Comments Elsewhere

Stephen, I agree that many actually existing corporations reap benefits from the criminalization of immigrants, in part because they can use the threat of La Migra (tacitly or explicitly) to control and exploit immigrant workers. And I’m on record as emphatically agreeing that corporatism or state capitalism needs to be sharply distinguished from the free market, and (therefore) defenders of free enterprise shouldn’t always, or even often, be defending actually existing big business. (See, for example, http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/03/31/anarquistas_por .)

And of course I agree that undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be blamed. (For what? They’re doing nothing wrong.) I just can’t find this argument anywhere in MacIntyre’s piece. All I can find is a single paragraph where he says that certain sorts of Chicano activists who are currently boogey-men of the nativist Right are indeed a problem locally in California, but aren’t as big an influence on federal policy as some seem to claim.

He does say that the corporate class has more effect on immigration policy federally than those Chicano activists do. But I can find anywhere at all that MacIntyre suggests that undocumented immigrants aren’t to blame, or that they shouldn’t be punished. He does have some complaints about the “disaster” of Spanish being spoken in Los Angeles schools, apparently blames Latin American immigrants for Los Angeles’s murder rate, and generally talks about Mexican immigrants in a way virtually indistinguishable from the AFL’s anti-Chinese rhetoric of the 1880s.

He nowhere advocates decriminalizing undocumented immigration, which is the only non-immigrant-blaming policy to take. He nowhere even suggests that the criminalization of immigrants, rather than the immigration itself, is the problem. Instead he repeatedly calls for escalation of the war on immigrants, e.g. by prosecuting banks that dare to write loans to immigrants, or government-subsidized landlords who dare to rent to them.

If you want to make the argument that corporatism is at least partly to blame for the situation, and that the best solution is to stop punishing undocumented immigrants immediately and entirely, then you can and of course you should. My beef is with the claim that MacIntyre’s piece, which is a string of immigrant-blaming, protectionist fallacies, and calls for escalation of government attacks on immigrants, has anything to do with the argument that you seem to want to make.