Comprehensive Immigration Problem

So I'm new to the whole blogger thing. I don't know why I didn't do this ten years ago, it really couldn't be simpler. It's journalism in its most pure form: collect your facts, collect your thoughts, put them together where everyone else can see them. For damn loudmouth pink-commie-bastard like yours truly, that pretty much comes naturally. As for the latest facts I've collected: President Bush, in his infinite wisdom, has thrown what's left of his credibility behind "Comprehensive Immigration Reform." Critics on the right and the left have both complained that the new bill pretty much offers amnesty to every illegal immigrant who was in the country before January 1st, 2007. That's mostly based on their interpretation of the new Z visa the bill introduces. Basically, the CIR bill does three things: it (1) creates a guest worker program for immigrants who are, at this moment, outside the United States (2) ends Chain Immigration and streamlines the backlog on green cards and (3) provides a "fraud proof" Z visa to 12 million illegal immigrants who are then allowed to remain inside the United States pretty much indefinitely.

It's Number 3, actually, that's got everyone so up in arms. If the bill goes through, then twelve million illegal immigrants inside the United States before January 1st can stay exactly where they are, and they won't get sent out of the country just on the basis of being non-citizens. The Lou Dobbs crowd like to call this "Amnesty" for illegals. Every bill, measure and movement in American politics has some sort of buzz word that acts as a rallying cry for its opponents; in this case, the word is Amnesty.

But as the bill's supporters are quick to point out, the Z Visa wouldn't actually give them amnesty. And they're right, it most certainly doesn't. Amnesty is what happens when the government guarantees that a certain crime will not be prosecuted at any time in the future. The twelve million people who are guilty of entering the United States illegally will not have that guarantee. What the Z Visa actually provides--at least on paper--is probation. That means all twelve million illegals suddenly become slightly legal, provided they hold a steady job and stay on the right side of the law.

When the Lou Dobbs crowd complains about Amnesty (I'm a fan of Dobbs, to tell you the truth), they're missing this in the big picture. The Bush Administration and its corporate allies don't want amnesty either; if that were the case, those twelve million illegal immigrants would instantly become twelve million American Citizens, complete with voting rights, organization, and their own internal agenda driven by a common cultural background. The Bush Regime wants amnesty the way Jefferson Davis wanted the abolition of slavery, and all for most of the same reasons: illegal immigrants are a godsend to the "economy" (the politically correct term for "corporate profit"), not because they're taking jobs Americans won't do, but because they're taking pay cuts Americans won't accept and working in conditions Americans won't tolerate. The less Doll and Tropicana have to pay their workers, the more money they get to keep on a carton of orange juice. And no, lower wages does not mean cheaper orange juice; capitalism doesn't work that way.

Bush is all for the Z Visa because it provides his corporate sponsors with exactly what their fat wallets depend on: a cheap, desperate, controllable labor force. The bill would instantly create a brand new quasi-legal working class at the bottom of the economic ladder with no votes, no power, no constitutional rights to speak of. The "path to citizenship" offered by this bill puts them on the bottom of an already backlogged waiting list of legal immigrants waiting for their green cards.

As for what this will do to America, that depends on who you ask. The Bush Regime's economists and corporate sponsors have visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads: as wages (and therefore, production costs) plummet, corporate profits skyrocket, and the Invisible Hand squeezes out a few extra drops to trickle down to the Middle Class. The rich get richer, the poor get screwed, the mediocre remain irrelevant. We haven't had a socioeconomic strata layered so perfectly since the good-old-days when black people--slaves or otherwise--were doing all those jobs that White Americans wouldn't do. And maybe corporate America has the right idea reverting back to its old sharecropping, bullwhipping, human exploitative ways... in Bush terms, twelve million slaves picking cotton fourteen hours a day will always be better for the economy than twelve million unionized workers picking cotton eight hours a day at ten bucks an hour.

The good news is, Latinos aren't nearly as oblivious to class difference as your average WASP. As much respect as I have for the Lou Dobbses of the world, it's a painful fact that Middle Class isn't in the firing line of corporate America; the ruling elites of this country depend on the middle class to be their first line of defense against the working class, whom they've always been at war with, and always will be. After all, the corporate CEO with the eight-figure income never gets shot by a disgruntled employee; he's too busy hiding behind Bobby from IT.

There are already plenty of reasons to protest the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, besides the fact that Bush thinks it's a good idea, and even besides fact that the C.I.R. Act will immediately create a powerless labor caste ripe for corporate exploitation. One of the most pressing reasons--at least to me--is the reason from history: in over two hundred years since this country was founded, nothing positive or meaningful has ever come out of an act or a movement that promised "reform." American didn't fight a civil war over "slavery reform," the labor movements of the 1920s didn't shut down their factories demanding "corporate reform," women didn't fight for the right to vote on a platform of "suffrage reform," and the Civil Rights Movement didn't gain national support by demanding "social and legal reform." In America's peculiar history, "reform" is what happens when the Federal Government replaces a broken system that does a certain thing with a completely new system that does the exact same thing. We do have an immigration problem in America, but it's going to take alot more than some token reform legislation to fix it.