After reading through the current Ode Magazine, I was quite shocked regarding an article promoting amnesty to the illegal immigrants. The author’s whole argument was for politics of compassion, and he was disproving alleged myths of why we should be anti-illegal immigrant. I have written many articles about why continuing to allow immigrants to flood into this country without any regulation could “bankrupt” our country. ( Illegal Immigrants: Should They Have Rights?, America: Pro-Immigration? Then Pro-Oil Dependence! and VIDEO — Are Immigrants Ruining Our Future?) Here is what Ode has to say about immigration into this country in general:

“The advantages of freer migration could be huge. Rich countries have much more capital — machinery, buildings, infrastructure and so on — and far better technology then poor ones. This makes workers in rich countries far more productive than their equivalents in poor countries. But when workers from poor countries move to rich ones, they can make use of rich countries’ superior capital and technology. This not only makes them, but the world as a whole much better off.”

As an idea, this sounds wonderful, but in reality there are many flaws with such a statement. First of all, the “machinery, buildings, infrastructure and so on” is built in this country to support the amount of people that are currently existing here. When we allow masses of immigrants in, it puts a strain on the infrastructure more rapidly than designed. We don’t build infrastructure for what we think it will be in 10 years, we build it for what the demands are now. Have you ever noticed by the time they are done with all the highway construction, they need to expand it again? I know I am familiar with it.

As far as the productivity, that is fine and dandy, but productivity mostly benefits corporations. Corporations end up exploiting this productivity since illegal immigrants will accept lower pay, no health benefits and unsafe working conditions. Then to stay competitive other companies have to follow suit. This creates a downward pressure on pay scales and health benefits across the board, affecting the workplace and the American middle class. In the end, the only people that benefit are the rich that aren’t affected by this issue and the corporations who reap the rewards of increased profits. Now Ode, in their article, tries to tackle the myths associated with immigration and explain their misconceptions.

“Myth 1: There are only so many jobs to go around, so every job an immigrant takes is one less for the locals.

Over the past 50 years, the US population has risen sharply. If the number of jobs in the economy were fixed, surely there would now be mass unemployment? Clearly, there isn’t — yet the belief that jobs are finite remains pervasive, leading critics to assume that any job filled by am immigrant would otherwise be done by a native. In fact, each person creates work for others, so the more people there are, the more work needs doing. People don’t just take jobs; they make them too.

Through their willingness to do unskilled work at lower wages than local people would accept, immigrants fill jobs that would otherwise not exist.

What’s more, when immigrants spend their wages, they increase the overall demand for goods and services, which in turn boosts the demand for workers, some of them highly skilled, to produce these goods and services.”

Although the belief that immigrants take jobs from natives is not necessarily true, they are again missing the big picture. For some reason, the majority of Americans, even highly educated ones, are not realizing that this is not the America they want to exist, but the America that does exist. They want the America where corporations are honorable, ethical and accountable. They want to believe that illegal immigrants will be treated and paid fairly just like the citizens of this country.

Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but this is just not how American corporations are. They are self-serving entities that will exploit any opportunity they can to increase profit margins without allowing the savings to trickle down to the workers. Tax cuts increase profits, higher productivity increases profits, savings on wages and removal of health coverage increases profits but where does all the extra income and savings go? They go into the pockets of the elite shareholders and CEOs and right back into the company to invest into cheaper avenues to save more money.

The bottom line is companies can’t sustain a high level of employment quality and keep up with the Walmarts, Home Depots and the Targets or any other of the burgeoning corporate conglomerates. Wages have to be slashed or the companies end up going out of business or being sold to the bigger corporations that continue hiring the cheaper labor. Even if we did legalize the illegal immigrants, corporations would not be able to afford to pay them higher. With language barriers and lower education, companies have to hire more employees to handle a job that one natively educated citizen could handle. So, even forcing companies to raise wages would not really benefit anyone in the long run.

The next problem is the fact that they do increase the overall demand of goods and services. Why is that bad? Well, it requires more natural resources to support this rise in demand. Electricity for production, oil for transport, infrastructure for supporting the demand as well, all requires more energy. Manufacturing creates more pollutants from chemicals and waste. All this just adds to our foreign energy dependence causing more war, strife and bloodshed in the Middle East and more negative environmental affects.

Myth 2: Immigrants and locals are competing for the same jobs.

Only if immigrants were more or less identical to us would they compete directly for the same jobs. But everyone knows that a Mexican peasant with a poor command of English is not competition in the job market for an American who has finished high school. Immigrants with different skills and abilities allow us to consume goods and services that were not previously available to us or consume existing goods and services at much lower prices.

The problem with this is how companies are less concerned with quality than profit which is becoming overwhelmingly important. Why hire a high school graduate when you can hire an unskilled cheap Mexican immigrant to do the same job. Sure the immigrant is less educated and can’t speak English, but he is a warm body and is much cheaper. Back in the days, a high school education could get you a decent job, and if you wanted more out of life you needed a college degree. Now, to get a decent job the high school diploma is meaningless, you need the college degree just to make ends meet.

[This is more on a personal note] Let’s just say they never competed and jobs were not a problem. Why in the world are we so obsessed with consuming goods? We are already bloated with goods as it is. We have become so materialistic that the average citizen is driven towards bankruptcy in trying to keep up with their addiction to shopping. Cheaper goods will not help this problem either. It will exacerbate the motivation for buying more since it is cheaper. I just don’t understand when the need for cheap overcame the demand for quality. Are we so obsessed with collecting crap, that we demand cheaper and cheaper goods and labor so we can continue our obsessive slide towards more materialism? What we really need to do is stop listening to Bush when he tells us, “…just go out and shop!”

Myth 3: Immigrants often come not to work but to live like parasites off the host country.

If people from poor countries can claim more in welfare benefits in rich countries than they can earn working at home, it is certainly conceivable that this would spur some of them to migrate. But there is no evidence of this.

It should be clear that if migration is costly and risky, it does not pay to move to a rich country to try to claim comparatively low welfare benefits when you could earn much more by working instead. In any case, migrants are typically not entitled to most welfare benefits in rich countries. And last but not least, even if rich countries made it easier for people in poor countries to work, and there were signs this was attracting migrants who were coming to claim welfare benefits, governments could restrict the availability of those benefits to citizens or long term residents.

Here is one big issue that is missed in the above quote. I will quote one of our own articles that I used some statistics from an earlier study.

Analysis of data collected by the Census Bureau in 2002, shows that women from the top-10 immigrant- sending countries living in the United States, collectively tend to have higher fertility than women in their home countries. As a group, immigrants from these countries have 23 percent more children than women in their home countries, further adding to world population growth. Among the findings:

- Among Mexican immigrants in the United States, for example, fertility averages 3.5 children per woman compared to 2.4 children per women in Mexico…

Has anyone thought about where all these immigrant children will go to school? Has anyone ever seen schools that are overcrowded from immigrant children? I have, and it causes many, many negative consequences to the native citizen’s education. The level of education is lowered, the student to teacher ratio is way too high, and the areas are normally too poor to afford to build the infrastructure to accommodate the rapidly expanding immigrant families. We end up sacrificing our own education to accommodate this massive influx of immigrants. [for relativity native Americans fertility is 2.1 children per woman]

Then there is the demand for health care for these immigrants. Since many of them are poor, they have unhealthy eating habits and some have bad addictions, so we end up, as taxpayers, paying for their medical bills when they go to the free clinics or emergency rooms since they cannot or will not take care of themselves and in no way, can they afford health insurance. These clinics end up flooded with colds, runny noses and simple non-emergency care issues illegal immigrants because it is free making it harder for actual citizens to get proper care with real emergency issues.

Unfortunately, this issue is highly complex and takes much deliberation and hard logical thinking to come up with an answer. What will ruin us is if we incorporate guilt into our politics and not think about the good of the country first.

If you are still on the fence about the immigration issue, please see our other articles as they cover many other issues that are not covered here in this article. They cover energy dependence, natural resources like our food supply, why helping a couple of million a year will not do any good to the other 80 billion in the world that need help and what the working conditions are for these immigrants and how they are exploited. I hope you look closely and carefully when considering this immigration issue because what we decide will affect the future of our nation. I am attaching a video to this article that I consider the best explanation of our immigration problem and what we can do about it. Please see Numbers USA if you would like more information on how to be proactive.

The most important consideration is to not let your emotions drive the debate about this very controversial topic. Do your homework and look below the surface for the answers. Our future depends on it.