From a paper I wrote in one of my classes...

As pretentious as possible:

"

My rule of thumb is to not hate the immigrant, but to criticize the illegal immigration. Although I completely agree with the thrust of all the readings: that immigrants illegal or otherwise make important contributions to our society, are just as likely to be great people, and are not the chief obstacle to economic prosperity, illegal immigration does have its down side. Employers often use illegals to break unions and because illegals are afraid of being caught they rarely report acts of exploitation. Since the importation of Chinese workers in the mid-19^th century, employers have used exploited immigrants to drive down wages. The idea that “Mexicans are doing work that Americans just won't do,” is a myth. A basic understanding of economics will tell you that this is nonsense. Americans have all kinds of crappy jobs. The reason that some jobs (migrant agricultural labor, construction, and small business service work--like restaurants--especially) are dominated by illegal immigrants is not because they are intrinsically horrible jobs. They are only horrible because, for the amount of work, they pay very little. They pay little mostly because, yes this is a circle, they have so many illegal immigrants employed in those sectors. If wages for these jobs were raised, "Americans" would be willing to do them. So, the question is, why are so many illegals in these sectors? The answer is quite simple: these sectors are almost impossible to regulate and where they could be regulated, there hasn't been much pressure to do so because labor unions in these sectors are weak (because it is so easy to find "strikebreakers," unions have no clout). Thus, despite what news anchors who don't know what they're talking about say, if we were to cut off immigration completely, we could still find people to do all sorts of dirty work. The only difference would be that wages would rise to attract more people into these sectors.

Of course, there are several solutions to these problems, ranging from complete open borders to complete closed borders. Actually, I think these are both band-aid solutions. A real answer must be larger: the real problem here is poverty and outrageous wealth inequality. Immigrants will come to this wealthier country because they are so much poorer in their own country. There are several ways to combat poverty, but I’ll suggest two that would have immediate and dramatic impact and could be done by American alone:

Eliminate hunger: Hunger is not a production problem, it is a economic distribution problem. According to the United Nations Development Program, it would take about $13 billion dollars to feed all of the hungry people in the world (about 850 million people). Just to make some comparisons: the United States spends about $41 billion on pet food every year and the War in Iraq costs about $12 billion every month and a half. Ted Turner alone has offered $8 billion to this cause if an organization can solve the distribution issues and come up with the remaining $5 billion dollars.

Enact a Worker’s Bill of Rights: If the United States declared that it would not trade with anyone who did not provide its workers with basic rights( minimum wage, working conditions, collective bargaining, etc.), it would immediately halt the exploitative practices of multinational corporations across the globe. Of course, there would be some hardships: a decline in production and investment in poorer countries, more expensive consumer goods here, for example. Yet, the benefits would be far better: eventually, developing economies would be able to produce for themselves and cannibalize their wealth rather than shipping it out to Wal-Mart. This is not to mention the benefits of no longer having workers exploited across the world. In this way, the benefits of trade could be enjoyed by everyone, not just the wealthy corporations.

Excuse the digression. Regardless of our failure to follow through on basic common sense proposals, as a teacher (especially in the Bay Area) I will be interacting with immigrants, illegal and legal, on a daily basis. I look forward to this. My father was an immigrant and my mother was the daughter of an immigrant whose father was from Spain and mother was from Mexico. I have a lot of respect for immigrants and attending an inner-city school in San Jose exposed me to the hardships of immigrants from Mexico, in particular. Unfortunately, too much of our politics (especially in this state) center around paranoid xenophobia disguised as an attempt to institute law and order. Immigrants have amazing stories, captivating experiences, and I would be thrilled to have as many of them as possible in my classroom. My task should be to make them feel safe, secure, part of a community, and, if they are comfortable doing so, allow them to bring their experiences into the classroom."