The random political thoughts thread (Part Deux)

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Disneyphile

So, in reality, if the nation supports this, and we ship all those people home, are we also in support of much higher food costs?

To the people who support this law: Are you willing to pay double to triple price for your current groceries? Or, are you willing to bend over all day in the hot sun, picking fruits and vegetables for only $2 per hour? If you are, then great. If not, then I really hope you think about the impact of this law some more. Every time you sit down to eat, think about who brought that to your table.

Even as someone who is against the law, I don't really find that a very compelling argument. What I pay for vegetables has no baring one way or the other on the basic human rights I think people deserve. The same "you'll pay $4 for lettuce" scare tactics were used in Cesar Chavez's era as justification for treating migrants like slaves and letting them exist in squalor. So yeah, I am willing to pay more for vegetables.

How US agriculture might operate in a world of reasonable labor control and enforceable border policies is an entirely separate issue from whether a particular attempt to enforce immigration law is fair or just.



Going on a different tangent, I recently saw a couple of interesting stats. Immigrant contribution to violent crime rates is a common justification for this law. Let's examine that claim. First off, in the last couple of decades, when the illegal immigration problem has, as the narrative goes, grown to epidemic proportions and caused all of this horrible violent crime, violent and property crime country wide has decreased. Okay, that's country wide, what about cities with large illegal immigrant populations? Violent and property crime in those cities has dropped even more. According to one reference I read, over a certain period (I believe it was something like 1990-2005), US violent and property crime rates dropped by ~35%, while over the same time frame it dropped by ~45% in Arizona.

Here are just a couple sources that seem to indicate that, while it's very difficult to get an accurate measure of effects on crime for various reasons, most of the broad estimates that can be used show no negative, and perhaps a positive, trend in violent crime rates in areas with heavy illegal immigrant populations. PPIC (pdf), CNN.