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Saturday, June 16, 2007
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 MAKING A RUN FOR THE BORDER: WHY "COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM" IS UNMITIGATED BULLSHIT
I'm sure that most of my American readers have been waiting with bated breath to read what their favorite Canadian baldheaded professional loser thinks about the centerpiece legislation of his scorched-earth presidency last 18 months in office, the "comprehensive" immigration reform bill.
I haven't addressed this before for the simple reason that the bill is completely meaningless and even if it is passed, absolutely nothing will change. The entire debate about illegal immigration is a complete and total waste of time. The United States Senate might as well have spent the last two months debating if jerking off with your left hand is better than the right, if only because it feels like someone else is doing you. That, my friends, is the extent of the seriousness of this debate.
Let's get real for just a second here, okay? There is absolutely no chance that some sixteen year old slipping across the Mexican border tonight is going to be running General Motors eighteen months from now - even though General Motors would very likely be better off if it happened.
Immigration is one of those issues that turns everyone involved into either Pat Buchannan or Hugo Chavez. That is to say that it makes absolutely everybody stupid. The American government can pass all the laws that it wants to, but the simple fact is that nothing is going to change as a result. Not a thing.
In large part, this is because lawmakers are cowards and voters are ignorant and profoundly selfish. Voters get their knickers in a knot when they think about the 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States "taking our jobs," as if chicken processing and picking fucking strawberries fourteen hours a day were their childhood dreams. "Goddammit," I can almost hear them howling with rage. "If it weren't for those fucking wetbacks, then I would be guy mopping the floors of Wall-Mart on the midnight to eight shift. Let's get those brown little bastards out of the country and seal the border behind them!"
I never fail to get a chuckle out of watching dumb people discuss issues like immigration in the abstract. This is because they almost always ignore the dirty little secrets about why illegal immigration exists in the first place.
American voters and their elected officials - particularly of the Republican stripe - paint themselves as the champions of free market capitalism. Yet they display an almost shocking ignorance of the laws of supply and demand whenever the issue is brought up. As soon as someone named Pedro is mentioned, your average Republican voter turns into Karl Marx with almost blinding speed.
Illegal immigration exists in the United States because the American economy has made it attractive and comfortable for everyone. Poor people from shitty countries get the chance to make a decent life for themselves, big business gets cheap, non-unionized labor, and the American consumer gets stuff at unnaturally low prices. That's why things are the way they are, and if the status quo were to change in any real way, there's be rioting in the fucking streets. And the rioters wouldn't be the brown people that you'd expect. It'd be psychotically angry soccer moms demanding to know why a can of creamed corn suddenly costs twelve dollars.
Just look at the blisteringly dumb reaction of the average consumer to gasoline prices in the last three years. The United States produces nowhere near the amount of oil it consumes. Sure, it refines a shitload of it when the refineries aren't being destroyed by hurricanes and whatnot, but it produces very little. That oil comes from faraway lands like Saudi Arabia and Alberta. Did you know that moving heavy fuel across long distant oceans is pricey? Also, countries like China and India have begun a love-affair with twentieth century life that involves buying a lot of oil. And increased demand for a limited supply tends to raise prices. The fact that the United States military is bombing, or threatening to bomb, most of the places where oil comes from might have something to do with it as well.
If there's anything that Americans like more than cheap gas, it's cheap food. And cheap food is entirely dependant on the labor of illegal immigrants. All the way down the line, from the guy who picks it out of the ground, to the guy who processes and/or butchers it, the guy who packs it, to the girl who asks you if you want fries with it, illegal immigrants are the agriculture sector of the American economy. Unless, of course, you're Captain Pilates and have devoted your strawberry picking time to bothering me on the Internet. But there are exceptions that prove every rule.
Why is this so? Because your average American worker has no concept of how economics really works. They stubbornly demand a vaguely defined "living wage" at the same time that they demand cheap consumer goods as if the two aren't mutually exclusive. If you don't think that the cost of a meat-packer's two-car garage isn't reflected in the price of your Big Mac, then you're even dumber than you look. Worse still, you're dumber than I look.
Illegals don't want a two-car garage. At least not yet. And by virtue of being illegal, they aren't exactly in the best negotiating position with their employers. On the bright side, the savings get passed on to you. Always keep in mind that every vote for a retarded monster like Tom Tancredo is a vote for a thirty-two dollar Happy Meal. When that comes to pass, the first protest march you hold should be in front of your bathroom mirror.
Here's another little secret. When the costs of both oil and food go up at the same time, so does the price of everything else. If anyone actually does anything serious about illegal immigration, they may as well dig up the body of Gerry Ford and dust off their WIN buttons because it'll be 1975 all over again.
Having said that, I'm not all that worried about anyone actually doing anything. At least not anything serious. You see, for all their rhetoric about being champions of captialism, the American government has for over a century engaged in what I call "supply-side law enforcement." That theory proclaims that if you destroy the supply for something, the demand will evaporate.
The problem is that there's nearly a century of evidence proving the contrary. Look to Prohibition or the Drug War as but two examples. When American production of alcohol was banned, alcohol was smuggled from Canada, Mexico and Europe because Americans wanted to drink. The same is true of illegal drugs - for every point of supply that is closed, at least two more open up. I suspect that the same rule applies for immigration. What is true of cocaine has to be true of people who are willing to pick lettuce for three dollars an hour.
Because it almost exclusively targets foreigners, all supply-side law enforcement has accomplished is getting the rest of the world pissed off at the United States. If the American government can't curb domestic demand for something, foreigners can hardly be blamed for supplying that demand. Not only is that how capitalism works, that's how it's supposed to work! What's next, the "Sunshine On A Cloudy Day Act of 2008," where Congress enacts the lyrics of "My Girl" into federal law? Oh, I forgot that they already did that. It's called the Defense of Marriage Act.
You could - in theory - stop illegal immigration tomorrow by attacking the demand. The current legal practice is to detain illegal immigrants without cute things like due process of law until the government decides to deport them. But that's just a supply issue. If you went after the employers of said illegals in a serious way, things might change. And fines just aren't serious. What's a few thousand dollars to a company like Archer Daniels Midland or Wall Mart? Nope, some motherfuckers are going to have to go to jail.
Let's say a year for a regional manager whose company knowing hires an illegal immigrant. And by saying that, I mean a year for each illegal hire. Once your Uncle Phil who works the greater St. Louis area for Wendy's gets sentenced to a few thousand years in prison, you might see illegal immigration stop because the demand will cease overnight. But I think we all know that that will never happen, so you can stop worrying about the forced buggery of Phil in the federal pokey.
None of that changes the fact that it would work. Indeed, it's probably the only thing that would. It would be a far sight more effective than picking on the weakest members of American society, illegal immigrants, has. I very much doubt that some guy wants to leave his wife and five kids in Hondouras to work the graveyard shift in a dangerous shithole of a meatpacking plant in Pittsburgh. He does it because he sees a giant market that demands his services and allows him to feed his family. Why does he suffer the indignity of forcible deportation while the middle-class idiot who knowingly employs him gets off with a microscopic fine, if that? Both are in equal violation of federal law, but it seems to me that's like giving a prostitute a life sentence - which deportation is - while her pimp gets the equivilent of a parking ticket.
Well, what about a wall, huh? Any number of conservatives have proposed one of those, or its touchy-feely equivilent, a fence.
A wall has actually been tried once. You might of heard of it, it was in Berlin. In 1962, the East German and Soviet governments came to the horrifying realization that all of their citizens with marketable skills or basic common sense were fleeing for a better life in the West. So they built a wall, a really big and famous one. But the East Germans realized something that American conservatives seemingly don't - that that wall had to be constantly manned by soulless killers who were willing to shoot anyone who came within 200 feet of the eastern face of that wall.
Is the American government willing to kill foreigners - presumably on their own territory - for approaching that wall or fence? And are they willing to do it to people who want nothing more than a piece of the American Dream for themselves? Because if they are, they are fundamentally changing everything America is supposed to stand for. But if they aren't, it just creates another giant propoganda piece. President Bush may as well just hang a 1,700 mile "Mission Accomplished" banner across the Mexican border instead.
Again, the drug war proves instructive. As I write this, American military advisors are in Colombia and Peru, working to stop cocaine at its source. Yet it still gets through. Then it gets past the Coast Guard and Border Service, the FBI and local police, directly to you, the American consumer. If the demand for getting high is that great, I don't think that the demand for cheaper cheeseburgers is any lower, do you?
This is nothing more than playtime politics, pretending to do something once and for all while accomplishing nothing. And it's designed that way. The political class in Washington and at the state and local level everywhere lives for this kind of nonsense because it takes the media oxygen away from real problems. How many Iraq stories, for example, have you heard since this bill was introduced? Of all the declared presidential candidates, John Edwards is the only one talking about poverty in America .... and that's only because he's getting 55 grand a night to do it.
For the most part, I support President Bush's bill for no other reason than it gives some measure of hope to people who aren't doing anything wrong other than giving the American people what they want - cheap shit. Furthermore, they work very hard for very little at jobs that no one reading this right now is willing to take. Why not make honest citizens and taxpayers of them?
Mostly because of politics. You see, it is far easier to be against something than to solve real problems. This is commonly known as the "negative unifying element" of politics. The Japanese sent a social anthropologist to Berlin to study it in 1935. Upon their return, they reported to the imperial government that "Nazism is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, it can never occur in Japan because we have no Jews." A multi-ethnic society will always have a bad guy.
Actually, that's not true. Fear and loathing is so essential to civic life that even homogoneous socities will invent enemies to placate the stupid. This is how Hindu society came to invent the caste system and how white, Protestant England developed the class system. But inventing enemies is a last resort. It is much preferable if they look and sound different from you. So much so that some countries actually import them.
To this day, Germany denies citizenship to everyone whose family tree doesn't include at least one member who gave Otto von Bismark a reach-around, but that doesn't stop them from importing thousands of Turks every year to do the menial jobs that Germans won't take. There are actually Turks who have been in Germany for three generations that are still considered foreign nationals. That goes double for Saudi Arabia, where the locals will not accept anything less than a managerial position - despite the Saudi unemployment rate of 40%. The wheels of Saudi society are actually turned by Egyptian, Pakastani and Filipino "guest workers."
The only difference between the United States and Saudi Arabia and Germany is that the latter have legally recognized the laws of supply and demand and the former hasn't. Also, screaming about the immigration policies of the House of Saud will only result in a lengthy prison sentence with your hands cut off whereas in America it gets you a six-figure salary and a television career being Lou Dobbs.
I understand that you're pissed off because Cousin Ed lost his job as the quality control manager at some Boise dildo factory, honest I do. But you should know that he didn't lose it to an undocumented Mexican. He lost his job because his wife wanted a cheaper dildo and they can be produced more efficently in China. More likely than not, Cousin Ed's union got a touch too fucking demanding for the taste of the dildo manufacturer.
Sorry, but you should all know the truth - "corporate interests" and illegal immigration aren't behind outsourcing, the American consumer is. Demanding lower and lower prices for everything only makes the manufacturing sector ineffecient. Your two-car garage and annual trips to take the kids to the Grand Canyon makes for a very expensive dildo.
But no politician in his right mind is actually going to tell you that. Being told that they're fat, lazy, greedy and obsolete is not something your average voter is going to respond well to - particularly when it happens to be true. So politicians do what politicians have always done, invent horseshit "solutions" like border security and increasing the minimum wage.
Border security is perhaps the silliest argument of all. You know how many terrorists have entered the country illegally? Almost none is how many. Every single one that has been captured thus far has entered the United States the good, old-fashioned way, they got a visa from the Department of State. Or, better still, they were born there.
Lets assume for a second that the Tucson Wall actually does get built. It won't stop terrorists, who cleverly get around such things by getting an entry visa from the American embassy in Riyadh and flying over them, and it won't stop drugs, which have an odd, capitalistic habit of being a supply that fills an American demand.
Granted, you might stop migrant workers from getting in. But all that accomplishes in the end is to create inflation and further squeeze the middle class until they have to get second jobs at Taco Bell just to eat there. And few things would be as funny as watching some yuppie fucking soccer mom behind the counter at a Mexican restaraunt because she demanded that all the Mexicans get kicked out of America. On the other hand, I have a pretty strange sense of humor.
Liberals are just as dumb as conservatives, but they're a different kind of dumb. President Bush and his liberal fellow travellers want to do silly things like create eleven million new citizens, who can then do things like vote for an increased minimum wage, unionize and make a zillion dollars an hour for doing nothing - just like native-born American workers do now. The net result is the same as it would be with the Tucson Wall - life becomes too expensive to continue happening in the United States and it moves to India. And even when American life becomes a fucking Steinbeck novel, I'll bet you anything that 40% of Americans will still be thrilled that it at least no longer has a Spanish accent.
All things being equal, things aren't so bad right now. Inflation has remained very low despite seven years of the Republican Party's best effort to destroy the American economy and put the United States government as far into debt to communist China as they possibly can. In large part, this is because of agriculture exports and reasonably low home-construction costs - two things that rely heavily on illegal immigration.
What the president and congress wants you to forget is the "illegal" part of illegal immigration. Passing laws against things that are already illegal is an exercise in making everyone feel good about themselves, but not much else. Immigration enforcement is not at all different from the insipid War Against Drugs, the government attacks supply rather than demand, which accomplishes nothing. The only reason they do that is because they know that attacking the demand for either carries with it consequences too brutish to contemplate for pretty much everyone.
So they do what they've always done, demonize the poorest among you and feed into the profound ignorance of everyone else so that an overwhelmingly stupid public can feel that "somebody is looking out for me." I know it and George W. Bush knows it. Christ, even that maniac Lou Dobbs must know it at some subconcious level.
And now you know it too.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Nonfiction By: The Black Crowes From: Amorica
PermalinkLabels: ... And Then You're Gonna Die, Fun With Politics
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