The Boycott

So yesterday was the Great American Boycott of 2006, when a vaguely specified group of workers skipped work and a vaguely specified group of consumers stopped patronizing a vaguely specified group of businesses in support of the vaguely specified rights of a vaguely specified group of people. Demonstrators clogged the streets of US cities waving flags (some of them Mexican) and chanting (often in Spanish) to show that they are Americans too.

Was it about immigrants? Was it about illegal immigrants? Was it about Hispanic illegal immigrants? And what did they want? I'm not sure I know.

What I do know is that some of the things people said bother me. First of all, there seems to be a sense that illegal immigration is not illegal, or shouldn't be -- that people from other countries have some kind of inherent right to come to the U.S. in search of a better life, even if they do so by circumventing the immigration laws and procedures. "We're not criminals." Or "We didn't come here to break the law, we came here to work." That doesn't change the fact that you broke the law by coming here, and that anyone who hires you to work for them is breaking the law too.

Here's a more subtle annoying thing. At a rally I walked past yesterday, the man at the microphone was saying that contrary to popular arguments, the presence of immigrants has little or no impact on wages. Furthermore, he went on to say, immigrants do jobs that would go undone in their absence because Americans do not want to do them. Now wait a minute. Why don't Americans want those jobs? Because they don't pay well enough. Why don't they pay well? Because there are people who are willing to do them for very little. But some of those jobs are necessary: someone has to do them, so if the people who do them now weren't here, their employers would have to offer better pay. Now, I know that the availability of cheap labor creates jobs that would not otherwise exist (gardeners, maids...) but not all low-paying jobs that immigrants have now would disappear without them, and as for those that did not, well, either (1) Americans would do them just as they are, or (2) they would pay more. So the guy at the rally must have gotten something wrong.

My bottom line opinion is that the U.S., like any other country, has a right to control who gets to enter and who gets to stay. It's a security issue. The fact that there are so many undocumented persons in the country now shows that our immigration laws and border controls are a joke -- and that should not be. We need to improve our border security by a lot, regardless of what we do about the people who are here now. As for them, we must not create a system where all you have to do to live and work in the U.S. indefinitely is go undetected for a certain amount of time until a blanket amnesty is passed or some time limit expires -- that would only create incentives for people to help each other hide. That's a security issue, too -- the marchers and chanters yesterday may not have been terrorists, but if good people can cross our borders and live for years in the shadows, so can bad.