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ECONOMY OF IMMIGRATION - Perhaps we need more illegal immigrants, not fewer. From a purely economic point of view, they’re a bargain.
History can be a cruel teacher. A few years ago, like some other states before and after, Alabama came down hard on illegal farm workers. Armed with the canard that illegals were taking jobs away from home-grown citizens, Alabama’s early version of ICE swept into fields and orchids, deporting tens of thousands of workers.
Imagine Alabama’s surprise when natural-born Americans, black and white, refused to take the stoop-labor jobs that paid by the box, not the hour, with zero benefits. Tomatoes, cantaloupes and lettuce sat rotting in the fields. Grapefruit languished on the trees. Alabama swiftly and quietly scrapped its hard-nosed immigration policies.
Some, including some in the White House, remain hard-nosed. They say illegals are bleeding Social Security when the opposite is true. Most illegal immigrants are entirely outside the system. The men who hire day laborers from the corner near Home Depot don’t pay into Social Security, and perhaps as many as ninety percent of our maids and housekeepers don’t receive Social Security benefits either. Think that percentage is too high? Know any of your friends who pay Social Security for their cleaning lady? Do you?
Social Security makes a bundle off illegal immigrants. Those companies who do withhold Social Security (restaurants, hotels, big-box retailers, etc.) require Social Security cards but aren’t required to verify them. So of course many illegal immigrants who can’t get Social Security cards, fake them. Which means the immigrant pays into the system, but cannot file for benefits. Each year $26 BILLION dollars go into Social Security coffers that can never be retrieved. Add to this the obvious fact that since most immigrants are young men, even legal immigrants won’t be collecting for forty years or so. As far as the Social Security Administration is concerned, the illegal immigrant is a cash cow.
And don’t worry about “the worst of the worst.” They are already here, and have been all along. One man, Bernie Madoff, stole more money in ten years than a million illegal immigrants could steal in a lifetime. It isn’t about moral high ground, it’s about opportunity. What’s the illegal immigrant laborer in the field going to steal? A head of lettuce? A box of oranges?
This eventually brings us back around to ICE, which apparently equates immigration with criminality. ICE will spend more taxpayer dollars in its losing battle to stop illegal immigration than the immigrants themselves cost us.
Immigration can’t be stopped; the United States isn’t the only country to learn this. The immigrant isn’t just coming here; he’s fleeing somewhere else, maybe for his life. But immigration in all of its forms can be used for the common good.
The United States needs to have a sane immigration policy that protects its citizens while offering the opportunity of a better life to those less fortunate. ICE isn’t the way to do it. We can’t shoot our way out of this one.
(Jack Shakely is president emeritus of the California Community Foundation in Los Angeles.)
