B After The Fact

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Immigration

I've said this before, but:

We had a full-scale guest worker program in this country for 250 years. It was called slavery.

Now certain very powerful voices, like John McCain, are saying that a full-scale guest worker program is needed again.

I am not paranoid enough to think that John McCain is looking for a return to slavery.

But despite everyone's good intentions, and professed safeguards, a full-scale guest worker program -- a huge legally sanctioned underclass -- can get us to slavery very quickly.

I am not naive enough to believe that everyone has good intentions.

The problem is not that there are jobs that Americans won't do.

The problem is not that the wages are too low.

The problem is that the true cost of certain items -- mainly food --- is too high to be politically acceptable, so someone has to bear the burden.

It says here that legalizing second-class workers is a worse solution than ignoring illegal immigration.

The problem is -- I'll let Lincoln describe it. From the last debate with Douglas

"It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."

I admit that our current tendency towards slavery (towards a permanent underclass of guest workers) comes less from an impulse towards racism than from an impulse towards union-busting. But at the end of the day, no matter what, today's union members will not be tomorrow's permanent underclass. The underclass will be non-Caucasians coming into this country from Third World nations.

And they will put the legal status of all non-Caucasians in America at risk.

It would be tragic if Barack Obama would be the President to sign this into law.