On immigrants

[T]he kind of people who choose to immigrate are really people who look a lot like the American ideals. They’re ambitious. They’re fairly self-confident. They’re risk-takers. They’re kind of strong, hearty people. They’re usually driven because they want to protect their families, which are on the borderline of really falling apart because there’s actually no way to make any money in the country they’re sitting in. That’s the majority and then there’s a new stratum globally —very successful, capable professionals who move around mostly in the science and engineering fields.

That’s Roxana Bacon, formerly of Phoenix, Arizona. She’s currently chief counsel for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, in Washington, D.C.

Bacon’s quote is part of a New York Times Op-Ed piece by NYU professor Anna Deveare-Smith, One Border, Many Sides. Deveare-Smith’s piece features excerpts from 2008 interviews with Arizona residents around the subject of immigration.

Bacon continues: Our housing industry, our service industry, our gardening, landscape industry, you name it — it’s been dependent for decades on Mexican labor. None of those people qualify for an employment-based visa. So when the hate mongers say, “Why can’t they wait in line? Why can’t they get a visa?” — there aren’t any visas to get!

And that is the immigration problem — both for the United States and Europe — in a nutshell. It may well be an unsolvable one.

Spain has a guest worker program for Moroccan workers — much like the one George Bush proposed during his presidency — in place since at least 2007. In one example of the program, strawberry farmers in Cartaya hire Moroccan workers to pick strawberries for a season, and return to Morocco once picking season is over. How do they ensure such a thing? Hire married mothers. Guarantee them a job picking berries next season if they fulfill the terms of their visa (i.e.: don’t run away). Not one worker had yet done so.

The problem with such a program, however, is that it only helps those Moroccan women who are hired. It does nothing for those men (mostly) from Western Sahara and Mauritania who cram onto fishing boats with hopes of reaching the Canary Islands. Nor does it do much for other Africans who cross the Mediterranean and become virtual slave labor under mafia control in Italy.

In other words, the demand for good-paying jobs will almost always outstrip the supply. As long as the promise of higher-paying employment outweighs the risk of staying put, people will migrate — with documentation or without it.