This past May, Georgia passed a new immigration law which makes it illegal to, among other things, knowingly transport illegal immigrants. Furthermore, it gives police the authority to demand immigration documents from criminal suspects and, if suspects do not produce these documents, the new law grants police the power to jail them, thus begining the federal deportation process.
Declaring that "states must act to defend their taxpayers," Georgia governor Nathan Deal made it clear in May that the law was meant to rid his state of the scourge of illegal immigration (1). The line of reasoning is not a new one: illegal immigrants are a drain on all law abiding citizens, because they draw on public services without paying all of the taxes required of legal residents.
Of course, the issue is not nearly as simple as such reasoning makes it out to be.
As lawmakers in Georgia have painfully discovered, illegal immigrants also bring a number of direct benefits to legal Americans, and when you chase illegals away these benefits disappear too. Georgia is now suffering a dire shortage of farm labor, causing produce to literally rot in the fields for the lack of manpower necessary to harvest it. In fact, it is estimated that Georgian farmers are now short by at least 11,000 workers (2).
"But wait!" you may find yourself thinking as Republican lawmakers in Georgia did, "there must be more than enough unemployed legal residents to take the place of these illegal immigrants. That's the problem with illegals: they take our jobs! Now that we've chased them out, good, honest, law-abiding Gerogians can finally find employment again."
Not so.
The fact is that most of these 11,000 jobs pay 7, 8, or maybe 9 dollars an hour for exhausting work done in the blistering heat. Almost none include health insurance and only a third offer some kind of worker's compensation (3). Legal Americans are simply unaccustomed and largely unwilling to work that hard for such little compensation. If Georgian farmers were to raise the pay rates of these positions it would not allow them to compete with farmers from other states who, surprise, rely on illegal labor to minimize costs.
Today, a federal judge in Atlanta proclaimed an injunction on the two provisions of the law listed in the first paragraph of this post. Georgian lawmakers had earlier vowed to appeal any such decision, so the outcome remains to be seen.
What is already clear, however, is that illegal immigration brings with it a complex web of advantages and disadvantages. One of the greatest of these advantages is the incredibly cheap price of food in the United States relative to most other countries. While global food prices continue to rise, contributing to riots and revolutions throughout the world, Americans have, for the most part, dogged the bullet. This is because we rely on illegal and often abused labor throughout our food production system. To categorically villanize illegal immigrants is to display an embarrassing lack of understanding of our nation's economy.
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1) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/us/14georgia.html
2) http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/06/17/gas-farm-labor-crisis-playing-out-as-planned/
3) Ibid.
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