How the United States Created the “Illegal Immigrant Problem”

Notice all the letters about “illegal immigrants” in the Grand Rapids Press lately? Inevitably, the writers comment that SB 1070—the new, racist Arizona immigration law—is a just and equitable solution to dealing with the “problem” of undocumented workers in the U.S. “If they’re breaking the law, why not catch and deport them?” the letters demand. “These people come here to take advantage of us. They are taking our jobs, enjoying the rights of citizens, and are here illegally! It’s about time the government did something.”

Well, the United States is doing something. In fact, the United States created this so-called “problem”—and did so with what seems to be deliberate intent. Here are a few facts:

1. Ever hear of an attractive nuisance? That’s the swimming pool that someone builds but doesn’t put a fence around. Neighborhood kids are drawn to it. And they drown.

Think of the United States as an attractive nuisance. For decades, we’ve openly promised that everyone who comes here will prosper. At the same time, we spend more on our military than any other country in the world—yet, we seem completely unable to do what every piddling Eastern European country can do: secure its borders. Ever wonder why?

Answer: Because the government doesn’t want to. Because the capitalist system thrives on the backs of undocumented workers. Here is a labor force that can be exploited in every way imaginable. They can’t demand minimum wage for their work. They can’t complain about unsafe working conditions and unfair treatment. And sometimes, they can’t even leave a job if they want to: they are threatened with reporting, deportation, and separation from their families if they do.

When costs for labor are lower, profits are higher. It’s the American way, right?

And it’s not only unnamed sweatshops in back alleys that are profiting hugely from this captive labor force. In 2005, Wal-Mart was fined $11 million for violations in hiring undocumented workers to clean its stores. A mere drop in the bucket for a retail giant that cleared $285 billion that same year. The fine went down on the Wal-Mart books as a type of accounting error.

2. The business capitalists are not the only ones feasting on profits from undocumented workers. The U.S. government is, too—to the tune of about $7 billion a year. How? Through money taken from paychecks for Social Security.

This is pure cream for the government. These workers can never collect Social Security, and yet they are paying into the system. And, as we all know, Uncle Sam uses the Social Security “trust fund” as a private bank account. The current budget, formulated under the Bush Administration, allows the government to borrow $2 trillion in Social Security funds over the next ten years.

That extra $7 billion from exploiting “illegal immigrants” is going to come in very handy. Why turn off the tap?

3. Next, let’s roll the dice and play the poverty game. Take a country that is largely agricultural, but has a system in place that has worked in precarious balance for centuries. How do you decimate that culture and economy in less than a decade?

With NAFTA and its evil twin, CAFTA: Two initiatives that allowed major U.S. corporations to invade places like Mexico and the Central American countries and take over—literally—with devastating consequences. For example, the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico was triggered by the start of NAFTA, devaluating the peso dramatically relative to the U.S. dollar. Today, thanks in large part to U.S. policies, 53 percent of Mexicans live on less than $2 a day, and the unemployment rate is currently over 40 percent. And some Central American countries have suffered even more.

But by removing trade barriers and dropping tariffs, U.S. companies have made fistfuls of dollars on these agreements. Industrialized farm operations, for example, have crushed the small-farm systems that existed in these countries. It became impossible for most Mexican and Central American farmers to make a living any longer. And it happened almost overnight.

So where could these people go in order to work, to feed and clothe their families? El Norte, of course. Where they supply unlimited cheap labor, Social Security padding, and even more profit for money-hungry corporations.

4. And that brings us back around to jobs—those jobs that are supposedly being stolen from the rest of us. In the last great Depression, there was similar outrage about how Latinos were stealing bread from the mouths of “real Americans”—and it led to the illegal deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from Texas and other border states. They were forced into Mexico—even if they didn’t come from there. And many of these people were actually American citizens. To date, the U.S. government has never even admitted any wrongdoing in this travesty.

Read the letters in the Grand Rapids Press, and you’ll see the same kind of mounting hysteria. Yes, there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Yes, the unemployment rate is rising. But you’d be hard pressed to find some well-fed Dutch American who’d be willing to take an undocumented immigrant’s job.

Most undocumented workers in this country live lives that are either slave-like or close to it. They are working double shifts in factories or at restaurants. They are plucking chickens and slaughtering beef in unregulated facilities. They are working fourteen-hour days as migrant farmers. They are sex slaves in prostitution rings.

I’d be unable to put it better than Dr. Daniel Groody, who wrote in his essay “Dying to Live”: “Immigrants die cutting North Carolina tobacco and Nebraska beef, chopping down trees in Colorado, welding a balcony in Florida, trimming grass at a Las Vegas golf course, and falling from scaffolding in Georgia….With an economic gun at their backs, they leave their homes because hunger and poverty pushes them across the border.”

So go ahead, Grand Rapids. Assert your rights! Pick any job that sounds good to you. I dare you.

But before you write another sanctimonious letter to the Press, think about the responsibility that each of us has for a situation that was created by our own country, is perpetuated by it, and profits from it every day.