- 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.