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Jewish World Review May 24, 2005 / 15 Iyar, 5765 Fox inadvertently highlights failed immigration policy By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
At first, I thought Mexican President Vicente Fox was trying for some sort of laugh line when he asserted that his country's migrant workers in the U.S. do work that "not even blacks want to do."
I wondered what jobs those might be. Shining shoes? Cleaning homes? Washing dishes? Tending the garden? Raising other people's kids? How about picking cotton?
No-suh, boss. Black workers are like other workers. There's hardly any job that we won't do, if you'll pay us a decent wage.
Black folks like my parents used to be associated as closely with those jobs as Mexicans and other immigrants are today. Hard work for low pay didn't make them rich, but it gave them a start up the ladder of the American Dream.
Unfortunately, by the time I graduated from high school, that ladder began to fall apart. Something called "deindustrialization" struck our cities. Factory jobs started to move overseas. New technology, a blessing to the skilled, undercut the value of unskilled labor. So did a new immigration reform law in 1965 that expanded criteria for new immigrants.
When Fox and his fellow Harvard Business School graduate President Bush insist that immigrants only take the "jobs nobody wants," what they really mean is "jobs that pay less than most American workers know they can get paid somewhere else." That's why even the legendary labor organizer Cesar Chavez opposed massive illegal immigration when it got in the way of his efforts to organize farm workers for better wages and working conditions.
For black people, history is repeating itself. Even in the days when slavery undercut the earning power of freedmen and others, free black workers became the last hired and first fired in competition with cheaper immigrant labor.
"The old avocations, by which colored men obtained a livelihood, are rapidly, unceasingly and inevitably passing into other hands," Frederick Douglass, the black journalist and former slave, wrote in 1853. "Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant, whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place; and so we believe it will continue to be until the last prop is leveled beneath us ..."
As a new century dawned, black leaders as diverse as the conservative Booker T. Washington, the liberal W.E.B. Du Bois and the labor leader A. Philip Randolph called for curbing the open immigration of that period as long as able-bodied black workers were seeking work here at home.
Today civil rights leaders and organized labor have softened their tone in pursuit of new members and coalitions with the leaders and families of immigrant workers. Coalition beats conflict any day of the week, but both sides need to get something out of it or one side gets short-changed.
That's why today's immigration debate needs voices of reason. Otherwise the demagogues flourish with their unsettling appeals to racism and "America First" nativism that enflames more than it informs.
That's why Fox's comments drew predictable rebukes from U.S. officials and a predictable visit from Rev. Jesse Jackson. Unfortunately he did not have much to show for it afterward, other than a promise that Fox would appear on his radio program.
American business and political leaders also need to be held accountable for what amounts to a de facto open-borders immigration policy. In 1986, when Congress and President Ronald Reagan responded with an amnesty bill, an estimated 5 million people lived in this country illegally. Three million eventually qualified for amnesty under a bill that, it was hoped, would discourage further illegal immigration. It failed. Its sanctions against employers of illegals lacked teeth. The illegal population grew again to 7 million by the mid-1990s and an estimated 11 million today.
Now Congress is considering another immigration reform bill. It has a surprisingly broad coalition of business groups, labor organizations and immigrant-rights activists supporting it. It also has a strong skeptical opposition. Judging by history, it's easy to see why.
As a first step to restore public confidence, we need to enforce laws already on the books against illegal immigrants and the employers who hire them. Experience teaches us that, when we Americans don't take our immigration laws seriously, no one else does either.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
