Last week I wrote about how astonished I was to move from madly multicultural New York to North Carolina and see, close up, the "immigration problem" that Lou Dobbs and a lot of Republican Congressmen have been yammering about, and that hundreds of thousands of Latinos and their supporters marched about this past April. (I’d gotten a preview then, when my Chicago-native parents quit going to their favorite Florida fish store forever because its owner fired the employees who took the day off for the march. The fish-store restaurant’s local patrons, by contrast, stood up and cheered.) North Carolina, with a population of less than nine million, has a largely separate enclave of close to a million Mexicans. I’ve seen one estimate that half of them are illegal. I’m too new here to know if that’s exaggerated or not. But I do know what I’m seeing: a de facto uninvited-guest worker program that has become a vital, yet diseased, organ of the state’s economy without becoming part of its society.
North Carolina has become a virtually bilingual state, not out of the goodness of someone’s bleeding heart, but because it’s good business. A recent University of North Carolina study shows that Hispanics contribute to the state’s economy not only as low-wage laborers but as consumers; in 2024, their spending packed a $9.2 billion wallop. By contrast, the same study shows, they "[cost] the state budget a net $102 per resident in health care, education, and correctional services". That balance sheet tilts against those who argue that the Hispanic community here is nothing but competition for local unskilled labor and a drain on law-abiding taxpayers . . . although, wait a minute, that casually tossed-off “correctional services” is disturbing. Since when is jail a population’s number-three normal need? That bespeaks not only poverty, but alienation – the complete lack of a stake in the surrounding community. A ghetto becomes a pressure cooker of crime, violence and addiction insofar as there’s perceived to be no way out of it. For an illegal alien who doesn’t speak English, that’s not just a self-defeating perception, that’s reality.
Liberals blame conservatives for hypocritically exploiting Hispanics’ cheap labor without really accepting them. Their solution is amnesty, which would allow illegals to let down their guard and enter American society — at the high cost of redoubled contempt for the border and a "Groundhog Day" replay of the problem. Conservatives blame liberals for siding with the forces that resent America’s Anglo-Saxon backbone and seek to parcel the country out in reparations to a Balkans of former victims. Their solution is to try to build a literal dike to hold back the global ocean — a world that wants to throw its arms around the American experiment and love it to death.
Until I came to North Carolina, I thought that President Bush – actually a moderate on this issue, maybe because of the Hispanics in his family – had hit on the sensible centrist solution: tighten up the border, but face the fact that people want to come here to work and businesses want their labor, and create a guest worker program. But now that I’m here, I see that a guest worker program is, in effect, what we’ve already got. Legitimizing it would solve the legal and economic problems, but it might make the social one even worse: a large group of people living self-contained and apart, with no real stake in America, neither being transformed by the place nor transforming it, because they’re only here to make money so they can get out of poverty at home.
And that’s just not how we do things. In the history of American immigration, money isn’t everything. Rather, economic and cultural transactions have been hopelessly intertwined. Money can hardly build a bridge before music, food, slang and sex are sneaking or stampeding across it. Back in the 1950s, when my friend Chato and his family swam the Rio Grande, we were two-faced about this two-way street. Officially, we demanded a kind of cultural loyalty oath from new immigrants: the price of admission was to forsake their former language and customs and act as white-bread as they possibly could. And all the while, white-bread Americans were crossing the river or the tracks on Saturday nights to learn how to be less so. Repressed ethnicity returned with a vengeance through the back doors of entertainment and crime.
Today, a majority of us are more confident of the robustness of American identity. We now invite newcomers to bring their differences right in the front door and contribute them to the American repertory. And the way to do that is to give us your heart. Whatever else you are, aspire to be an American. (Yes, I know that Latinos are already “Americans.” I’m using the word in the politically-incorrect sense that’s recognized worldwide.) Hunger to get the fast food of English into your mouth. Love the idea of America – its unparalleled freedom and opportunity and informality and directness and interchange. Want to join us. Don’t be a stranger. That’s the earnest we want from you. (Does anyone remember Paul Mazursky’s underrated ‘80s movie "Moscow on the Hudson"? It was an unapologetically sentimental tribute to this idea.)
A guest-worker arrangement, legal or illegal, is, by contrast, only a pact for mutual exploitation, in which nothing but money is exchanged and no one is changed. The United States, as work site and money tree, becomes the enabler of its neighbors’ dysfunctional economies, uprooting people who would rather make a good living at home and who will live here in a consolatory bubble of home, a foreign body that provokes rejection. I’d like to see an immigration program that trades legal cheap labor for a real chance to become American. I’d like to see a basic English requirement for a labor visa — and a basic language requirement, with Spanish as the default, for entry into middle school. (It’s good for the brain.) I’d like to see both tough border enforcement and a challenging amnesty that is far from quick or easy. I’d like to see, and would willingly carry, an unforgeable ID card. What left and right proposals would you want to combine in a Unity immigration platform?
