Immigrants will do work that Americans won’t. That’s what defenders and critics of immigration say.
Which means even defenders miss what is arguably the bigger, more pertinent positive about immigrants: they’ll travel long distances frequently by foot, to do work that Americans won’t do.
The lengths gone to by immigrants to find work stateside speaks to why all conservatives should revere immigrants. They're not just doing endless amounts of backbreaking work, including daylight-to-dark farm work that Americans left behind literally centuries ago, they’re frequently risking their lives to do this kind of work.
Contrast this with the so-called “forgotten Americans” that all-too-many conservative pundits ennobled amid the rise of Donald Trump. Eager to understand the “exotics” who embraced and still embrace Trump, conservatives happened upon the idea that Trump connected with Americans “left behind” by globalization, and all sorts of other alleged cruelties visited on people who, by virtue of being born American, were born on 3rd base.
Ridiculous. While there are all sorts of reasons to be sympathetic toward all sorts of Americans, the fact that they were born in the United States and are citizens of the United States is not one of those reasons. The growing conservative embrace of victimhood is odious.
Bringing it back to immigrants, it’s not just that they’re revealing a self-reliant, American character in risking so much to get here. And it’s not just that they perform such difficult tasks once here. Think about what they do with the money earned. It’s a conservative story too.
While conservatives justify their anti-immigration stances by saying immigration isn’t consistent with a welfare state, the reality is that no one would risk their life to attain welfare that isn’t available to illegals as is, and similarly isn’t available to legal immigrants for at least five years. But that’s a digression.
The bigger truth, and an inconvenient one for the conservatives who hide behind welfare state imagery to justify their disdain for pure market signals (the movement of people is the purest of market signals), is that immigrants are here to work. Evidence supporting what is an obvious claim is annual remittances from workers in the U.S. to Mexico. Last year it was $61 billion, which was a down year thanks to ICE agents persistently showing up to private businesses (yes, places of work) to round up central Americans. Forced to hide their work out of fear of imprisonment and deportation either to socialist paradises or countries they aren't even from, they couldn’t work as much, which means they couldn’t remit as much.
Still, think of the meaning of remittances. It points to people eager to better not just their own economic situations through the thrift that so rightly appeals to conservatives, but also the lot of their families.
Instead of embracing the pro-family aspect of worker migration to the U.S., conservatives critique rich businessmen for allegedly exploiting “low-wage” immigrants who will supposedly never assimilate. The assimilation question is one reason conservatives view the willingness of immigrants to do what we won’t as an immigration demerit: how to assimilate the people who will do what no American would be caught dead doing? There’s nothing to fear.
Implied in Mexicans coming north to do work Americans won’t do is a bullish market signal conveyed to us by them: by virtue of risking it all for work that Americans won’t and can’t do, they’re really telling us it’s not the work they want either. They want better for themselves, and much better for their children. Assimilation solved care of ambition, another conservative value.
