Immigration

This here rant has been boiling for a while now, but before I get into the main points, let me relate a little story with some tangential relation. While phrasing it like this suggests I'm a babbling nutcase, THE GOVERNMENT IS AFTER MY SPINE JUICE! THEY WANT TO PERFORM CRAZY TESTS AND FIND OUT HOW MY BRAIN WORKS! Translating that out of crazy-speak, I got a letter from a government agency suggesting I go and get a spinal tap done because it would speed up the paperwork for some big ongoing thing that's totally unrelated to my point today. What is relevant is that evidently, they don't call it a spinal tap anymore. They call it a "lumbar puncture" now. This is a particularly nasty example of a terrible habit our society has. Sugar-coating unpleasant things with highly deceptive terminology that confuses what it is you're talking about.

This is one of the bigger factors involved in "the debate over immigration" in our country. I'll likely get back to this point later in the rant, but for now, let's clear up a little terminology. There's no such thing as an "illegal immigrant." An immigrant is someone who leaves one country to become a citizen of another. There's some inherent legality involved there. When people say "illegal immigrant" they really mean "illegal alien." We stopped using that term though, because the original definition of alien (people who are in this country, but citizens of another) doesn't see a lot of use. These days the term alien is used pretty much exclusively when talking about science fiction, so someone had the idea to change the term. A more accurate replacement term would be "illegal foreigner," but that doesn't sound nice. What people fail to realize here is that when someone is breaking the law, you don't really want a term for it that sounds nice. Especially if that term isn't accurate.

Now then, not too long ago as of this writing, there was a massive national protest strike. The idea was for all the illegal aliens working in this country stay home that day, so people get an appreciation for how much they do, and don't go trying to pass laws to kick them out of the country. Everyone involved in this event was, simply put, a complete idiot with no understanding of the situation at hand. I don't use the word idiot as often as the average person, because an idiot means someone who is stupid, not someone who lacks knowledge about a topic. Here though, it's perfectly apt, because you don't have to spend a whole lot of time thinking about this to see why such a protest is not in the protesters' best interests.

The people who argue "in favor" of the "immigrants" in this country love to use this line. "These people are just doing all the jobs that American citizens don't want to do." It's sad how many people out there actually believe this. Assuming for the moment that you're one of these people, let me ask you something. Do you know what the current national unemployment rate is in this country? Probably not. Most people don't. For what it's worth, it's officially been around 5-6% for the last few years. The actual percentage is a bit higher since that's only counting people collecting unemployment checks, not the many people who have been out of work for years, or never had a paying job to begin with. Either way, the actual number isn't the important thing. The important thing is, you are aware that there are citizens of this country who are out of work. Any of these people would gladly take a job doing yard work, or house cleaning, or any other given menial, minimum wage job you can name. If you don't believe THAT, then you're totally out of touch with reality. The only reasons I can think of for someone to believe that people with no jobs would pass up available job opportunities, would be if they fall under one of these categories. A- Horrible bigots, believing a given group of people to be so lazy that they'd rather live as homeless beggars than do any sort of work. B- People who grew up in rich families, with no comprehension whatsoever of what it's like to have no money.

The real reason that these jobs go to illegal aliens isn't that American citizens don't want to do them. It's because people don't want to PAY American citizens to do them. And why not? Because America's minimum wage laws are currently bringing about the exact opposite of their intended effect. The concept of minimum wage is that there's a certain minimum amount of money someone has to be able to earn in a day to maintain a decent standard of living, and it should therefore be illegal to pay people less than that. Great, wonderful concept that. The way the laws are written even sets the bar higher in areas where, for whatever weird economic reasons, things like food and housing cost more. Unfortunately, many people are, simply put, amoral greedy jerks who don't feel like paying people enough money to meet these basic standards of living. Depending on what job they don't feel like paying people to do, they either take advantage of loopholes that let them have people in other countries do'em (the Outsourcing problem), or they give them to people from countries with standards of living so low that illegally sneaking into this one and working for peanuts under the table is actually a step up for them (the "illegal immigration" problem).

Does it totally suck that there's countries out there were people's lives suck that much? Sure does. I think the U.N. should work on establishing some international minimum wage laws, factoring in the average cost of housing and food in each given country, and ideally eliminating situations where people feel inclined to do this sort of thing. Sneaking into a more prosperous country as people do in America however is an atrocious solution to this though. If the amount of money needed to get by where you live is, say, $24 a day, and you come to a work for less than minimum wage where I live, where it's, say, $60 a day, nobody's going to want to pay me three times as much as you obviously (and by law, they have to), so I can't find work. I have to beg for money now, and what's more, I have to beg for three times as much money as you do, because I'm stuck in an area where food costs three times as much. The alternative is for me to travel to where you live and beg for my food there, but now we're just being incredibly inefficient with our travel costs, aren't we.

Really though, I don't pin the blame on the illegal aliens here. I pin it where it belongs, on the corrupt people paying slave wages to them, and threatening them with deportation if they ask for more. These are terrible terrible people who belong in jail. In my book, the best solution to "the immigration problem" as people call it is to put the shoe on the other foot here. Write up some laws to severely penalize anyone caught employing non-citizens in this fashion, and while you're at it, a reward for turning them in. I'd say putting a stop to such people is worth handing out, say, a green card or two, wouldn't you?

Now, remember what I was saying earlier about people confusing issues when it comes to terminology? Here's another place where this takes place. When people talk about the "immigration problem" they're specifically referring to people sneaking into America from various Central American countries. Nobody wants to come out and say that though, because it sounds like singling out a single group of people. So they change the way they refer to things, and try to launch Political Correctness movements, pointing out that American citizen is an immigrant, or a descendent of immigrants.

Now, for argument's sake, let's ignore the possibility that there are no people left in the country who's ancestors exclusively include Native Americans. This does not at all help your case. Because, again, there is a world of difference between someone sneaking into a country and taking up residence, and someone going through the actual legal process to become a U.S. citizen. Absolutely anyone can apply for U.S. citizenship. I don't see why initial proximity to the U.S. should grant someone a greater right to move here than anyone else in the world, nor do I see any reason such people can't go through the same process of gaining citizenship as the various immigrants the majority of modern Americans descended from went through.

One final issue to discuss here, which has been in the news of late, is the whole notion of whether English should become the official language of the U.S. First off, I find it strange that we've gone so long without one, but this is another issue where the people speaking out against it are hurting their cause. Why would we not want an official standard? So that it would be possible to set up a system where nobody was forced to learn English. Let's examine this real quick.

Pros: We all feel good about ourselves for being so enlightened and accommodating. Nobody who moves to America from another country has to go and learn a new language, which, honestly, is negligible. Learning a new language (enough to get by at least) isn't particularly hard to do, especially if you're surrounded by it. It's also has a generally positive effect on one's life, which is why it's a mandatory part of our highschool curriculum (at least in some parts of the country).

Cons: Endless debates over which languages are spoken by enough people to be included on the list. Large scale costs of printing multilingual signs, books, magazines, etc. (not to mention the nightmare of making all movies and TV shows available in all these languages). Anyone seeking a decent position in any given company would be forced to learn English anyway, for both the practical reason of needing to understand everyone around them, and some discriminatory issues that won't go away just from passing some laws. Finally, there's the biggie. America's massive service industry, which more or less across the board pays minimum wage to untrained shmoes, flat out couldn't possibly survive if all employees were required to be multilingual.

That last bit may seem hypocritical, as I just explained how easy it is to learn a language. The principle here is really quite simple though. The more languages a society uses to express things, the more languages everyone is forced to learn. It's much much easier for society to use just the one, ensuring that everyone is only required to learn one language, than for society to use several, forcing everyone to learn several.

This honestly extends to the international level. I fully advocate the establishment of an international language, which everyone in the world is required to learn in addition to any others, as it would have enormous benefits to international trade, tourism, collaboration, and audiences for all forms of media. Furthermore, I'd like to offer up English as a candidate for it. Do I suggest English because it's what I speak? No, with such a system in place, people for whom English is their native language would honestly be at quite a disadvantage, not being readily fluent in another language with which to enjoy private conversations in public, or have full appreciation of great works of literature best read in the language they were first written in. Do I suggest this because English is my favorite language? No. In fact, of all the languages I'm familiar with, English is my least favorite. In abstract acoustical terms it's a chaotic mess, and it really has no clear cut rules for grammar, spelling, or sentence structure. It doesn't even have a unique pronoun for the second person plural. I suggest English because it has no real style. Any word you'd like to import from another language, you can, without really worrying too much about the way it sounds or how you spell it, because there's no real guidelines to conform to. That gives you great flexibility. More importantly, English is already the unofficial standard of international business, so there's a path of least resistance to be taken.