Comments Elsewhere

tas: “But Roxanne, that would mean blaming a corporation for something negative.”

I object to the idea that hiring undocumented workers is “something negative.” One of the most common reasons that people immigrate is in order to find more lucrative work, and it’s a good thing, not a bad thing, if they are able to find it. (This is why talking about “demand side” policies makes me queasy: what “reducing demand” means is making it so that people who need jobs are less able to find them.)

Of course, some companies that hire undocumented workers are abusive and exploitative: the threat of La Migra makes both legal and social recourses largely unavailable to undocumented workers; and that makes it easy for predatory employers to pay them starvation wages, cheat them, put them in unsafe situations, etc. That’s wrong, and employers who do it should be blamed and punished. But it’s wrong because abuse and exploitation of anybody is wrong; the only connection between this and immigration status is the artificial connection forged by government intimidation and punishment of undocumented immigrants. Given that that’s the only connection, the logical response is not to force employers to discriminate against undocumented immigrants in hiring; the logical response is to call off the immigration cops and stop treating undocumented workers as outlaws.

Rox: “The purpose of this post was to point out that legislation in this area is almost always focused on the supply side.”

Well, sure, and I’m all for wide-ranging debate that’s not constrained by the operational assumptions of sadistic nativist blowhards. What I’m questioning mostly has to do with the terms on which the suggested broader debate is being conducted. A lot of discourse about immigration tends to assume that immigration or immigrants pose some kind of special problem that demands a special solution. A lot of it also tends to assume that undocumented immigrant workers are a problem that needs to be analyzed and solved (whether the problem is blamed on the workers themselves or on their employers). I think that both of these assumptions should be challenged.