Obama understands the migration dilemma
When Senator Barack Obama was campaigning, successfully, for the presidency of the United States — a country populated by migrants and their descendants — he promised to tackle the issue of migration.
Six years into his presidency, he has announced a fundamental plan to overhaul the system of immigration which will drastically alter the lives of an estimated five million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.
The dilemma faced by the US society and economy is that it needs the labour of migrants, without which the economy would grind to a halt in a matter of days. Migrants provide cheap manual labour for jobs that born Americans do not want and are unwilling to do at any wage. Migrants, especially the illegal ones who are vital to construction and agriculture, provide cheap labour.
Both the employers and the illegal workers know the system. In the early morning an employer drives his pickup truck to the MacDonald’s and if he needs two workers he puts up two fingers and two Hispanics jump in the back. At the end of the day, they are dropped off at the point of origin.
The United States also benefits enormously from millions of high-skilled migrants who arrive with education and experience, paid for in many cases by the governments of poor developing countries. Among them are many Jamaican nurses who migrated to the US after receiving their primary, secondary and vocational training in Jamaica. In addition, the US retains a large share of foreigners trained in US universities.
The dilemma is that while the US needs the labour of migrants it also wants the impossible dream of controlling the supply of migrants to match the demand for labour. Enough migrants of the right type, manual or skilled, is good for the economy, but too many become a costly problem because they draw on education, health and welfare services. A small minority also end up in crime and being incarcerated in the penal system.
To avoid the cost of unemployed, undocumented workers, the US Government has resorted to trying, with little success, to control the supply of migrants by limiting the number that crosses its borders and by deporting as many criminals who are costly to keep in prison and children who will require years of education before they can become workers. Better to just allow in an adult worker.
It is difficult to expel labour when it is no longer needed by the economy. Indeed, after the abolition of slavery there were several schemes to encourage Black Americans, the former slaves, to return to Africa. The situation becomes a contentious social issue, especially when the migrants are blamed by those whose parents were migrants for every problem, ie low wages, crime.
The antagonism is aggravated because many of today’s migrants don’t want to be American. The minority who want to become Americans find the motto — “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me” — was not meant for them. It’s the poor migrants who are being deported.
President Obama’s recent proposal recognises that there is no cost-effective, administratively feasible system of controlling the supply of migrant labour to exactly match the demand for labour.