Washblog

Illegal immigrants are, indeed, illegal. I can show you the laws. The Republican Party has been THE force making sure that people who employ illegal immigrants can do so with "plausible deniability" and few sanctions.

Republicans are NOT serious when they threaten to deport millions of illegal aliens. They could easily do so now, as millions of aliens dutifully send in their W2s each year with obviously fake Social Security numbers.

What the Republicans are trying to create, both with the Bush "Guest Worker" proposal *AND* with the Sensenbrenner Bill, is a permanent, legal underclass in this country,with unequal protection under the law. Let me say that again: BOTH the Bush proposal AND the Sensenbrenner proposal have the same intent - a legal underclass with unequal protection under the law.

That is TOTALLY unacceptable.

I worked with illegals from all over the world. I've worked in immigration law. I have personally retrieved people from DHS's (privately run) jail in Tacoma. Yes, being an illegal here in the US is better than going to back to some of these hellhole countries.

However, this Republican, Big Business illegal immigration we have in America is about the importation of political and economic oppression. We can't allow that. The political economy of importing illegal workers dictates that we will keep doing it until it becomes a toss-up whether people are better off as illegals here, or living back in the third world. Do we want to live in an America that provides only a slightly better living standard than Mexico? Certainly notif it is because we have lowered American living standards.

We do not need the labor of non-citizens who have no chance at citizenship. There is no excuse for having a large population of people who are neither citizens nor resident aliens on the way to becoming citizens. There is no such thing as a "migrant" worker. People aren't geese. It does nobody any good to lie about it. If we want people's labor, then we either want them to work as citizens of governments we can be proud to trade with or as citizens of our own country. We do not want people living in the shadows. That is what the Republicans want and they must not get it.

Let's be clear. Vastly increased citizenship means vastly increased deportations. We need both. It has become a norm for businesses in this country to expect a supply of cheap, illegal labor and that must change. We cannot let the Republicans win this issue by selling super-low-wage jobs to desperate Latinos and anti-Mexican bigotry to everybody else. We have to stand up for good jobs for CITIZENS. We can't allow illegal immigrants to become a new, slave class in this country.