Immigration is an issue men ought to be concerned about for a number of reasons, because it can have both positive and negative effects on our lives. The kind of immigration that occurred during the Bush administration (with full complicity on the part of the president) was, on the balance, bad for American men. The mass influx of low-skill workers without documentation pulled the rug out from under working class Americans, who can’t compete with virtual slaves. It also increased the burden on public schools, health care and welfare, and drove up the price of housing, which has been a problem for young families.
One of the aspects of immigration from Mexico I don’t see mentioned very often is the wage disparity between Mexico and the US, and the cost of living in Mexico as compared to the US. Mexican wages, last time I checked, come out to about one eighth of American wages. The cost of living in Mexico is significantly lower as well. This is the number one reason Mexican men come to the US to work.
Imagine what would happen if Canada paid an unskilled American construction worker $80 per hour. Millions of Americans would cross the northern border for the money, and they would be willing to work their tails off and live in subpar conditions just to put in a few years so they could return home relatively wealthy. This is what many Mexican men have done, and it’s hard to blame them for it. A number of the Mexican men I’ve spoken with have told me they far prefer Mexico to the US, and plan to return and buy a house there when they have a nice nest egg. In general, these are the quality Mexicans who came to the US to work hard.
However, once it became easy to sneak into the US from Mexico, others followed the hard-working men, including many women who, once in the US, rapidly have multiple US citizen children and contribute little to the economy. Sleazier sorts who couldn’t get by even in Mexico also figured they’d come to the US to live off the fat of the land.
So, what we have is two groups of Mexicans: the workers and the spongers. Amnesty would obviously be a problem with the spongers, who would immediately start to legally draw welfare benefits, but it would also be a problem with the workers as well. Instead of going home to Mexico to retire or raise a family, amnesty would incentivize an even longer stay in the US to secure social security benefits. Once they were entitled to these benefits, they could then, as dual US-Mexican citizens, return to Mexico and buy that house, and on top of that draw benefits from the US government, sucking taxpayer money right out of this country.
To put it bluntly, amnesty is simply unaffordable. The US government cannot afford to spend out what it would take without destroying the social welfare system as we know it. The only solution would be to drastically curtail welfare, and politically that would be disastrous for Democrats.
Republicans, for their part, might support an amnesty if they could pull it off without losing too many votes, but that’s unlikely. Both parties are stuck in a difficult situation here, because while the Mexican votes may seem very tempting to Democrats and the prospects for cheap labor may make Republican donors salivate, neither can figure out a way to get what they want without ultimately alienating their base.
But then again, it wouldn’t be wise to trust our contemporary politicians to make choices based on the nation’s long term interest, so I guess we’ll see.
