500,000

500,000 – That’s how many turned out yesterday in downtown L.A. to protest proposed federal immigration legislation. That, my friends, is one big ass protest. Both the police and organizers of the protest said it may be the largest protest ever in Los Angeles. (To balance my criticism of the anti-war protest last week, kudos to the organizers of this one. Turning out half a million people is a triumph of community organizing, and to do it with no arrests or injuries is unbelievably impressive.)

Hundreds of students from half a dozen high schools walked out on Friday to protest a House bill that calls for a 700 mile wall along the Mexican border, makes being an undocumented immigrant a felony, and makes aiding undocumented immigrants a felony. Cardinal Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, has spoken out against the bill and has said that priests should defy any law that would prevent them from helping any member of their parish, regardless of immigration status. The cities of Pasadena and Los Angeles have passed resolutions opposing the bill. The city of Maywood has declared itself a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. The city of Costa Mesa recently gave the police force the power to check immigration status. So immigration policy is big news around here these days.

Given that 28% of California’s population is immigrants, it’s not surprising that the discussion of immigration policy can be heated. We are the home of both the founder of the Minutemen and the United Farm Workers, and we still haven’t figured out how The O.C. and East L.A. are supposed to coexist. California has more undocumented immigrants than any other state, the majority of which are from Mexico and Central America. Head down to MacArthur Park and you can get a fake social security card and other papers for a couple hundred bucks.

Undocumented immigrants are a strain on our public health care and school systems, and our entire agricultural industry depends on them. So do the hotel, restaurant and garment industries. They pay taxes, but can’t vote. This is what happens when you have a schizophrenic immigration policy.

Most undocumented immigrants came here out of economic desperation. You don’t decide to cross the border illegally because you’re bored and there’s nothing good on television. Stronger border enforcement doesn’t work because if people had options in their own country, then they would stay there.

It’s not like some guy in Oaxaca or San Salvador turns to his buddy and says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s leave our families behind, pay exorbitant fees to a coyote, and risk our lives to travel hundreds of miles to los Estados Unidos. If we don’t die walking across the desert, we can find low-paying jobs with no benefits from which we can be fired for no reason. Then we can cram a whole bunch of us into small, dilapidated living quarters so we can send money back home every month while we learn to navigate an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile language, country and culture. Come on – it’ll be fun.”

The way I see it we have two options: One, we decide that we are serious about stopping the flow of undocumented immigrants into this country. If that’s what we really want, then we should put the bulk of our efforts into penalizing the employers of undocumented immigrants. If we impose enough massive fines on companies who employ them, they will decide it’s not worth the risk. However, since there are entire industries that are dependent on undocumented labor, this will mean both a substantial rise in labor costs and a shortage of workers. And even with higher wages, I think some jobs will be hard to fill. The agricultural industry will have a particularly hard time finding enough workers. Picking strawberries in Oxnard is backbreaking work, and there aren’t a lot of American citizens clamoring to do it. Farmers will have to pay a lot more to find enough workers to do the job, which will translate into significantly higher prices at the grocery store.

Or we decide that immigrant workers are an important part of our economy, and decide to officially acknowledge their presence and decide to craft some sane and sensible social policy that provides ways for needed workers to enter the country legally and provides a path to citizenship for those who are interested in staying here permanently. Businesses can then hire the workers they need, and workers can have some basic protections. It would also make it easier to distinguish between someone who just wants to work and feed their kids from someone who is running drugs or up to something shady. I vote for option 2, in case anyone is curious.

The conversation about immigration has a lot of complicated overtones, and requires us to face a lot of things we rather wouldn’t. We have to deal with racism and what it means to be an American and Anglo fears of losing our position of cultural dominance. We have to deal with an economic system where increasingly large numbers of people are employed in the service sector, working full time and still living in poverty. We have to grapple with our increasingly beleaguered public health care system. There are no easy answers, but maybe 500,000 people in the streets will prod us to at least ask the right questions.

Rudy also has a post about this. He'd be more on the Option 1 side of the issue.

Comments

[Jon]

What are your feelings of the pros/cons of Mexican flag-waving in these rallies. It was such a prominent visual, both in the pictures I saw and in the people I ran into today, that I think it bears commenting on.