November 22, 2004

The morality of delousing pens

Professor Bainbridge has yet another post supporting Bush's "guest worker" plan. Not only that he's linking to a yet another column by Jason Riley of the WSJ that supports the plan.

Bainbridge seems to think Bush-style "immigration reform" is the moral choice. Driving millions of wages down near the minimum wage is "moral"?

There is no news yet on whether the Bush/Fox Amnesty will include workers put through delousing pens as did the Bracero program of the 50s, but the exploitation this time will probably be the same as before.

Perhaps the more moral choice would be to try to automate and mechanize rather than using serf labor. Bainbridge might also want to look at poll results before throwing around terms like "nativist right." Three-quarters of Americans oppose what Bainbridge and the WSJ support.

P.S. I partially fisked an earlier Jason Riley editorial in my first comment here, and Mark Krikorian discusses that editorial here.

UPDATE: See also "Is Bush Pandering to the Hacendados?"

Upon deeper inspection; however, the real nature of Bush's approach to immigration becomes apparent. What President Bush and his Machiavellian cohorts are trying to do is develop a strategy that allows them to have it both ways on immigration and at the same time relieve wealthy Mexican elites of any responsibility to improve the lot of the poor in their country...

the hopeless people flooding the US border today are not the white Y Tu Mama Tambien-making, Selma Hyacks you see on TV, they are overwhelmingly disenfranchised Indo-Mexicans who have been a pawn in the political machinations of European-Mexican and American elites since very day Cortez laid waste to Tenochtitlan. This Republican proposal is yet another move in a sad legacy of actions whose purpose is to keep a seething revolution from boiling over and overthrowing the land holding, European-Mexican elites who control Mexico...

I generally agree with that bit, but I have some disagreements with the other things in that post.

I'll also add that making foreign countries dependent on sending us their excess population in exchange for money sent back home (i.e., remittances) is hardly a moral thing.

Posted to Immigration2004 at November 22, 2004 12:39 PM

Comments

Another aspect of this treacherous proposal, and any others like it, is the differential between unemployment rates here and in the source countries. The relevant countries, on average, have unemployment in excess of 20%. If we average out towards their unemployment, via immigration, our unemployment rate must go into double digits and stay there indefinitely. That state of affairs is not a proper object of value to man; it is immoral.

Posted by: John S Bolton at November 22, 2004 10:34 PM