Ponderings

As President Bush crossed the contentious aisle this week to lobby for immigration reform, he was sabotaged from behind and the effort went up - again - in smoke. Immigration is a hot button issue in our culture, and like all wedge issues it has made for some strange bedfellows. What appeared to be a bi-partisan effort broke down along lines reminiscent of the Mason-Dixon line.

In a conversation about the Civil War, a friend from Texas recently confided that down south that chapter of history is still taught as ‘the war of northern aggression’. Although the Civil War was not a war of northern aggression, it likewise was not, as I was taught in the North, a war to end slavery. Both Abolitionists and the States-Rights leaders were certainly prominent players in the thorny ground that spawned that awful war, but the war was much more than either of these issues.

As I toured Oak Valley Plantation in Louisiana a couple of years back, I expected to be offended by this institution that harbored the most atrocious abdication of human rights imaginable. Instead I was moved by the humanness, the vulnerability of both the ‘big house’ and the markings where the shacks had once cowered. The lot in life for those in the ‘big house’ was one of relative comfort, but even they were pawns in a system not of their making.

The system was an economic system and it was in those days a system that spanned the nation. Cotton grown in the south and harvested by people held in bondage, but that was not where the story ended. The harvested crop was shipped to the textile factories in the north where beautiful fabrics and massive fortunes were produced. Dependent but unseen were the ravages of slavery. Those above the artificial dividing line could take a moral high ground and pretend to wash their hands of the unsavory business of slavery while those living in and around the fields were left holding the toxic human waste which has festered for centuries.

If the factories had not purchased the cotton, slavery would have had no purpose in the 19th century. Although ethical issues abound when the word immigration is voiced, the growing number of ‘illegals’ in our nation is the result not of a moral collapse but rather an economic one. Or perhaps at the intersection typically called greed.

Our American economy is dependent upon the relatively cheap labor of our undocumented work force. The human cost of this dependence is staggering, so too the financial cost to local communities where these laborers are forced to live behind curtains of secrecy. Unseen and undocumented does not preclude need for healthcare and education, for police care and sanitation services. Undocumented means not only that people are denied their rights to vote but also that they are not allowed to contribute to the communities in which they live. Although ‘illegals’ pay millions of dollars in taxes (like Social Security that they can never collect on), little of that money supports the indirect but substantial costs to the communities where our growing work force resides.

Those of us who live in communities where this growing population is unseen and the costs not relevant can take a moral high ground and point to the human rights issues. Meanwhile those whose neighbors are undocumented are expected to pay the undocumented costs for this choice. All the while frightened immigrants, recruited by agents on our behalf, are struggling not to find meaning but simply to survive.

If we continue to pretend that cheap labor is really cheap, those most vulnerable and their neighbors will continue to pay an unbearable price. Immigration reform is needed that will allow all of our neighbors - legal or otherwise - to build houses and live in them, to pay taxes and benefit from them, to have sustenance and pursue happiness. Beyond blue and red is purple, and I think purple must be the color of true humanity.