A detained immigrant visits his son and family members in a California detention center.

By Sean Quirk

Despite the historical pluralism in the Nation of Immigrants, Americans have often displayed gross xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiments towards those that seek a new life on their shores.  Trends in the last few decades continue America’s recurrent predilection to shut its gates to hopeful immigrants.

No blog piece could accurately encapsulate the complexity of the United States’ immigration issue.  The multifarious characteristics of immigration politics and individuals who come to America will not all be addressed in this piece.  Instead, we will analyze a few significant segments of the current debate surrounding undocumented immigration—namely, the issue’s terminology, the “freeloader” myth, and the struggle for labor mobility.  This piece is not intended to conform to Democratic Party policy pamphlets, but instead to recast the undocumented immigration debate in terms that promote greater tolerance and recognition of a desire to ameliorate poverty.

Hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric is so ubiquitous that it pervades beyond Limbaugh’s radio waves and Dobbs’ rants to exit the mouths of our Democratic president and the liberal populace.  The common term “illegal alien” is one of many epithets used to dehumanize a person who resorts to extralegal means to enter the United States.  The term removes the subject from our political-legal community as an “illegal” human being, while s/he exists as an “alien” outside the accepted bounds of American society.  Anti-immigration rhetoricians often simply call these desperate, often impoverished peoples “illegals,” further dehumanizing them in order to inhibit our otherwise natural feelings of empathy towards the needy.

To frame the debate not around sub-human “illegals,” but the undocumented immigrants that disobey the law often to feed themselves and their children is to begin to strip away at the socially constructed animosity toward undocumented immigrants.  Americans can then begin to see the undocumented population that lives in the shadows of our society and the faces behind the border wall.

Immigration opponents’ frequent claim that undocumented workers “freeload” off society is false. In fact, by paying federal income taxes out of their paychecks and abstaining from using state resources such as welfare, Medicare, and even calling the police/fire department for fear of being deported, undocumented immigrants actually add significantly more revenue to the state than the costs of the services they use.  Princeton Professor Douglass Massey’s article “Illegal immigrants: Are they freebies or freeloaders?” reveals that a mere 4 percent of a studied immigration population used food stamps, while 60 percent reported paying taxes.  Moreover, only 11 percent reported sending their children to US public schools, even though they are legally entitled to do so.  The result of these undocumented workers is actually a net increase in government funds.  Yet, the more compelling realization from this data is not the positive economic benefits of undocumented populations, but the moral reprehensibility of a system that allows millions of people to remain economically destitute in the shadows of the general American public.

Immigration reform—long-debated and little-instituted—must be a paramount objective for the American polity.  Any reform must be centered around the correlation beyond the strength of the US economy and its resulting lure to foreign laborers.  The recent recession appears to have decreased the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the US from 11.8 million in 2007 to 11.6 million in 2008, according to the Department of Homeland Security.  Such data demonstrates that these workers, failing to find jobs, are returning to their native countries.  Political and cultural leaders must recognize the power of the US economy over immigration flows and its capability to improve the livelihoods of millions who seek better economic conditions, not to mention the great economic benefits for the US from large amounts of willing labor.

Just as nations lifted tariffs and embargoes to expand free trade, developing countries must acknowledge the hypocrisy of political boundaries that strictly halt the free movement of labor.  Radical as it may seem, such freedom of migration to meet global labor demands can substantially improve the livelihoods of indigent laborers.  For instance, Nepal’s deep poverty had been cut by 25 percent due to remittances from Nepalese working in India.  Lant Pritchett, a globalization expert at Harvard, reminds us that such poverty alleviation is not about helping Nepal, but about helping Nepalese.  Rawlsian philosophy advocates not discriminating against others due to any conditions of birth.  If we do not want to prevent a woman from acquiring a job because of her sex, then how can we bar her because of the location of her birth?

Globalization will continue to alter what products we consume and how Americans perceive international workers that meet unmet domestic labor demands.  As we look at the undocumented immigration debate, we must recognize that contentment with poverty on this or the other side of American borders is deplorable.  It is time for immigration reform, and it is time to bring the undocumented mothers and fathers, children and grandchildren, out from the shadows, welcoming those who desire to join the Nation of Immigrants.