Thinking about migration

All the blather over the past few weeks about illegal immigrants, the news that the National Guard will be joining the effort to guard the border, plans for fences, and the really scary Minutemen people taking the law into their own hands got me thinking. Illegal immigration is, of course, a problem--both in human and economic costs. But a couple of thoughts--
--why aren't major business interests being more vocal about hte problem? Could it be they like cheap labor?

Mexican workers going to the fields

--Could the concerted effort to break unions and reduce wages have some connection with the oft-repeated statement that we need immigrants because they do the jobs Americans don't want to do? Americans were perfectly happy doing many of those same jobs in the past. What's changed?



--why is it that the attention appears to be almost exclusively on Mexican and other Central/South American migrants, and our southern border? The border with Canada appears to be virtually porous--but I don't remember hearing anything about posting national guardsmen on the northern borders of Washington State, Idaho, and Montana.



Photo Copyright © Manuel Echavaria These farm workers are picking chili at Santa Maria in 1971.

--so I just wonder--could the fact that these illegal immigrants have dark skins be part of the concern, even if unstated? Is this another aspect of our basic racism, still prevalent if less publically expressed than in the past? Why isn't there the same public bloviating by politicians and pundits about the waves of illegal Asian immigrants? Oh, of course; they disappear into Chinese restaurants and laundries.

After all, as Ronnie Gilbert sang some twenty years ago, "We all came here in separate ships/But we're in the same boat now!" (on the Lifeline album with Holly Near). Most of us are the children of immigrants from someplace, either welcomed or not, legal or illegal. Don't really know about my own family, although a generally specious family history has us coming from Scotland by way of Ireland in the seventeenth century. Ann's family is from Italy--her mother's parents from Sicily, her father from Naples. Her maternal grandparents arrived in much the same way as the folks in the archival photo below:

Italians en route to America at the turn of the century.

I have no solutions. But it seems to me that addressing the economic engines driving all this should be part of the discussion. Why don't Americans want to do the jobs that illegal immigrants take? What about the pay and working conditions stop poor Americans? Shouldn't that be addressed? Shouldn't the businesses that hire illegal immigrants be involved in the solutions?