The deficit - a pertinent fact

Lots of apocalyptic buzz these days about our national budget deficit.  I am one who believes Washington has been pretty irresponsible at times over the years, and we should work toward reducing our budget deficit, but the hyperbole on the political front sometimes begs for a reality check:

Normally we judge how serious our debt situation is comparing how much income our country generates in a year  (gdp) against how much debt we have.   It is sort of like your personal finances.  If you owe $50 and only make $20 a month you have a much bigger problem than if you owe $50 and make $100 a month.

31 countries in this world have more debt than we do as a percentage of gdp.  Of course that includes the high profile debtors such as Greece, Italy and Portugal, but it also includes countries we think of as economically solid and responsible, like Germany, Israel and Canada.

Source:  San Francisco Chronicle Insight section for Sunday, October 16, 2011

Thoughts on Immigration Laws

Immigration laws are an odd sort of law.

Being an illegal Immigrant is not a crime in the same sense as murder, robbery or other acts that are intentionally directed at harming someone else.  Immigrants (generally) come here to work, because they can't support their families or feel it is too dangerous in their home country.  The are generally motivated by values we respect.  

The main purpose of immigration laws are to protect our selfish economic interests.  They are basically about the fact we've got a good deal and we don't want the rest of the world muscling in.  

Immigration hawks lately argue illegal immigrants are acting illegally so they won't consider amending the law until everyone is obeying it.  Their view seems to be "its the law so it must be obeyed, and we can't talk about changing the unfair, impractical of just plain dumb parts of the law until everyone is obeying the law".

Every time I hear an immigration hawk say something like that I hear echos of the Syrian Government shooting its peacefully demonstrating people because they are breaking the law.  Or Ghadaffi, or Hosni Mubarek.  

I don't think Jesus would find violation of immigration laws a very compelling sin.  That's not to say we don't have a right to enforce immigration laws, or that some restrictions on immigration aren't prudent.  But much of the overheated rhetoric about immigration is misplaced.

Our economy, whether we like it or not, depends on cheap labor from Mexico and Central America to work for low pages in low end, low paying jobs that Americans won't do.  Would you or any of your kids be willing to spend 8 to 10 hours a day bending over in a strawberry field for something close to minimum wage day after day, month after month? Anybody you know be willing to do that?

Immigration hawks in the last couple decades have substituted emotion for analysis.  Instead of recognizing immigration laws as laws about economics they have treated them the same as laws against murder, rape and robbery - drumming up emotional outrage (because that is what gets votes) then making it tougher and tougher for people to come to this country.  Politicians and media personalities build huge ratings on this emotion based opinion bending.  It is very successful politically but does not prepare you to actually govern, because once you play the emotion card in your own head, it is very hard to get past it.

A couple decades ago we had a program that allowed people to come North to work in the fields, then go home.  We eliminated that program and at the same time made it tougher and tougher to immigrate legally.  People have kept coming (now illegally) because there were jobs here and there were no jobs in their homelands, and they have been helped out by employers who needed them.  Perversely tougher laws probably resulted in vastly more immigrants in this country  because, as academic studies have shown, most illegal immigrants would prefer to go back home where their roots are (and their earnings make them relatively much wealthier) when their work ends.  But crossing our borders has become so difficult and dangerous people who once came to work and then went home to their families between growing seasons, now stay and look for any kind of semiskilled labor job so they don't have to go back and forth across the border.  Or they bring their families up here.

It seems to me Immigration hawks have not approached immigration law in a constructive manner because they get a lot more mileage out of it as an emotional issue to get people fired up to vote for them.  Unfortunately when they get enough votes to get elected they often do something stupid, like the immigration laws recently passed in Georgia and Alabama that seriously damaged their states agricultural economy, before they realized maybe they made a mistake.  Good government figures those things out ahead of time, but good government doesn't come from fired up emotions.