First, Hi everyone. This seems like a very cool project, and I'm glad to be a part of it. I've never done blogging before - this danged new-fangled interweb - but I will try to get the hang of it. Thanks to Jon for the nice comments about Yo&LO. Lots of work went into that, and for those interested, it was a rare example in philosophy of genuinely and fully collaborative work.
I want to put up a couple thoughts that seem to me to be completely obvious. They are, however, strangely - or not so strangely - absent from highly visible public debates. These will set up a discussion of what I'm really thinking about these days, namely what role we academics can and should be playing in the political world.
So, immigration. I read the Post everyday, and good bits of several other papers online - usually hunks of the Times, Ha'aretz, Huffington, etc. And just now I googled "immigration reform" and glanced at the first 25 news articles, and the first 25 non-news sites that came up. And I saw essentially nothing on economics. Over the last year or so I recall a couple mentions of it in passing, but not one mainstream press article that made it the central point, and damned few in the left press either.
Which is pretty damned notable. Indeed, it is just obvious that economics are at the center of this issue. We are pushed by mainstream political debates between two positions: that these undeserving illegals are stealing our jobs and that we should punish, or at least keep them out; and that they are not undeserving, are not that big a problem - or maybe are a benefit - and so we should show compassion and give a route toward eventual citizenship.
Neither of these positions pays any attention to the fact that these people are horribly exploited and as a vulnerable and non-status labor force, are very useful in keeping other wages low and in fighting unionization.
The ubiquity of labor by illegals is one of the obvious ways that the unity of the traditional nation-state is breaking down. For a few hundred years there was pretty good de facto overlap between the people working in a country, the people subject to the laws of that country, and the people with citizenship rights in that country. (Leaving aside colonies, of course.) But now a substantial portion of the work in the US - and other industrialized countries - is done by non-citizens, with no rights, but subject to the laws. This change is a union-buster's wet dream. And the dream is in no way interrupted by the current "conservative"-"liberal" debate. Indeed, if there is a loud and forceful fight over whether to brutalize illegals further - between racists and anti-racists - there are two added benefits for the dreamer. First, the issue of their exploitation of everyone - illegal and legal - is not on the table. And second, the constant threat of punitive racist assaults - legal or extra-legal - makes their workforce even more cautious and dependent. As long as there is a constant public debate about whether illegals should be profiled, denied medical care, etc., there is no chance in hell of any trying to organize for minimally decent workplace conditions.
As I said, I think this is all completely obvious. I claim no insight at all in noticing it. But that leads to the interesting question: why is this sort of analysis so absent from liberals and the left? Why don't we even hear such things on Democracy Now! for example? And more important to me, what does that say about those of us who purport to be public intellectuals on the left? Since it seems completely clear that the long-term left strategy has to be not to ask people to be tolerant of Mexican laborers, but to find ways to stand in solidarity with them, why do we not have left economists and social scientists emphasizing this issue in every available venue? Is it just that most of us have decided to give up on public uses of our academic expertise? Am I missing something?
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