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Hispanics Rising.

By Chris Rangel MD ⋅ April 2, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The new fight over immigrants.

Welcome to a new century and a new era of immigrant bashing. The latest round saw its genesis in a new Senate bill cosponsored and written by John McCain (R-AZ). The bill would overhaul the immigration process by creating a temporary worker program that would allow in 400,000 foreign workers per year and change the citizenship process for an estimated 8-12 million undocumented resident aliens in this country provided that they work here for 6 years, pass criminal background checks, learn English and pay fines and back taxes” (the bill authors deny that this is “amnesty”).

Naturally and expectedly the conservatives in the House essentially freaked out and proposed their own immigration bill that would make it an automatic felony to enter the country illegally thus permanently blocking any opportunity to become a legal resident or citizen. Under current law entering the country illegally is a misdemeanor while subsequent entries are felony offences. However about 40% of the total illegal resident population is made up of people who overstay their visas and this is currently only a civil offence.

The sheer idiocy of the House bill is evident when you realize that in order to become a felon one needs to go through the court system and either plead guilty or be convicted by a jury. It’s highly unlikely that the courts would strip non-citizens of the right to trial by jury. And then what do you do with 12 million felons provided the overwhelmed court system does not collapse prior to convicting them all? Do we send them back to Mexico? Waiting for them all to go through the court system would delay deportation for years. As it is now deportation is much speedier.

Or do we throw them in prison? Currently the US prison population is about 2 million and overcrowding is chronic and sometimes severe. Where would we put 12 million more felons? Would we put them into “concentration camps” specially built at massive cost to house them all? Would families be torn apart? Even if we don’t jail them all we would still be creating a permanent underclass of 12 million people who would be prevented from working, prevented from becoming citizens or legal residents and who would have no choice but to live off the taxpayer. Realistically these new felons would simply be forced further into a shadow existence and this would probably increase and extend their impoverished situation.

Hell! Why don’t we just deport all these illegals! Not including the insanely massive cost and effort of finding and processing 12 million illegal aliens (estimates range from $206 to $230 BILLION over 5 years) John McCain, citing the columnist George Will, noted that it would take 200,000 buses in a line 1,700 miles long to deport 11-12 million people in what would probably be the largest mass deportation in history. The numbers boggle the mind! It’s one thing to act like a retarded carnival barker while pandering to your electorate and sounding tough on immigration. It’s quite another to face the reality of the situation.

The commonly held belief that the majority of the 12 million aliens are here to live off welfare is a complete fantasy. Because they are illegal and it is illegal to hire them exact figures on the employment status of illegal aliens is hard to come by however, there is one source that has data that indicates that illegal residents are not only employed in vast numbers but they are also generating enormous amounts of taxable income!

In 1986 Congressed passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) that made it a crime to knowingly hire illegal aliens. The key word here is “knowingly”. But the IRCA had minimal effects on hiring practices. Beginning in the late 80’s the Social Security Administration started getting increasing numbers of W-2 employment tax forms with incorrect or fictitious social security numbers on them. During the 90’s the total amount of taxable income recorded under “bad” SS numbers had grown to a staggering $189 BILLION. The taxes from these “bad” numbers amounts to $6-7 Billion in SS revenue and $1.5 Billion in Medicare revenue each year!

Where are these “bad” SS numbers coming from? The data shows that the majority of these filings are from employers in Texas, California, and Illinois. A third of these filings were from restaurants, construction companies, or farms. This looks like the residence and employment demographics of undocumented aliens! Apparently forged green cards and SS cards are relatively cheap and easy to get and this gives employers plausible deniability if confronted by INS.

In 2002 there were 9 million filings with bad SS numbers. Assuming that the vast majority of these are from undocumented foreign workers and assuming that millions more are employed in jobs that pay direct cash and report no wages then the vast majority of illegal aliens are employed. Known employment rates of illegal immigrants are actually only slightly lower then the national average. In fact, recent employment data indicate that the employment rate for unskilled immigrants in low paying jobs has increased while the rate for unskilled Americans has decreased.

Of course this is another fear mongering point from the House conservatives. Illegal aliens are taking jobs from American workers! Right? Yes and no. The picture is far more complex then just saying that American workers are losing jobs to immigrants. Over the last few decades the percentage of young Americans with a high school diploma has grown from 75% in 1970 to 86% in 2004. Presumably these graduates are more likely to go after higher paying skilled jobs. Who then is taking the unskilled jobs? Take a wild guess.

Less than half of new immigrants have a high school diploma. In 2001 despite making up only 13% of the US worker population, immigrants (legal and illegal) held 35% of the unskilled jobs. Despite the influx of immigrants during this same time the national unemployment has remained steady. What is going on is a change in worker demographics and not just a simple displacement. In addition, the fact that illegal immigrants must work to feed their families while unskilled American workers have access to all kinds of benefits including unemployment and welfare probably has something to do with the higher unemployment rates of unskilled Americans compared to unskilled immigrants.

Yet one critique of unskilled foreign labor is valid. It holds down wages. But it also holds down costs to consumers. If an unskilled American worker loses a job to an unskilled foreign worker then it is more than likely that this was because the unskilled foreign worker will work harder for less. But to call for the deportation of the illegals and their cheap labor is similar to calling on tariffs to protect American workers! But that’s anti-capitalistic and that’s un-American!

The status quo.

The reason why we have the current immigration policy boils down to economics and practicality. The cost of either constructing an impenetrable barrier to immigration from Mexico and/or deporting most or all illegal resident aliens is prohibitively expensive and likely not very feasible. Businesses that benefit from cheap foreign workers need those workers (very few employers are prosecuted under current immigration laws). And it remains to be proven that illegal immigrants significantly harm this country more than they benefit it. So the current system lumbers on.

The debate from the conservative viewpoint.

However, for conservatives, the debate over illegal immigrants appears to boil down to two non-economic issues. The first is the “inertia of illegality” i.e. the conservative fixation on the fact that once something is made illegal it should remain illegal (or get even more illegal). Thus the idiots in the House shun anything that resembles “amnesty” or leniency for illegal immigrants and propose tougher penalties for immigrants no matter how impractical.

The other issue, I hate to say, appears to be a good bit of underlying ethnocentrism and isolationism among conservatives towards Hispanic immigrants. This is consistent with a long tradition in this country of open hostility towards immigrants that appears to be indirectly proportional to the similarities in ethnic makeup of the immigrants compared to our own. Apparently anti-immigrant hysteria is so bad that California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, unable to avoid the obvious economic consequences should 3 million illegal aliens be deported from his state, suggested that we could simply have “prisoners” pick up the slack. Never mind that this moronic suggestion would involve moving the entire US prison population to California and they would still be a million short. One has to wonder how different the reaction would be if instead it was 12 million mostly impoverished white Canadian citizens living here illegally.

It appears that the simple fact that Hispanic (non-white, non-black) population growth in the US has exploded in the last 20 years is “a priori” a major concern to conservatives. Ironically the majority of this growth is from native births rather then immigration. In 2000 there were 35 million Hispanics in the US of which only about 40% were foreign born. In 2001 over 50% of all births in California were Hispanic! In 2003 the national Hispanic population grew to 37 million and surpassed the black population as the biggest minority ethnic group in the country. It is projected that by 2050 over 50% of the US population will be non-white. This does not seem to sit well with some anti-immigrant conservatives.

“The combination of the 1965 Immigration Act, which accidentally unleashed mass immigration after a four-decade pause, and Washington’s abject failure to defend the borders against illegal immigration, has resulted in an extraordinary situation.

Basically, because of the perverse selection process built into the current system, the U.S. population is going to be vastly larger, much more non-white and much less skilled than would otherwise be the case.

By 2050, there will be 400 million people living in the U.S. instead of maybe 280-290 million. And whites, 90 per cent of the population in 1960, will be on the verge of becoming a minority. This is an ethnic transformation without precedent in the history of the world. It is happening for one reason only: the federal government is making it happen.”

Yea. So? The author Peter Brimelow can’t seem to come up with any compelling reason why this would be of concern other then the fact that cheap immigrant labor keeps wages low. But that should make conservatives happy. Huh? And there is no reason to believe that the Hispanic population would remain “less skilled” as it grew and integrated into American life, especially our robust economic system.

The common critique of Hispanic immigrants is that they are less educated, more impoverished, and less skilled than the American norm. Yea. So? This has been true of almost every immigrant group to come to this country. It is also true that they are hard workers, productive, and very entrepreneurial just like almost every other immigrant group and there is every reason to expect that the educational and skill levels of Hispanics will increase and reach parity as their numbers grow and 3rd and 4th generation Hispanics are born . . just like every other immigrant group.

In fact, the only reason that I can think of that would hold down Hispanic education, income, and skill levels would be because of continued institutionalized less-than-pluralistic attitudes represented by people like Mr. Brimelow when it comes to hiring practices and business and educational opportunities (it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy). However, such massive projected population growth should significantly reduce this risk as more businesses are Hispanic run and owned and “white” businesses will find that their survival depends more and more on serving and pandering to the non-white population. Ahh, parity.

All of this talk and worry among the conservatives is kind of amusing because it far too little and far too late. They can complain and fear monger all they want but the fact is that the Hispanic genie is out of the bottle and there is not a dam thing that Mr. Brimelow nor the republican majority of the House of Representatives can do about it. Even if all 12 million illegal aliens were sent home and not a single Hispanic immigrant were allowed to cross the border ever again (i.e. if we think magically) the “native” and legal immigrant Hispanic population would continue to increase dramatically (remember, most of the growth is from US births). Instead of pandering to their mostly white and conservative audience to win political points and sell books maybe these guys should consider learning a little Spanish!

The real isues.

Regardless, all of this discussion about useless and impractical proposals like building border walls, and deporting or criminalizing 12 million people detracts from some real issues that need fixing. Remember those billions of dollars in taxes that illegal immigrants produce? Few if any of them are eligible for benefits like Medicare or Medicaid because they are not in this country legally! Their taxes go into the general Federal fund to be distributed to other things like the war in Iraq. Not only do illegal immigrants get the royal screw but private hospitals which are forced by Federal law to treat anyone and everyone who comes to their ER don’t get anywhere near enough funding to offset the costs. There is no reason to believe that illegal immigrants are sicker than the rest of us. They just have nowhere but the ER to go to when they get sick! This injustice needs to be corrected and the proposals included in the McCain bill are a step in the right direction.

What is a problem is not from tax paying resident illegal aliens but from foreign nationals who do NOT reside in this country or who are only “visiting” who cross the border with the specific intent to be treated in an American ER knowing fully well that they cannot be refused emergency treatment nor do they have any intent on paying for such treatment. Either the EMTALA law needs to be changed or there needs to be some sort of tax on foreign entry to help offset these costs.

Amend section 1 of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution. It says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Originally the intent of this post civil war amendment was to protect the rights of former slaves but these days it has become a massive loophole for illegal immigrants to try and become de facto citizens. These new citizens are automatically eligible for social services independent of their parent’s employment status and contribution to the tax base. This is not and was not the intent of the amendment and few other western countries have such naturalization laws.

The risk.

Republican representatives are sure taking quite a political risk considering the fact up to half of the future electorate will be non-white and considering that the usually politically tepid Hispanic population suddenly found its voice last week. Hispanics were marching not in support of illegality but in protest of what they saw as an attack on their cultural identity. That this cultural attack is seen to come from conservative Republicans is not a good thing. The GOP lost significant support from the black community in the 1960s and never recovered it. Now they seem hell bent on repeating history.

*About the author: Dr. Rangel is half Hispanic, was born in a town that is 90% Hispanic, practices in a city that is 78% Hispanic and that will see a net loss in white population over the next 5 years, and is mad that he didn’t learn more Spanish as a child.