Story by Chris Graham 

There’s one thing you can say about Americans - we’re all immigrants, even the Native Americans who traversed the land bridge between Asia and North America to get here way back when.

“Every one of us came from someplace, if you go back in our history long enough. It’s important that we say that up front. We’re a nation of immigrants, and we’re a nation that has its arms open to immigrants,” said Bill Bolling, the Republican lieutenant governor of Virginia.

The next words out of Bolling’s mouth illustrate where millions of Americans are with respect to the immigration debate that has been raging on Capitol Hill and the streets of Middle America the past few years.

“All we do is ask that you come here legally,” said Bolling, who favors stricter immigration policies and stricter enforcement of existing laws on the books regulating immigration.

The immigration issue was hot and heavy last spring - when Republicans in Congress pushed for measures to stem the flow of immigrants from Mexico and points south across the southern border and to do something about the millions of undocumented immigrants who have made their way here over the years.

“We have immigration now at a level unprecedented in our history - and it’s been going on for nearly 40 years now,” said John Vinson of the Monterey-based Americans for Immigration Control.

“Using the analogy of food, we need to stop and digest what we’ve taken in before we start eating more,” Vinson said. “We’re seeing many signs that we’re moving toward balkanization in this country. We are also importing poverty. And if you extrapolate these trends, it’s not good. A divided, poor society is not one likely to be stable - it’s not one likely to be able to maintain the freedoms that we cherish.”

Like Bolling, Vinson makes it clear that neither he nor his group are against immigration and immigrants being here.

“A lot of people make that accusation. We think it’s important to apply the principle in all things moderation,” Vinson said.

“We’re seeing real warning signs of trouble up ahead - for example, with what happened in France last year, and what is still happening in France. You’re having basically an insurrectionary situation going on over there,” Vinson said of 2005 riots led by Muslim immigrants in the European nation to protest what they perceive as economic inequality there.

“They brought in all these people to do jobs that the French don’t want to do. Well, now they’re doing jobs that the French don’t want to do - such as burning automobiles and burning buildings in cities,” Vinson said. “It’s a dangerous situation - and we’re seeing intimations of the same thing here.

“Last spring, we had those massive illegal-alien marches. We had foreigners in the streets of our cities telling us what laws we can pass and what laws we can’t. I just want to ask, Where is this going? I don’t see a good destination,” Vinson said.

Immigrant-rights advocates agree on one point - about how this debate isn’t going in the direction of a good destination.

“Going into his presidency, it appeared that President Bush, based on his actions and words in Texas when he was governor there, was a champion of reform, even suggesting a kind of amnesty program. He was a proponent of a guest-worker program - and met with Mexican president Vicente Fox on a number of occasions suggesting as much after he became president,” said David Shreve, an economist and University of Virginia professor.

“President Bush once said famously that family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande - suggesting that you have to take into account the status of these people,” Shreve said. “Clearly we’ve moved now more toward an enforcement-only approach, at least in the president’s party. There have been recommendations in his party, most notably from Larry Craig in Idaho and John McCain, to do something on both sides, that is, reform immigration laws and offer amnesty and guest-worker programs along with increased enforcement. But it looks like those kinds of proposals have been shot down. We’re kind of approaching this now from an enforcement-only perspective.

“The trouble is this speaks to the larger issues related to economic policy and growth,” Shreve said. “Not only do family values not stop at the Rio Grande, but economic policy doesn’t stop at the Rio Grande, either. And I’m afraid that what we’re facing is a kind of a consensus on economic policy that began in the United States that has been copied abroad, including Mexico, that focuses mostly if not entirely on the interests of employers. So even beyond the confines of the debate on immigration, we’re kind of stuck in that mode.

“What you’re fighting against, ultimately, is a bigger structural problem in terms of economic policy that puts the interests of employers first and foremost above everything else. It’s a general supply-side approach,” Shreve said.

Employers are “clearly taking advantage of at least perceived desperation on the part of immigrant workers,” Shreve said.

“The difficult thing about sizing this is up is that there is often a push and a pull. They’re pushed away from their situations in their home countries - but they’re often pushed away because of less-than-ideal conditions back home in their local economies and job markets and so forth. But they’re often attracted as well by the notion that there are plentiful jobs across the border. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not - part of the problem here is limited knowledge among these populations. A lot of what they’re basing their actions on in terms of migration and coming in and looking for the jobs is rumor - not cold, hard facts,” Shreve said.

One cold, hard fact that might not always make it to those south of the border who are weighing their options regarding possible future employment in the United States has to do with the nature of that employment.

“The workers who are here on a work visa - an H-2A or H-2B visa - they are here legally, and they can work legally, but their status is tied to a specific employer. And that creates a huge problem - an inherently coercive situation where it’s extremely difficult for a worker to complain without jeopardizing their work permit,” said Tim Freilich, the managing attorney of the Charlottesville-based Virginia Justice Center for Farm and Immigrant Workers.

“Many workers are also provided employer housing - so when your job and your housing and your legal status is tied to a specific employer, it makes it more difficult to defend one’s rights to be paid properly. It’s just an inherently coercive situation. If there were visa portability, where a worker could say, OK, this employer is not paying me what I’ve earned, I’m leaving and going to another employer, it would be a much better program,” Freilich said.

Looking at employment arrangements in light of these facts, it should not be a surprise to learn that many immigrants decide to bypass the visa system in favor of a more flexible work system.

“This is sort of counterintuitive, but the one thing that an undocumented worker has that a worker on a work visa does not have is the ability to shop around and find a different employer without jeopardizing their status - because they don’t have status. So some workers prefer to have that freedom of movement to escape an exploitative situation,” Freilich said.

As more and more immigrants choose to go off the books in that way, the impact on native-born workers on the lower rungs of the economic ladder is arguably quite significant.

“The law of supply and demand has never been repealed - and by the law of supply and demand, the more workers you have, the more your wages go down, all else being equal,” Vinson said. “The labor movement in the past understood this. They don’t understand it now - for various reasons.

“Samuel Gompers, who founded the American Federation of Labor, was a strong advocate of immigration control. He supported the 1924 Immigration Act. He said that there are powerful interests that want to keep the country flooded with immigration. He said there are the cheap labor interests, he said there were the quote ‘racial interests,’ the people representing the various ethnicities that wanted to increase their power. And he said that society needed to stand against these interests for the sake of the working people,” Vinson said.

“Cesar Chavez, the Latino labor leader, was another opponent of illegal immigration,” Vinson said. “In fact, he even sent people down from his union to the border to act as the Minutemen do today to try to stop illegal immigration - because he realized that the unimpeded flow of people coming across the border would keep pulling down the wages of his agricultural workers. And that’s exactly what’s happened. The wages for a while were going up for those workers - but due to the flood of illegal immigrants, they’ve stagnated and come down.”

“Some people say, Well, if you only paid enough money, the U.S.-born people would take these jobs, so don’t give me this explanation that nobody wants those jobs. But in the Valley in most places, you have in the past decade or 15 years unemployment rates of 8 percent or less. And any economist will tell you that if unemployment is that low, that means that people that are there who are unemployed are basically not employable - either they are older, or they have disabilities, or they have drug and alcohol addictions,” said Elzbieta Gozdziak, a Georgetown University professor who has been actively studying the Latino communities in the Shenandoah Valley for the past several years.

“So you need a labor force that is relatively inexpensive, and that is willing to do jobs that are not pleasant, that are very difficult, that are physically taxing, like in the poultry plants. It’s not pleasant. It’s not just the physical difficulty and the monotony of the movements, but the stench, the wetness - you stand all day in water. My personal view is that you would have to pay a lot of money for somebody to want to do that kind of a job,” Gozdziak said.

As to any sort of final resolution to this debate … well, the new Democratic Congress that took office in January is not likely to go in the direction that hard-line Republicans in the House of Representatives, in particular, wanted to take things last year.

Vinson makes it clear that he and others in the reform movement are very much cognizant of that fact.

“The best we can hope for is to go on the defensive and stop them from passing amnesties and guest-worker bills. That’s the best we can hope for at this point,” Vinson said.

Filed under: 8-January 2007 Issue