Conservative Advocate: Our immigration problem
In the ordinary course of events, a conservative columnist frequently finds himself defending American business, or this or that aspect of it, against attacks from the left. There is something about liberals that makes them instinctively hostile to businessmen.
Liberals are forever attacking companies like Wal-Mart, even though these enterprises are selling their wares to the public at huge discounts. And they make life as miserable as possible for employers in general, without reflecting that, without employers, there would be no such thing as employees.
So I am glad to demonstrate my essential objectivity by coming up with an occasional instance in which American business is clearly and demonstrably to blame for an inexcusable state of affairs. As the late Westbrook Pegler wrote in a similar situation many years ago, “I have come up with a nugget of such size and purity that it can only be discussed in editorial terms of ‘My God, can such things be?'”
I am referring to America’s huge problem with illegal immigration. According to the last U.S. Census, there are more than 7 million illegal immigrants in this country (with Mexicans accounting for two-thirds of that number), with almost 300,000 more pouring over the border each year. Combined with the legal immigrants, they are gradually turning the United States into a multilingual (and multicultural) nation. Meanwhile, they and their children (including those born here, who are automatically American citizens) are overloading the welfare and educational facilities of the border states, and especially California, to the breaking point.
No law has been able to stop them. To be sure, Latino politicians already here and active in Congress are working hard — and largely through the Democratic Party — to keep the illegals coming. But there is simply no doubt that the chief instigator and beneficiary of illegal immigration is American business. And the Republican Party is up to its ears in helping it.
Years ago the late Edith Green, a conservative Democratic Congresswoman from Oregon, told me that she had endorsed and worked for President Gerald Ford (against Jimmy Carter) in the 1976 election. When she offered to make speeches on the problem of illegal immigration, the Republican National Committee advised her not to touch the subject.
Of course not. There are businesses all over the country paying far lower wages to illegal immigrants than they would have to pay to native-born employees. They know exactly what they are doing, and they are profiting from it handsomely. And whenever some bill comes before Congress that threatens to put a stop to the flow of illegal immigrants, you can bet your bottom dollar that they lean hard on their congressional leaders, and even the president, to kill it or amend it into ineffectuality.
Of course, they make all sorts of excuses. These illegals “only want to work here, at jobs Americans won’t do.” Eventually, they assure us, they will assimilate to the broader American culture, including the language, and enrich America with their hard work.
But what if it doesn’t work out quite that way? Let’s not forget that, in the 18th century and the early days of the Republic, the spiritual ancestors of these businessmen felt no compunction about buying African slaves who worked hard and didn’t have to be paid at all. The result was a bloody civil war, and a tragic social division that echoes into our own times.
We will pay dearly, as a nation, for our failure to control illegal immigration. And the people primarily responsible for that failure are many American businessmen and their servants in American government.
William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.