Bigotry and Stupidity are Poor Immigration policies

• Originally published in the Lewiston Morning Tribune (Idaho) March 24, 2005 Copyright 2005 Tribune Publishing Co.

By Tom Henderson

Aliens are coming! Aliens are coming!

Researchers at the Pew Hispanic Center this week announced the number of illegal aliens streaming into the United States grows by 485,000 people per year.

Damn those illegal aliens anyway. They come into this country and dare to take the jobs we would never do for the wages we would never accept.

The life expectancy of a migrant farmworker is 49. Most farmworkers make approximately $5,000 per year -- moving from field to field, state to state in back-breaking labor. Check out the average migrant labor camp.

You wouldn't let your dog live in conditions like that.

Far from being a drain on the U.S. economy, migrants -- even those here illegally -- contribute 10 percent more in taxes than they receive in benefits.

Conservatives sputter about the horrors of illegal immigration as if it is a major crime. Enron is a major crime. Thousands of people desperately trying to survive is more sad than criminal.

Besides, we depend on them.

Migrant workers -- including the ones here illegally -- do more than 80 percent of the agricultural labor in the United States.

Even Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, understands the math. So conservative he usually lets no one get to the right of him, he nonetheless recognizes the importance of migrant labor.

He wants Congress to grant legal status to at least half a million undocumented farmworkers. They would not gain legal status automatically.

They would have to toil in the fields for five or six years before getting permission to break their backs legally. (You know those migrant workers. Always getting something for nothing.)

Craig's Ag Jobs Bill has flaws. It does nothing, for example, to address the undocumented workers employed outside of agriculture. However, it brings something resembling sanity to the illegal immigration issue.

Reactionaries want to send in the National Guard to seal off the border. They want to cut funding for bilingual and migrant education. They want to make English the official language of the United States (as if it's not already).

They pour all sorts of perfume on their rhetoric. But it's still a load of racist manure.

Public policy should be based on logic, not bigotry. The logic is that people come here because they need the work and Americans need the cheap labor.

Did you feed your kids today? Hug a migrant worker. -- T.H.