My $0.02 on Illegal Aliens

Mrs Vache Folle and I were talking about all the hullaboo over “illegal aliens”, and I suggested as a thought experiment that one solution might be to add up the societal costs of illegal immigration and pay Mexicans half that amount to stay in Mexico. We couldn’t think of any such costs, however. What we did come up with were costs associated with cracking down on illegal aliens. There are the costs of enforcement itself. There are increased costs all along the line for every service or product that Mexican labor is involved in. Sure, some non-Mexicans might get paid more for doing this work, but all the rest of us will pay more for the products and services. On the whole, “society” would gain nothing from the crackdown. The crackdown would in effect be a subsidy for certain categories of entry-level workers, a subsidy paid by all of us in higher prices. Why would we want to do that?

I suppose that you might not like Mexicans or that you might not like it much that your culture and language and values are being challenged by the presence of a competing culture, language and values. It might be worth it to you to pay more for things if you could also get rid of a lot of Mexicans. I understand the sentiment, although I do not share it. I don’t like what all those Ellis Island immigrants did to the country and many of their descendants are still doing, but I advocate deportation only in a tongue and cheek way. I would never advocate the use of force to interfere with the ability of people to migrate for work or other reasons. Perhaps folks who want a more Mexican-free America for aesthetic reasons could contribute money voluntarily to pay Mexicans to go home or stay there.

I myself am an immigrant in a very real sense. I live and work in New York, although I was born in Tennessee to Georgian parents and raised in Georgia. If things had gone differently at Gettysburg in 1863, I might have needed a passport to get into New York and a green card to work here. By happenstance, Georgia is considered the same country as New York, and the imaginary dotted lines that divide New York from Georgia have less significance than the border with Mexico. When I first came to New York, I had an acquaintance from Barbados who mentioned that he been to “the island” over the weekend. I assumed that he meant Barbados, when he actually meant Long Island. He had a place in the Hamptons. He was a hundred times more a New Yorker than I will ever be even though he came from a “foreign” land. I was more of an immigrant newcomer than he was, his having lived in New York for 20 years.