My Immigration Quandary

I may be one of the few Alabamians tugged both ways in the debate over my state's new immigration law. The driving influence behind the law is not economic, but cultural. It's a xenophobia born of too little contact with the outside world, and too little empathy. I despise the police-state tactics associated with the law's enforcement.

Yet...what's really happening? The state has volunteered to accept and pay for what's usually a federal responsibility: enforcing immigration laws. There are millions of people residing in the United States in violation of the law. If I were to try to live in another country past my visa deadline, or with no visa at all, I wouldn't feel abused if I were caught and deported. Just unfortunate. It's the way the world works. I'm puzzled why enforcing the nearly universal principle of sovereign control of borders is somehow, on its face, wrong.

I'm still more bothered by having laws that are widely flouted and underenforced, as are our federal immigration laws. If a law's not effective, it should be repealed or its enforcement redoubled, but it can't simply be ignored without risking popular contempt for the rule of law.

One of the unintended consequences of such new state-level immigration laws, should they take hold and spread, will be rising food prices. Weirdly, I regard this as partly a good effect. The assembly line slaughter and butchering of cows and chickens is made possible by cheap immigrant labor fueling the demand for the meat through lower prices in the grocery store. I'm not so happy that fresh fruit and vegetables will be made more expensive, I'll admit. But I've been disconcerted to realize that I've been saving a buck on the back of someone stooped over in a field all day earning far less than a legal worker would.

So, ideally, we'd either legalize the immigrant labor we need in order to produce food at prices we find acceptable, or we'd enforce the existing laws more rigorously, ask more legal residents and citizens to consider working in the fields, and cope with the reduction in our ability to consume non-food items. The status quo ante was unacceptable in its inconsistency, and we shouldn't be surprised that someone would step forward to adjust it, either toward regularizing and legalizing more immigration, or trying to throttle illegal immigration.