We Need You; Keep Out

Along the U.S. border with Mexico, beginning this week, there stand ordinary American citizens, armed, who are dedicated to stopping Mexicans, and people who come through Mexico, from entering the United States. The armed people at the border call themselves the Minutemen.

This is a desert crossing that these illegal immigrants are making, a hard journey that fairly often ends in death, from the heat, from gangs, or from any number of other deadly things that can befall you when you’re desperate and poor. Now these immigrants face one more gang; what will be their reaction? What will the immigrant, who has already traveled so far and sacrificed so much, do when confronted with the sight of these Minutemen on the other side of the Rio Grande?

My guess is that the immigrant in question will do the same as immigrants have always done: wait for the way to clear, say a prayer, and try to make the crossing. At this point, the desert behind this immigrant is just as big as the desert in front. And there are no jobs in the desert behind.

But in front of the immigrant is the land of opportunity. The jobs available are for picking fruit and cleaning houses, but it's work that immigrants are willing to risk death to get. It's also work that U.S. workers are not willing to do, not for the wages offered. Fruit growers could mechanize, or pay better, maybe allow unions, but, for a variety of reasons, both social and economic, they don't. It's the same in many industries: the cost of using illegal labor is less than the cost of complying with the law, so businesses, mindful of the bottom line, go with the thing that costs less. And the immigrants keep crossing.

The Minutemen want to protect their country. What they don't realize is that their country doesn't want their protection. We have decided, as a society, that we like illegal immigration; we like the cheap labor it provides, we like the cheap fruit and clean houses. Our distaste for these immigrants is outweighed by our appetite for the things they can provide us.

Government can't fix everything, but if the government wanted to, it could make it more expensive to hire illegal immigrants. It could make it so expensive that industries would have to find other ways. The government won't do this, though. The businesses want it, but I think that we, ordinary U.S. citizens, want it, too.

Why? I think that most people, deep down, sort of like the idea of having an underclass. It's a sad but true fact of human nature that our self-esteem sometimes improves a lot if we know that there are certain jobs we'll never have to do, just because of who we are. I'm an American, which means that, at the very least, I'll never have to pick berries for a living. There is a lot of comfort in being able to say that.

Well, that's part of human nature, but it's also wrong. We should fight against this instinct of ours. No one should have to clean toilets for a living. But doesn't someone have to? Nope; we're smart. We can make a self-cleaning public toilet. If the price is right, innovation will solve this problem. The problem is that, because poverty in foreign countries makes people so desperate for work that they'll work for very cheap, the price isn't right yet. But we can make it right.

Standing at the border with guns, by the way, won't help. The Minutemen should lobby Congress and the World Trade Organization to change laws instead. It'll be less fun, but we should do it anyway. Deporting poor people solves no problems. But what if every country in the world had laws that required a living wage? If people in Mexico can afford to feed their families on the money they make, they'll stop risking their lives to cross the border. Maybe some of them will even save some extra money. Then they can take time off, buy some guns, and patrol their side of the border to keep out whoever it is they don't want in their own country.