Red Rooster

On Lucille Avenue, the Immigration Debate (NY Times)

I was, at first, amazed that the generally liberal-leaning New York Times would give a voice to a man who is so obviously xenophobic and conservative. It’s as if they brought on Charles Krauthammer to write all the Opinion essays for a week.

But then they go on to tear him a new asshole via the facts surrounding his situation, and show that his vitriol is mostly absurd. And all is right with the world again.

It’s rather sloppy of the Times, though, to fail to mention an important fact that Mr. Nicolosi is dead wrong about: immigrants, even the undocumented ones, usually do contribute to school taxes in a meaningful way. They work (and contribute to payroll taxes), and they pay their rent (which goes toward property taxes). They are not simply being handed cash for being here and working in the sun/cold all day. I will say this, though - those off-the-books jobs that they mention in the essay are evil, and are more widespread than anyone’s willing to admit.

More to the point, Mr. Nicolosi mentions this:

Those clipped front lawns? Mowed by underpaid Latino workers. Those tidy homes? Contractors hired immigrants off the books to repair roofs and replace pipes, Mr. Nicolosi said, instead of training, and decently compensating, someone like the 20-year-old American up the block who needed a job.
“They’re telling us Americans don’t want to do these jobs,” Mr. Nicolosi said. “That’s a lie. The business owners don’t want to pay. I know what my grandparents fought for: fair wages and days off. Now we’re doing it in reverse.”

Unfortunately, this is true. Debate on your own whether it’s good to expand the global market economy in this manner: significant percentages of American citizens find themselves in dire, often inhumane conditions in our own country because we’ll let anyone anywhere else take a skilled job at an unfair salary and live in conditions that are just slightly less shittier than the shittiness they’re currently in. This is a case where the “level the playing field” mentality is more than a little misguided. It’s less of a cultural/racial problem than it is an economic problem - and the solution is hardly to create a situation where most of us wind up living in a dungeon apartments, too.

(Also, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/nyregion/30fire.html for some of the uglier results when impoverished, undocumented workers are accomodated in our housing market. I’m under the impression that we don’t want to create economic demand for slums in this country.)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.