Immigration...

I'm enjoying an interesting repartee on immigration reform with a number of friends and acquaintances. I'd like to share an email I just sent, in response to one such friend's screed.

1. 50 million Poles, Germans, Italians, etc. may not sound like a lot to us in 2007, but looking at that as the percentage of total US population at the time (early 1900s), it was a tremendous influx of immigrants. Which leads us to…

2. Sadly, just as in the early 1900s, I find most of this debate inspired by racism. It’s sad or infuriating, maybe both.

3. I’m all for assimilation. Indeed, forced measures will make my own language school huge. My only problem with it is that people are demanding illegal immigrants learn English, but they have no avenues to do so. Naples is pretty good by comparison to Massachusetts, where there is a TWO YEAR or longer waiting period for any government-sponsored ESL course.

4. Anyone who says we don’t need illegal workers needs to get out there and meet some employers. I’ve spoken with thousands of employers, as that is my job. Even if we offered “born & bred” American workers $20/hour for the unskilled jobs that immigrants are now being paid $8/hour to perform, we still would have vast numbers of unfilled positions – and many of the unskilled American workers who might fill those positions are terrible employees. They're the failures of our educational system. It only goes to follow they might be failures as employees as well.

5. This is another form of “The Walmart Effect.” Much as we like to loathe Walmart, it is keeping inflation at bay and helping poor and middle class Americans afford to live better with what little they have to spend. Immigrants keep our prices low for the same reason.

6. Push, and people push back. It’s basic psychology that few people grasp. The more we denigrate Latin culture, the more Latinos will embrace it. And, if you look at “Irish-Americans” in Boston as an example, telling people their culture makes them inferior has an effect opposite of that intended: they embrace it all the more.

7. What we need – and I’d argue that this might be all that we need to focus on, as a country – is education that actually serves our Latino population. Half-measures are failing those kids, and thus the high dropout rate and continuation of the poverty cycle, with crime and teen pregnancy as byproducts. A number of influential groups have begun working on that in Immokalee right now. Stay tuned: the national model is under development right here in Collier County.

8. If we can make the move from Immokalee to Port Royal visibly possible for children of immigrants, all of this anti-immigrant ranting will lose its steam, and assimilation will happen as a matter of course.