely has used up most of any inherited willpower to fight again from start for a better life. The Judge is likely to have none of the abstract anger at immigrants that the rest of us can easily acquire from more distance. So the judge will often delay deportation so the defendant or Social Services can attempt to ensure the person has a chance for employment when deported back to a foreign neighborhood unsympathetic to his plight and no relatives around to help the person. The situation is a mess, but a mess we allowed to fester for many decades. The whole situation is a modern re-run of runaway slaves, complete with safe houses and deplorable consequences when this new slave labor is returned to his old ‘plantation’. In a world suffering badly from overpopulation, we simply cannot allow illegal immigrants to flood our country. This in no way diminishes the sad life situation so many destitute people face across our planet. They are victims and we would do well to understand that, and be ever grateful that we were not born in their environmental situation. There is something unethical to start ranting and raving about these poor souls and start blaming them for our own poor choices for how we have been spending our money for decades. We currently spend almost 600 billion dollars a year on our military budget. There are 75 million refugees living in refugee camps across the world. The U.S. in 2015 spent $1.56 billion dollars to help resettle some of them. In 2014 the U.S. resettled about 70,000 refugees. 75 million refugees is a serious problem in an overpopulated planet. We continue to be a major player in the kind of conflicts which generate these refugees. Does anybody want them in their own country? Of course not. Taking 70,000 is a drop in the bucket. It is no surprise that human overpopulation is generating the kind of intolerance of one group against another. It is no surprise that every group starts pointing their finger at another group as the cause of all their current problems. Like mentioned before, those at the bottom of the ladder are the easiest ones to blame and the easiest ones to punish and be angry at. That doesn’t make it logical, nor does it make it ethical.
Every country has the right to protect its own population in times over overpopulation. That is what we need do. We should stop any further illegal immigration. A wall certainly won’t do it, but fingerprinting all legitimate citizens is plausible and workable. Those that are here and behaving should be helped just like we help all the poor who are legitimate citizens. Their problems are the same. Our responsibility for the kind of communities that exist for our citizens remain. The slaves did not create slavery and the inhabitants of our rural, suburban, and urban ghettos did not create the ghettos. Almost all of them were born there.
9. This item is a real winner. It blames illegal immigrants for suppressing wages and yet the same people are against livable minimum wages that rise with the cost of living. How the hell is this logical? Yes, those of us affluent should pay a reasonable price for items or services provided at livable wages. Period. If our hamburgers cost another 25 or 50 cents to pay workers a livable wage, then so be it. Most of it will be gotten back by the taxes these workers then pay, the stimulus to the economy from the money they spend to buy things. Isn’t it weird a justification for allowing huge tax breaks, loop holes, etc. for the wealthy claiming they will spend money and this will stimulate the economy, yet paying livable wages for workers will also stimulate the economy but this is a no-no. This is an amazing act of hostility and lack of sympathy for the poor. The actions and words of Christ are obviously no longer the driving mentality behind Organized Christianity. Instead it is the bottom line, materialism, and ‘family values’ which makes it perfectly ethical to view our own family unit as our only responsibility. We thus circle the wagons and view others as heathens or at the very least undesirables, whose existence and offspring could not possibly be as precious to God (however defined) as our own far more precious genetic cabal.
13. This must be the ultimate in disingenuous ethics. How can people who treasure ‘family values’ criticize the poorest of people who sacrifice their own pitiful standard of living to help distant family members survive, be criticized? When any person or group of people make heavy sacrifices so others, family or otherwise, can survive this is, by any definition of ethics, a significant and admirable action. For whatever reasons, I seem to be happy living a very simple lifestyle with no expensive hobbies. This enables me to easily decide, for example, to let pass an expensive trip here or there and instead spend, let’s say pay $6000 so that 3000 children can receive a vaccine that will protect them from dying from a particular disease. What Americans need to work on, in the difficult global situation that exists today, is to control their own compulsive expensive behaviors or addictions and understand when enough is enough. Those who manage to do this are not better or more ethical (inability to control our compulsive or addictive behaviors is not an ethical failure) but this failure leads to less contentment in our lives and generates the kind of anger we see so prevalent these days against all sorts of human targets. If it is not immigrants, it is blacks, or hispanics, or Jews, or Muslims, or the residents of our ghettos, or gays, or liberals, or conservatives, or life styles, and so on. The worst anger—amazingly— is muslim vs muslim (Sunni vs Shiite) or Christians vs Christians (Catholics vs Protestants) or even Southern Baptists vs Northern Baptists, or evangelicals vs mainstream Christians, or White Christians vs Black Christians, or radical Jews vs moderate Jews. Most of the real ghastly crimes here have been in foreign countries, but America seems to be coming more and more of the same nature. We saw this in the last election where varying groups want desperately to teach a differing group a lesson they won’t forget. Even more worrisome, the trend has been established now for anyone frustrated about anything to just go out and kill dozens of people at random. Wow, I guess that is one way to combat human overpopulation. I prefer responsible reproduction, but that is just my thoughts.
As ever, God’s laws which govern the evolutionary process will go on, via evolutionary time, not human time, and progress will continue albeit at a high personal cost to individual members of all species. Birth is a nothing more than a random sort of hap-pence, with a chance to achieve some contentment. In the end, we all die, death levels all, and all worries come to an end. The dead never have anything to worry about. Fair enough. If we can’t discipline ourselves to understand when enough is enough, death will do the trick.
After I wrote my response to the article sent me I came across this URL which fact checked this article which has been mass sent to many people. I assumed the article had the stats correct. Apparently this is not true. At any rate if you go to the following URL it will contain the article sent to me plus the fact checked answer to each list of assertions which I addressed by number in this musing. I don’t feel the article wasted my time as it drove me to look at illegal immigration from a perspective less dependent on simple stats. All of this illustrates the danger of the internet with misinformation. I have no answer to this anymore than I know how many times in my own answer I have missed some points. That is the neat thing about the evolutionary process—it slowly proceeds independent of all our babble. Here is the fact checking URL with all the original claims sent to me via the internet: http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/cost-of-illegal-immigrants/
