~Lisa Lopez Snyder- journalist, writer, and community advocate in Columbia, SC
What do some of the Mexican poultry workers in South Carolina and the Guatemalan hotel maids in California have in common? They are among the 12 million undocumented people in the United States who fled their countries because economic circumstances have left them without work and food. They live in the margins of our society and toil in jobs that many Americans eschew. But they now have reason to hope.
President Obama recently announced that he was committed to bringing before Congress a proposed plan for comprehensive immigration reform later this year. The legislation the president favors would bring these individuals out of the shadows and onto a path toward becoming legal U.S. residents. While more details are forthcoming in May, we do know the president believes immigration reform should be comprehensive, and that it should include measures that create secure borders, remove incentives to enter illegally, and allow undocumented immigrants in good standing to pay a fine, learn English and get in line to become citizens. Such a plan, Obama says, must also fix a dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy so that families can stay together and it should promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration.
Opponents of this reform say that such a plan and its timing–in the midst of an economic crisis—could mean that immigrants will take jobs from Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, comprehensive reform can play a key part of getting the economy back on track, for it addresses key issues that many American workers have been fighting for years.
For example, comprehensive immigration reform ensures that working people receive a living wage by fixing existing wage imbalances, which will then increase the tax base and will ultimately raise revenue for municipalities, cities, and states to do things like repair schools and fix roads and bridges. Comprehensive reform calls for safe workplaces, ensuring that workers have the right to secure work environments and fair labor practices. This reform also helps create safe communities by ensuring that both basic civil rights and laws against human trafficking are enforced, and that a strategy at the U.S.-Mexico border emphasizes training, accountability, and competency rather than militarization.
Many people on all sides of the immigration issue agree our current system is broken. Let’s realize then, that comprehensive reform would not add new workers to the American work force, but rather recognize the millions of people who have already been working here and who can play a role in helping get our economy back on track. The equation is really quite simple: when people have jobs, they have money to buy the essentials like groceries, school supplies, and gas. As the demand for these goods grow, the producers and suppliers of those goods, in turn, add inventory, hire more people, or find new ways to expand their business or improve their products and services.
If there’s one thing we should have learned from the mortgage lending and credit crisis, it is how interdependent one sector of our society is on the other, including the global economy. Let’s not waste anymore time, then, placing the blame for our problems—which were with us for many years before undocumented immigrants began to come here in large numbers—on the most vulnerable people. Rather, let’s understand that our lives are all interconnected in one way or another, that we can’t help but be in this together, and that comprehensive immigration reform is and can be an integral part of our country’s economic solution.
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