The Hot Screen has long refused to take seriously Republican bloviation about the evils of illegal immigration for one main reason: the lack of proposals to deter businesses from hiring illegal immigrants in the first place. As this New York Times editorial points out, the last big immigration bill (in 1986!) existed in a world in which this topic could at least be addressed, if insufficiently. Thirty years on, nativists like Donald Trump have embraced this blindness, so that we are left with a supposed crisis both perfect and perfectly illogical. The right tells us that millions of illegal immigrants continue to pour into our country, like an unstoppable brown wave, to take our jobs (despite the fact that illegal immigration has dramatically fallen off in the past few years) — but with so much single-minded emphasis on how American jobs are being “taken,” the obvious question is always skipped over — who, exactly, is giving them all these jobs? Well, American businesses, that’s who!
So instead of building a Great Berlin Border Wall at the cost of billions to keep these people out, why don’t we just pass some laws to make it impossible to get hired without proper documentation? The grotesque, grandstanding spectacle of stopping ‘em at the border must always take center stage, in order to obscure the logic of taking away the employment magnet, and making the border wall redundant. Suppressing this basic, common-sense idea enables demonization of immigrants by picturing them as an immoral horde who shoulder all the blame.
At least in the ‘80s, cracking down on employers who hired illegal immigrants was seen as an important aspect of the overall immigration issue. Today, though, you can measure the corruption and inanity of the anti-immigrant push by the way the burden of the problem has been pushed entirely onto the immigrants themselves. This silence, as they say, speaks volumes, and I would venture that the role of businesses in exploiting illegal immigration is the key to understanding the overall issue. So many American industries employ illegal immigrants, from agriculture and construction to meatpacking and restaurants, that they can be said to be the number one reason we have illegal immigration to begin with: without jobs to be had, far fewer people would come here illegally. After all, Republicans admit as much when they falsely claim that immigrants are stealing American jobs — these people are coming here to work, not mooch.
The benefits to business are also the central reason why it has taken this long for illegal immigration to move from bogeyman of the right to an issue they actually have the governing power to do something about: too many traditional centers of Republican influence have seen the benefits of illegal labor. But now Donald Trump has ginned up illegal immigration into an existential crisis for the country, and a reckoning is at hand between the xenophobic and low-cost labor wings of the party. (For a particularly bracing shot of schadenfreude, be sure to check out this article about Trump-supporting California farmers worried about losing their cheap labor — how could they have known, right?)
But the pass we have arrived at on immigration must be seen as a bipartisan failure, and evidence of the Democrats’ share of hypocrisy and misjudgment on this issue, and indeed a source of their peril as well. Democrats are responsive to some of the same business pressures as the Republicans, and have hardly advocated for an employer crackdown — all the more telling when this is the most obvious and effective line of defense against the inanity of building a border wall. In going slack on this crucial piece of the puzzle, Democrats have indirectly enabled the supercharging of a narrative that places blame for illegal immigration solely on the illegal immigrants and the porousness of the long southern border. In turn, this has placed Democrats in the politically fraught position of advocating for citizenship paths for long-time illegal immigrants, and adopting the morally necessary position of protecting the human rights of illegal immigrants, which inevitably make them vulnerable to charges of being more sympathetic to illegal immigrants than American workers.
The lack of employer sanctions in all the Trumpian talk of cracking down on illegals suggests a dark and exploitative future for illegal immigrants in our country: since employers will still be able to hire illegal immigrants with little fear of sanction, while the immigrants are ever more fearful of deportation, their employers will have even less incentive to pay them fairly or provide decent working conditions. It is a recipe for increased exploitation.
Finally, this is as good a place as any to call out a grating piece of racist dogwhistling that’s gotten under my skin lately: the way that the right is able to use the neutral phrase “illegal immigrants” when everyone knows that we’re talking specifically about Latino immigrants (particularly when the context is building a wall on the southern border). That is, we’re not talking about illegal immigration in general, but illegal immigration by certain national and ethnic cohorts (which, admittedly, is by far the greatest source of illegal immigration). The decontextualized term “illegal immigration” provides polite language for the fact that this effort is specifically directed at the world of Latino immigrants, and of course also serves to ignore their actual human (and humanizing) realities of nationality, race, creed, religion, and the myriad other things that would make them not simply job-grabbing invaders but people driven to escape their countries for a thousand reasons.
