THE BRIGHT SIDE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

by Jack Donovan

I had an epiphany a couple of months ago.

After looking over their shoulders, some co-workers started complaining about all of the illegals in our industry. As their go-to right-wing ideologue, I smiled, took a deep breath, and mentally arranged my collection of completely legitimate complaints, theoretical objections, snarky cheap shots and racist laughs.

Then it hit me.

Illegal immigration might not be so bad after all.

Sure, every group is defined by its borders, and you can’t make rational decisions—let alone collective decisions—for a group if you don’t know who is in and who is out. It doesn’t matter if the group is a team, a tribe, or a nation. If your group has open boundaries, it really isn’t a group at all. Your group, if it is even your group, is loosely “whoever shows up at any given time.” That makes it virtually impossible to maintain security or do any kind of meaningful long-term planning. People who simply come and go as free agents share no common culture or connection. Everyone, at least theoretically, is just passing through. It doesn’t make sense to run any group that way.

“Who’s on your football team?”

“I guess those guys out there.”

“Do they know the plays?”

“I doubt it.”

“Do they know the rules of football?”

“Can’t be sure.”

“Can you talk to them?”

“I can try. Oh, wait. There’s another one. And those two look like they’re leaving. HEY! You guys!”

(Points and gestures.)

“This is going to be a great game.”

Illegal immigration also hits me where I live. I like to do simple, honest jobs. I drive a delivery truck so I don’t have to swindle people, or tell lies, or send passive-aggressive emails cc-ing someone’s supervisor. I can write what I want and I don’t have some prissy Human Resources busybody reading my blog. The thing about simple, honest work, though, is that it generally doesn’t require a lot of experience or educational background, and usually requires some physical labor. In most places in America, that puts me in direct competition for jobs with illegal immigrants.

Illegals are happy to work 60 hours a week. They’ll take split shifts and split days off. They’ll work days and nights and graveyard shifts. They’ll do whatever you tell them to do, whether it’s the job you hired them for, or scrubbing a toilet. Illegals will let you talk to them like morons, whether they’re morons or not. They’ll whistle while they work like good little dwarves, they’ll stick around forever, and they’ll do it all for peanuts.

Why?

Because they don’t have a lot of other options.

Who cares if they can’t speak English at an elementary school level? They’re cheap!

Lift-o, the boxes-o!

Ándale! Ándale! Arriba! Arriba! Arriba!

The presence of “undocumented workers” or illegals with fake paperwork in an industry translates to worse hours and lower pay for anyone else working in their industry. Illegals raise an employer’s expectations of how much his labor dollar will buy, and lower what he expects to offer in terms of benefits and accommodations. Why should he treat you with respect when he can treat Pedro like shit and get the same work done, and for half as much money?

Uncontrolled immigration is bad for security and long-term planning. It lowers quality of life for working people. It creates disharmony and ethnic tension. It grinds my gears because I want things to make sense, and poorly managed immigration just doesn’t make sense for a nation if you want the best for the people of that nation—if you want that nation to succeed.

But, what if you don’t want it to succeed? What if you want your nation to fail?

If one’s aim is to “actively disengage from this equally evil and stupid political system,” and the idea is to hasten the failure of that system, then why get your chonies in a bunch about a big, fat wrench in the works like illegal labor?

Instead of blustering on about all of the ways that it darkens the nation, I’ve decided to look for the bright side of illegal immigration.

Because it has failed to secure its borders and enforce its own immigration laws to protect the interests of its citizens, the United States government has undermined its own authority and created a nation of bourgeois criminals. Instead of respecting the rule of law, millions of average, hard working Americans have chosen to ignore the law and abandon any sense of community and allegiance to each other. To make a profit, they hire foreigners because it’s cheaper and easier than hiring their neighbors’ kids and the people they grew up with. In a sane country, we’d hang these people for treason—or at least socially shun them—but America stopped making sense a long time ago. One wonders if a nation built on merchant morality and short-term profit seeking ever made much sense.

You can’t even blame illegal immigration on big, global corporations. Small businesses might hire the “document challenged” to compete with big business prices, but hiring illegals isn’t GloboCorp’s game. GloboCorp has enough pesos to outsource labor anywhere in the world. GloboCorp screws over working people and undermines the state in completely different way.

No, the businesses that create a market for illegal labor—the businesses that lure illegal immigrants into America—are small businesses. It’s mom and pop who are hiring Juan instead of John. Conservatives love to condemn about illegal immigrants and sing the praises of small businesses, but it is small businesses who hire workers under the table and build their whole business models on breaking the law. Then they call their confessions to drive time talk show hosts and look for absolution by complaining that in a country with a high unemployment rate, they simply can’t find any Americans who are willing to do hard work. I’m not saying a lot of young Americans aren’t lazy or entitled, but if as an employer you feel entitled to treat your employees like refugees from a Third World Country, why would any First World workers want to work for you? The grass gets cut both ways when you pay minimum wage (or less).

I’ve been in a lot of snazzy restaurant kitchens over the years. I know for a fact that at least twenty percent of the folks washing your dishes and prepping your $30 entrees can’t pass The Roy Rogers Test.

(If you can’t say the R’s in Roy Rogers, you probably weren’t born on this side of the Rio Grande, and if you’re washing dishes, you probably didn’t go through the lengthy and complex legal immigration process. The Roy Rogers Test is probably about as accurate as E-Verify.)

Illegals with fake paperwork are stocking your warehouses and picking your potatoes and setting up the white tents for your fairy tale weddings. So many people are somehow involved in turning a blind eye to illegal labor. It’s not just some swaggering dickhead plantation owner with a big brass belt buckle; it’s also his sweet old accounting lady and the chipper bilingual stooge he hired to manage the operation. It’s Bob the Builder with his pickup truck. It’s all of the regular white guys like me who just shrug their shoulders, accept it as reality, and end up teaching their customers words like “celery.” We all know what’s up. As with Prohibition, almost everyone is somehow wink-and-nod complicit in this crime that undermines the rule of law in America. And, instead of enforcing the law and protecting the interests of the nation as a whole, every President from Reagan to Obama has allowed this middle class anarchy to flourish. They even dangle amnesty in front of illegals every few years to reassure them that crossing the border was a swell idea, after all.

Illegal immigration may be slowing down, but it’s still happening, and millions of legitimate American citizens remain out of work while employers hire illegals instead of Americans.

People try to say that America is simply “changing,” but that’s the liberal language of passive resignation. It’s like convincing yourself that getting prison-banged by Bubba is merely “changing” the shape of your lower intestine. America isn’t simply “changing.” It’s getting torn apart from the inside, it’s bleeding internally, everyone is looking the other way, and no one is coming to help.

Illegal immigration is killing my grandfather’s America, but that America is never coming back.  The bright side I see is that this is all part of the process of creating a failed state—a state where no one believes in the system, where the government is just another shakedown gang, where no one confuses the law with justice. A state where there is no such thing as a law-abiding citizen, a state full of middle class criminals. A state where overregulation and corruption, combined with a lack of the will and the resources to enforce the law, leads to widespread civil disobedience.

In a failed state, we go back to Wild West rules, and America becomes a place for men again—a land full of promise and possibility that rewards daring and ingenuity, a place where men can restart the world.

Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers.