The Right Thing to Do

The Right Thing to Do

President Bush's proposed immigration reform may be hurting his fundraising, but it's the right thing to do. No person of good-conscience who travels to Basin City, Washington in the winter could continue to believe that our current immigration laws are defensible. Vast tracts of dilapidated mobile homes provide minimal shelter for the laborers who pick our fruit and tend our vegetables.
These people are there, living under intolerable conditions, for two reasons. First, we need them. Our fruit needs to be picked, much of it by hand. We like to eat cherries and we like to drink apple juice. We want fresh asparagus, and when we barbecue hamburgers in our back yards in the summer, we want to top those burgers with slices of Walla Walla Sweet onions. Americans want those things. But, we don’t to pick the fruit. Secondly, they are trapped there during the off-season because if they were to return home during the winter, illegal re-entry into the United States is expensive, risky or both. Better to hunker down and winter in a central Washington shantytown than risk getting caught trying to get back in.
I am neither a physicist nor a labor economist, but I do know that nature abhors a vacuum and when jobs are left available, somebody will fill them. Americans don’t want to hoe vegetables and pick fruit for six months out of the year. But there are millions of Mexicans eager to do so. And with only an imaginary line drawn in the sand to keep them away from the jobs, they come.
When you enter these people’s homes, you get a sense of what they have left behind. You see the sort of grinding poverty that few Americans can even imagine. Large families are squeezed into an ancient mobile home just 8 feet wide by 30 feet long. These trailers are constructed to have only a kitchen, a living room and one bedroom. But often, five, six or more people try to live in one of these homes. These families frequently hang sheets from the ceiling to give themselves a little extra privacy. There is little food on the shelves. They rely upon the kindness of strangers to carry them from one agricultural season to the next.
And yet, they are there because it is better than what they left in Mexico.
I have been in their houses. I know how they live. I know what makes their lives what they are. And, I know how their lives can be made easier. Immigration reform of the type proposed recently by President Bush is absolutely the best solution.
He has tasked Congress with working out the details, but basically he proposes that Mexican guest workers be permitted into the country to take jobs that Americans simply won’t do. And there are plenty of those jobs. And, just as importantly, it permits these guest workers to travel safely back to Mexico once their work is done in the United States.
We had a somewhat similar system forty years ago when I worked in the tomato fields of central California. It was called the bracero program. The program had its flaws, but it was much better than what we have now. The braceros were brought legally into this country by contractors who struck deals with farmers. These contractors often swindled the workers, but that is a soluble problem. Without exception, the braceros I worked with liked the system. They came to the United States, and in just a few months made far more money than they could have hoped to make in an entire year in Mexico.
And, when the season was over, they could return to their families. Today, illegal immigrant farm workers either have to leave their families behind, or try to smuggle them all into the United States.
The current situation is the worst of all possible worlds.
Another likely consequence of trapping migrant workers on this side of the border during the agricultural off-season is crime. When there is no work, there is boredom. Boredom does not excuse crime, but idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
Among the more simple-minded criticisms of the president’s proposal is that it rewards people who have broken our laws. Well then, we are all being rewarded for lawlessness every time we eat an apple or steam a pot of asparagus.
We need to stop being such hypocrites.