You are Probably a Criminal

My father, a factory worker, informed me that his employer uses undocumented aliens as leverage against employees. They come right out and tell employees that if they don’t like their benefits/pay/conditions, there are plenty of undocumented aliens who would gladly take their jobs for less money/no benefits/worse conditions. Dad also reckons that his employer has pull with the immigration authorities since they openly recruit undocumented workers in Mexico and bring them to northwest Georgia. Dad’s proposed solution is to grant the aliens the same rights as Americans so that they won’t comprise an underclass. That way, locals and newcomers will be in the same bargaining position and can’t be so easily played off against one another.

For businesses like my father’s employer, immigration laws are a hammer to be used against workers. You don’t want to enforce them consistently because you want the workers, but you want the laws on the books to use against any of them that get too uppity. This is true of many of the legions of laws on the books. Back when I was a campus cop, we were instructed to enforce parking regulations inconsistently because parking fines were a significant source of revenue for the university. We wanted folks to park illegally, and consistent enforcement would deter infractions and reduce revenues.

Drug laws are a further example. They provide a rationale for an extensive regime of surveillance and policing of impoverished neighborhoods, especially those inhabited by black folks. Drug laws are enforced inconsistently and are used as leverage by police and prosecutors in non-drug cases. The disproportionate number of black drug defendants and convicts is a function of the disproportionate allocation of enforcement efforts to black neighborhoods. Police and prosecutors want to keep drugs illegal because of all the power and resources the drug laws bring to them, not because drug use itself is particularly problematic. The entire criminal justice industry depends on drug enforcement resources to maintain its current bloated state.

There are enough laws on the books to make us all criminals.