Immigration Raises Issues of Social Justice
In a post two weeks ago, I said that a loyal American must favor immigration because it has been and continues to be the basis of our national wealth and power. Having said that, I think that we must recognize that using immigrants to grow our economy also creates significant social injustice. Immigration has costs, and they are born mainly by working-class people including both the immigrants themselves and native-born, working-class Americans, especially those with less than high-school educations who compete directly with immigrants for jobs.
The Social Injustices of Immigration Are Important Politically
The social injustices brought about by immigration are important politically as well as morally. The Democratic Party has lost many working-class votes because the party has failed to take working-class concerns about immigration seriously. The MAGA wing of the Republican Party has attracted working-class votes by claiming to be the voice of "real Americans." Immigration is one of the areas where the Democratic Party is most vulnerable. Instead of admitting that immigration can harm some Americans, we have branded people who are anti-immigration as racists. We should not be surprised to learn that we have not attracted many votes that way.
If we are to promote immigration because it is good for our country as a whole, we will have to frame it in a way that recognizes that, while it is good for the country as a whole, it is not always good for everyone. Some people may be harmed by immigration, and we must mitigate that harm. We must also recognize the potential for harm in our framing of the issue of immigration. The framing must address potential harm to two groups of people: immigrants and native-born Americans.
Social Justice for Immigrants
If we are going to rely on immigrants for the growth of our
economy, we must include in our framing a path to citizenship for them. Our economy’s need for
immigrant workers has attracted a far larger number of people than our legal
system can handle. The result is that we now have more than ten million
undocumented immigrants living in our country. Some Republican politicians talk
loudly about deporting them, but we all know that is unlikely because our economy depends on them. In my home state of Wisconsin, the large
dairy farmers who are among the Republican party’s important supporters would go
out of business without their undocumented workers.
However, the undocumented status of the workers makes them vulnerable to exploitation by employers. They are paid low wages, and they work
under very unsafe conditions. They are afraid to complain because they are
afraid of being deported. They are unable to get drivers’ licenses, but in our
automobile-dependent society, they must still drive. So, they are vulnerable to
harassment by local police.
Some people say that immigrants should enter the United States only in legal
ways, but it must be obvious to everyone that our legal system cannot support the
level of immigration that our economy demands. Some people ask why the
immigrants cannot come in legally as our grandparents and great-grandparents
did. The answer is that at the time of the wave of immigration in the early
twentieth century, we did not have laws restricting the number of immigrants.
Anyone who came was accepted legally. At Ellis Island and other places,
the immigrants were sometimes rejected because they carried communicable
diseases like tuberculosis but never for lack of proper visas.
It is wrong for us to build an economy on the backs of immigrants while not giving them the right to live in our country and to be treated as native-born workers are treated. It is unjust, and it is un-American. It is un-American because inconsistent with the belief that we are all created equal. We must reform our immigration laws to be consistent with social justice and with our economy's demand for labor, and in addition, we must include a path to citizenship in our framing of the issue.
Social Justice for Native-Born Workers
While immigration benefits our country as a whole, it has a cost which is born by native-born workers who suffer from competition with immigrants who are willing to work for low wages under unsafe conditions. Workers without high school diplomas are especially vulnerable. The availability of immigrant workers keeps wages low for native-born workers who must compete with the immigrants. The fact that immigrant workers are vulnerable to exploitation weakens the bargaining power of unions and makes jobs unsafe for all workers. Reforms to our immigration system to legalize the status of undocumented workers will help all workers by taking away employers’ opportunities to hire workers who will work for less than native-born workers. In our framing of the issue of immigration, we must talk about preventing native-born workers from suffering.
In addition, we must make sure that our native-born workers are not left behind. To do that, we must provide opportunities for unemployed and underemployed workers to retrain. This means that we should provide free or very cheap post-secondary education and that we should pay generous unemployment benefits and childcare benefits to workers who take advantage of opportunities to retrain. We have a precedent for this in the GI Bill. After WWII, returning veterans were able to obtain education and training at almost no cost, and that contributed to their ability to rise economically during the post-war economic boom. Inequality declined during that period, which saw the height of the American Dream.
Providing free or very cheap post-secondary education also means increasing the tax-support for it. Over the last fifty years, we have shifted the cost of post-secondary education from the taxpayers to the students, and the effect has been to increase inequality because working-class people must take on crippling levels of debt to obtain post-secondary education. This was not always true. In the nineteen fifties, post-secondary education was extremely cheap for the students as I can attest. I attended the University of California from 1958 to 1962, and at that time, the tuition was free, and the fees were $140 per semester. Our framing of the immigration issue must stress the connection between growing our economy on the one hand and providing opportunities for our people on the other.
Social Justice in the Framing of the Immigration Issue
If our framing of the immigration issue is to be effective in appealing to working-class voters, we should stress the idea that immigration is one part of an effort to make our economy work for all Americans. Economic growth can enable us to fund the initiatives to make our country more just. We should stress our commitment to increasing opportunities for all Americans, and we should link our ability to do that to our ability to grow our economy.
