The New Republic

How about an anti-poverty initiative that starts with an empirical analysis of the source of the increase in poverty in the last ten years? Like, you know, assessing whether a 5 million or so increase in desperately poor, illiterate or semi-literate illegal immigrants might just possibly have something to do with the increase in the number of poor and uninsured? Just a thought.

- teplukhin

May 7, 2007 at 1:50pm

teplukhin -- Fair. Although it's not like immigration is the only problem here, or the non-Hispanic poverty rate anything to brag about.

- Brad Plumer

May 7, 2007 at 2:06pm

The greatest threat to our way of life is the increasing separation of this country into two camps - one enjoying financial security and the other living under conditions of significant insecurity and want. As we have seen in recent years, the group at the bottom have been growing, even as the concentration of wealth at the very top has increased dramatically. This is a greater threat to the democratic principles we aspire to than any terrorist. Only Edwards has taken this issue on and put forward real proposals to address the problem. As for Tep's point about immigration, either these people are staying or going home. If they are staying, it is because we need them to, and they deserve our consideration. If we don't need them to stay, then shut down the businesses that employ them and they will have to go home. With them or without, we have this terrible problem. Let's stop finding excuses and do something. Neil

- purcellneil

May 7, 2007 at 2:30pm

Agreed, Brad, but first do no harm. My megaphone doesn't carry very far, but perhaps TNR could ask our elites to answer a very simple question that no one among ou media betters seems to want to ask: why are we importing a second underclass when we haven't addressed the problems of our existing one? thanks, t ps for the record I favor immigration, favor bilingualism, favor "the browning of America." It's about literacy, not nationality or culture. About Mexico's rural meltdown, not immigration per se.

- teplukhin

May 7, 2007 at 2:43pm

Maybe the mill worker's son should spend a little time understanding how mills work these days. Here's an alternative, but effective way to reduce poverty in America. 1) Penalize or even threaten to shut down businesses employing illegals (and help the illegals transition back to Mexico by means of direct cash subsidies if necessary). Repeal the NAFTA loophole for US agribusiness. 2) Watch illegals go south, mexican rural incomes and exports rise, and poultry factories & hotels and US sweatshops immediately raise wages by $3 or $5 or even $10 an hour to attract workers pronto to fill the gap. 3) Watch smarter employers figure out that better-paid workers who receive good treatment, safe and clean workplaces, skills training, subsidies for daycare, tuition reimbursement are better, more productive employees who do not turn over with anywhere near the frequency of sh*t-wage illegals. 4) Watch US employers start migrating up the value chain-- better (albeit somehwat fewer) workers, better products, substitution of cutting-edge equipment and IT systems for massive armies of semi-productive helots-- and being to compete on product quality, variety, superior understanding of customers' needs etc. Instead of on price and a race to the bottom.

- teplukhin

May 7, 2007 at 2:53pm

an odd thing about the Earned Income Tax Credit is that it really doesn't target the poor so much as the lower middle class. A man earning 7 dollars an hour with a wife and two kids at home won't get back as much as a man earning 10 dollars an hour. And a person working full time at minimum wage will get even less then the 7 dollars an hour guy. Seems screwy to me.

- blackton

May 7, 2007 at 3:06pm

the United States is not importing the illegals so much as Mexico and Central America is exporting them. I don't think you realize the depths of poverty that people live with down here and what they would do to escape it, and you don't seem to grasp that there will always be a large segment of the Business community that will feed off of that. And you seem to not be aware of how easy it is to get fake i.d. so well done that many legitimate businesses will not be able to tell the difference. To be honest, I think you are raging at the destructive power of the wind, whereas I think it would be better to simply build windmills.

- blackton

May 7, 2007 at 3:15pm

I realize it and agree that we should do everything we can to aid the (honest, non-bandit) mexican rural sector. Raise exports and incomes. Give these poor people a decent life and decent opportunities at home. Ireland used to export people, too, and look how far they've come on the back of reform, reduced corruption, intelligent US investment and subsidies. Hard work and a long road, sure, but let's get started. Instead of merely shifting the problem northward and screwing our own native-born underclass in the process.

- teplukhin

May 7, 2007 at 3:23pm

at least to teh extent that we have given Mexican/Central American elites a free pass in the press and our public discussion of the illegal immigration issue. Calderon, et al. should have their feet put to the fire as to why they make it so difficult to start a business, and why their society is as corrupt as it is. US farm subsidies must go (and teh EU's, too) to help the rural poor there. I know we can't deport 12 million. How about 1 million, for a start? How about a crackdown on my (mostly ) Republican businessmen who are "knowingly" (wink, wink) employing illegals. I don't buy this nonsense about how, if we deport our new peasant class, the economy will collapse. Interesting, how with the housing sector in trouble, the unemployment rate has not gone up. Why? Because illegals, big in teh construction trades, aren't counted in the unemployment numbers. I hate to agree with Lou Dobbs on anything, but I'm just sayin....

- butchie b

May 7, 2007 at 5:01pm

I think regarding Mexico and Central America it is going to take a multi-generational approach focused on the long haul, something American people don't seem willing to do. I favor an entirely different approach then you do Tep, one which I realize is even more unrealistic politically; That is, open the borders, work on creating a true open trade bloc in North America, push genuine economic reform in Latin America, promote bi-lingual education on both sides of the border (and I don't mean French). In any case, I think this is a discussion our children will be having.

- blackton

May 7, 2007 at 5:03pm

carrot and stick butchie, holding Calderons feet to the fire is meaningless, how can we go about doing that? The more we would try the more popular he would be with the masses when he defies the gringos. As to deporting 1,000,000 illegals, you can't possibly be serious. The cost alone would be a nightmare, let alone the image of loading Latinos on cattle cars. Besides, I gotta tell you Homeland Security is a hopeless bureaucracy. My wife applied for her permanent resident card on Dec. 20 last year at the Philly office, she simply had her picture and photo taken. She still doesn't have it yet, and her old one has expired (she only has a piece of paper as a receipt). When they round up that million you envision, what is to stop the f-ups from rounding her up as well? And aren't you aware of the scams, there are literally hundreds of thousands of legal Hispanics who return to their home country and let others use their i.d.'s (like Social Security cards). Also, why do you (and Tep and others) continually view other human beings as being burdens and not resources? Properly educated every ethnic group in America gives us our vitality and strength as a nation.

- blackton

May 7, 2007 at 5:16pm

why do you (and Tep and others) continually view other human beings as being burdens and not resources? Properly educated every ethnic group in America gives us our vitality and strength as a nation. Hear, hear. But illiterate kids whose peers and parents are illiterate in their own language, and who have no desire to learn to read and write, do not belong in the same class as kids from families that worship education, teachers, reading, intellectual curiosity etc. This is exactly the situation we have in Silicon Valley, where you have immigrant kids whose achievements put to shame the very smartest native-born kids sitting right next to immigrant kids with a fourth-world attitude toward education. The former have boosted US educational achievement hugely; the latter threaten to reverse all the gains of the past 25 years. My point is that no amount of resources will ever properly educate these two side by side. All the money and all the good intentions in the world can't square that circle.

- teplukhin

May 7, 2007 at 9:49pm

We have had this discussion before, but after you shared your personal stake in the issue, I decided to cut you some slack on the repetition. For those joining late, I would repeat that there is research indicating that by the third generation, most of these grandchildren of Latin American immigrants will be able to speak, read, and write English. However, this gives no comfort at all for people like tep whose kids' education is being diluted by the inundation of illiterate immigrants. Your proposed solution is upstream to reduce drastically the immigration of illiterates, While I agree that the situation is out of control, I would suggest that another strategy would be downstream to re-structure schools to serve the very different needs of their sub-groups of students, so that your kids' education would no longer be held hostage to the limitation of non-English speaking kids. I'm not suggesting this, but if private enterprise were running education, they would never try to sell the same service to customers with radically different educational needs. But unfortunately, public schools are monopolies that don't have to satisfy their various market segments, resulting in the inappropriate and ineffective "side-by-side" situation you describe. The implication of this downstream strategy is that there might be a place for local initiatives at the School Board level to ameliorate the situation. Any thoughts?

- JackR

May 8, 2007 at 9:32am

that by the 3rd generation the illegals will be English-speaking Americans. And in the long run we are all dead. We have 2 questions before us -1) what to do about the 12 million illegals here now? 2) how to stop the next 12 million (and the 300 million Chinese who may want to come). I know that mass deportation is a pipe dream. We have neither the stomach, nor the capability for it. Still, it can't hurt to at least TRY to enforce our laws, in the workplace and at the border. You school idea makes sense, but as you note, the monopoly character of our schools make them uniquely unsuited to educate, well, nearly anyone below the middle class. Our good friends the teachers' unions see to that. I note that NPR said today that 57% of us, including a majority of Dems and indies, would make illegals go home and apply again. It's a very volatile issue, and it might blow up in the Dems' face if they're not careful.

- butchie b

May 8, 2007 at 10:38am

Jack - you're basically talking about streaming, only at the school level rather than within the school. One huge problem is that you'd have to recut the school boundaries, a political exercise that's only slightly less difficult to bring off than, say, getting universal health care passed. Tomorrow. Another big problem is that making all the pieces fit the new school puzzle would, I'm guessing, entail the creation of at least a few new schools, from scratch. Take a look at the cost of real estate here, add in ridiculously inflated labor and materials (nb routine building materials are at sky-high prices worldwide thanks to soaring Chinese demand for commodities), and you're talking about the cost of an Andover Philips or a Deerfield Academy -- just for a garden-variety, basics-only school. Who pays for that? As to streaming, that in fact is what happens almost everywhere in my patch, where the children of the CEOs of Cisco and Apple and Intel etc go to school with kids who couldn't read a comic book, even one in Spanish. So the illiterates are shunted to the dumb track, perdona mi francese, and John Chambers et al's kids are shunted to the Stanford-Berkeley track. Fine, so that's an acceptable compromise. One problem: suppose your kid comes within an inch of getting a spot on the Stanford train but fails and is tossed on the slow train. How do you like them apples? For those who are tired of my admittedly broken record on this issue, do you understand the stakes here? Do you folks without kids realize how unbelievably important this issue is for those tens of millions of Americans with kids in the private schools?

- teplukhin

May 8, 2007 at 1:03pm

OOps, public schools. You can tell where my mind's tending. Harker, $25/year, how the f*** am I gonna swing that...

- teplukhin

May 8, 2007 at 1:03pm