The Economics of Immigration January 12, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
Politicians and priests use fear to manipulate people. Fear is a primal emotion. Traditional religions use fear of divine punishment to keep people in their pews and to fill their donation baskets. Progressives tend to dismiss belief in hell and many of us, me included, dismiss any belief in an afterlife. Hence, fear-filled evangelical churches are full and progressive churches tend to be tiny if they exist at all. Motivating religious people by encouraging compassion and generosity just doesn’t have the same motivational power as pitchforks and burning lakes of fire. Religious people invented this non-existent hell so that they could offer the only known insurance against it without ever having to provide any evidence for the existence of hell or any evidence for the efficacy of the cure that they offered. It is the biggest scam in history but maybe only slightly ahead of politicians who promot fear of immigrants.
When Donald Trump took his famous escalator ride in 2015 to announce his candidacy for the presidency, he was such an unlikely and comical candidate that he had to hire unemployed actors to come and swell the crowd in Trump Tower to fake enthusiasm. But he filled his announcement with fear baiting statements about illegal immigrants, suggesting that they were criminals, rapists, drug dealers, and a threat to everyday Americans. It was an absurd and obviously racist ploy but, as Mark Twain allegedly said, “A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth.” And in politics, a lie told and repeated often enough, becomes the truth in the minds of many voters.
It is not unlike the lie about the existence of an eternal hell filled with impossible pain and torture. Most of the time, when traditional religious people have heard me say that what they have been told about hell is entirely fictious, that it is a preposterous lie for which there has never been a grain of evidence or the slightest reason to believe that it exists, they get angry at me! As if they want to hold onto their fear of being tortured for all eternity for having lascivious thoughts about their middle school English teacher . . . or maybe you didn’t go to school when young teachers wore miniskirts and high heeled boots?
People have been so conditioned to be scared of hell and to have moderated their behavior, avoiding all kinds of sins that they would have really liked to have indulged in, out of fear of hell. And if you try to take that irrational fear away from them, rather than being relieved, they are often angry. I insist that they have every reason to be angry at all of the priests and preachers who have lied to them about it for decades but rather than being mad at Father O’Connor or Preacher Sidesaddle, they get mad at me for pointing out that the myths just “ain’t” so. People are funny.
But when it comes to illegal aliens, let’s first deal with some facts. Trump has claimed that 21 million people have come over the border during Biden’s time in office. The truth is that there are not half that many undocumented people in America, total, from all of the years prior to now. Still, 10 million people is a lot of people. Major cities, where most of these migrants show up, have some real issues with strains on their public services such as housing, education, and emergency medical services.
I happen to live in a small coastal town in eastern Florida and while we have a racially diverse community and my neighborhood is integrated, you don’t see a lot of immigrants in any one place, unless, of course, one of my neighbors is getting a new roof, or if someone is having landscaping work done, or new construction, or painting, or if someone is getting their house cleaned or their pool serviced. And, like in your town, if you go to Asian or Mexican restaurants, you are likely to encounter Asian or Spanish speaking servers, cooks, and staff, whose legal status you know nothing about. Our local French bakery is run by a Lebanese guy. I don’t know if he is a citizen or not but as long as he keeps making those phyllo dough cookies he sells, he is alright by me.
No country can have totally open borders but countries with advanced economies cannot well survive without an influx of workers who are willing to do low waged jobs. Is 10 million too many undocumented immigrants? I don’t know how to gauge that. If you are the mayor of New York and you are having difficulty keeping people off of the streets and sleeping in the parks, maybe. But what I hear from restaurant owners and construction managers is that they can’t find enough people to hire who will actually show up to work to keep their businesses going.
And I get that we could wish that people would do this legally but let me assure you that the legal process is not that easy. I adopted my daughter from South Korea. Thirty-six years ago, it took a few thousand dollars and four months to make that happen. It felt like an eternity. She was assigned to us in her first week of life, but it took four months to get the documents signed and permissions granted for her to make the trans Pacific flight. Now, the process is much longer.
Currently, my significant other and I are in the process of obtaining a legal visa for her to move here from Thailand. We have paid several thousand dollars in attorney and application fees and have submitted tons of time-consuming paperwork. Our case is very simple. She has never been married and has no children. She isn’t trying to bring any family members with her. She is an educated, English speaking, professional, with no criminal record or health issues. I am just one of millions of old men living in Florida with a swimming pool, beach access, and time and income on my hands that I would like to spend with someone who also profoundly dislikes Donald Trump.
We’ve paid for her medical exam and police background check and so, this is about as easy as it gets. However, our documents are at the bottom of a pile of applications. It took me four months to get my baby here but the US Immigration service estimates that it will take them 13 months to rule on this visa. 13 months! When you are 68 years old, that sounds like a significant chunk of the time I have left on earth! And that is for an application that is guaranteed to be approved with lawyers working on both sides of the globe to make it happen.
If you are an unemployed farm worker in Nicaragua, watching your wife and children starving to death and living in an area overrun by violent gangs, what are the chances that you could muster the resources to make an entirely legal application to come and pick oranges in southern California? Republicans and Democrats agree. Our immigration system is broken. Because it is so absurdly difficult, expensive, and time consuming, temporary workers come over the border any way that they can. Still, this is not an unsolvable problem.
The immigration office could, especially considering the fees they charge, hire a few more people to work through the back log of applications gathering dust on their desks so that grumpy old men don’t have to go to the movies alone and there should be a pretty quick process for workers who have eager employers waiting for them in the USA to gain temporary work visas. I’m just a dumb country preacher and I could generate the proper forms and procedures manuals in a week or so. Hire me, President Trump, and I could make your administration look like it verged on competence in the first month you are in office.
Oh, and all of this “hand wringing, panties-in-a-wad” talk about illegals voting in our elections, yeah, that doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. When my intended is able to come to the United States, sometime late in 2025, she will have to live in the USA for 5 years before she can apply for citizenship and if she is successful in gaining citizenship, then and only then, will she be able to vote for the Mayor of Vero Beach. And just for free, everyone who has ever told you that these undocumented immigrants are pouring over the borders and voting in our elections knew that they were lying to you. They lie to you because they think you are stupid enough to believe them. Please prove them wrong.
And if, as some political talking heads have suggested, inflation in the grocery store was the single leading factor in Kamala Harris’ defeat; what do the Trump people think will happen to produce prices when they deport 70 or 80% of the farm workers who pick our fruit and vegetables? Right now, the USA is the most agriculturally advanced country in the world but take our labor force away and see where we stand in global agriculture six months later.
One of my former neighbors from Joplin, Missouri, Jessie Memer, who is famous only for her viral social media rants, recently put to bed another silly rumor about migrants taking up welfare and food stamp money, when she said:
For the final point I want to make on immigration, I have to acknowledge a lecture I heard by Richard Wolff, emeritus economics professor at Boston University. I have to acknowledge him, even though the basic math and logic of it is so simple we all should have realized it on our own but somethings are as plain as the nose on your face but, you may have noticed, it isn’t easy to see your nose without help.
Wolff points out that the first 17 or 18 years of anyone’s life is the most expensive. Children must be housed, fed, educated, and medically cared for while they produce almost no useful labor. Whether you grow up in Europe or North America or in some profoundly impoverished country, your first 17 years require massive investment from someone to get you ready to enter the workforce. So, every time a migrant crosses our borders to work, someone, somewhere else, has already made a huge investment in them, getting them to the age where they can pick peaches and apples, and the even more back breaking work, of picking strawberries and green beans. And if they can nail shingles to a roof, mix concrete, plant landscaping, or clean a hotel room, so much the better. And that’s without even considering the physical therapists, physicians, psychiatrists, engineers, and IT experts we need to run our economy which our universities fail to produce in numbers enough to keep us at the head of the line of development…. We have lots of literature and art history grads but not a lot of the kinds of scientists and inventors we need.
So, men and women, we don’t need to build a wall. We don’t need mass deportations. And we really don’t need for you to be afraid of the hysterical lies you have been told about undocumented workers. Do America a favor, be a rational, critical thinker, and be willing to, as the Bible has told us for centuries, to welcome the stranger as one of our own.
I’ve said it before, but let me say it again . . . you aren’t going to go to hell, neither is anyone else and some days I’m kinda sorry about that because there are people who really ought to go to hell but there just isn’t one to go to. And, immigrants have to be limited in number but that number is a whole lot higher than you have been led to believe. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by going along with mass deportations unless you want to pay a lot more for groceries, lawn care, construction, and wait a lot longer for an appointment to see a cardiologist or an oncologist. In general, I just want for you to stop being afraid.
